New UK Starlink Broadband Customers Hit by £10 Monthly Kit Fee
Remember last month’s big price hikes (here)? Well bad news if you’re a new customer because the ever changeable packages of Starlink’s (SpaceX) satellite broadband service have just added a new “Monthly Kit Fee” of £10 to the package price for hardware rental, which will be applied on top of the existing rental.
Starlink currently has nearly 10,600 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential customers in the UK currently pay from £40 a month for the Residential 100Mbps unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers), which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity. Faster packages exist at greater cost, while more restrictive (data capped) options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
However, until now, Starlink had been rather generously offering their Standard dish (terminal) hardware as part of a “free” rental agreement for their residential subscribers. But since the start of this week that’s changed to adopt a £10 monthly charge for new customers, which some may perceive as being a second big price hike in the space of less than a month. We can’t help but feel that Starlink should be expressing this as a single rental price, rather than trying to mask the change by separating it out (i.e. Residential 100Mbps is now £50pm rather than the £40 they promote on the front page).
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On top of that, PC Mag are reporting that Starlink’s fastest Residential Max plan is losing two key perks. In short, existing customers no longer get access to a free Mini dish as a rental, or the 50% discount to the Roam tier plans like before. “The Optional Mini Kit for Travel was available only to customers in select countries with an active Residential Max plan. It is not available to new customers at this time,” Starlink says.
A bit of product and pricing stability would be nice to see. At present Starlink is rapidly becoming far too much of a variable and unpredictably priced service.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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So if you’re out in the sticks you can get Starlink Max for £90 a month. Or you get Gigaclear 300 for £16 a month…
Reminds me of that meme from Succession “You’re not serious people.”
SpaceX will always point out that they don’t try to compete with fixed line options, though I do agree you’d have to be insane to use them if those options are available.
I’d even stick to FTTC over Starlink. Headline speeds are lower but it is at least more consistent and has lower latency, plus there’s the benefit of not funding that man or that insanely overvalued company
Then you would be a nut job to get Starlink… Simple
Starlink is for someone who can’t get reliable fixed line.
Coming soon… Starlink altitude charges (£0.01/km/month for low-earth) and K-band utility fee (£1/GHz/month). Note that the small-print includes product name-length allowance of £0.25 per character per month, which will be introduced with the launch of StarlinkMaxxLite, or £4/m.)
I would rather go without than pay anything to Musk.
Says anyone who has a decent connection and a false moral compass. He’s about to make 4000 cantenn workers millionaires – say what you like about him – he looks after his people.
Until there’s viable competition Starlink have pretty much free hand to do as they like. If you think this is bad check out the details of tomorrows Space Xai flotation on the NASDAQ, it’s absolutely nuts but there seems to be an army of Musk sycophants willing to part with their money.
I live on a OFNL served new build estate, and there are 2-3 people constantly on FB, promoting their Starlink install over FttH that the rest of us use, despite being more expensive and much slower….. I just can’t see how the MuskRat brainwashes people
Not so much brainwash – more like practicalily. I have a Gen 2 motorised dish in my shed. I also have 5Gbps FTTP. But when that goes down – oe some twat takes the pole out with a car – or there is a power cut and the exhcnage goes out too (which happened last month – lasted 4 days due to a transformer being sourced)
Having internet that takes 40W and can run off a power bank – changes everything.