Starlink Launch 500Mbps Premium Satellite Broadband Plan
SpaceX’s Starlink ISP, which provides ultrafast low latency broadband across the world and the UK via a mega constellation of compact satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), has soft launched an expensive new PREMIUM tier that will give you speeds of up to 500Mbps for $500 per month (£369) and $2,500 for the kit (£1843).
At present Starlink has 1,871 LEOs in orbit (1,846 are active) and their initial plan is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024. Customers in the UK typically pay a hefty £89 a month, plus £54 for shipping and £439 for the kit (dish, router etc.). But for that you can expect unlimited usage, fast latency times of 20-40ms, downloads of c. 50-250Mbps and uploads of c.10-20Mbps (such figures should improve as the network grows).
However, SpaceX’s boss man Elon Musk has just announced the soft launch of a new PREMIUM tier on Starlink, and it’s easy to see why they’ve written that in ALL CAPS. The new service costs a whopping $500 per month, which puts it well out of the reach of ordinary consumers.
So what do you get for all that money? A much larger, more robust and more capable antenna, as well as the promise of download speeds in the 150-500Mbps range, uploads of 20-40Mbps and prioritised 24/7 support. In theory, the bigger antenna should also reduce the chance of disconnection events, which can sometimes cause problems on the existing kit.
Starlink’s website makes clear that their PREMIUM package is being aimed at “small offices, storefronts, and super users“, although at that price in the UK you might be better off shelling out for a leased line or helping to self-fund a community FTTP build – where viable. One catch is that the new product isn’t due to launch until Q2 2022, and we don’t yet know exactly what its UK pricing will be.
In theory, this service could actually be quite handy if used to supply capacity for a small office network in a remote area, but it’ll only really make any kind of sense if the new antenna does help it to perform noticeably better than the existing consumer tier. The fact that the speed range starts at 150Mbps, which is well into the current consumer plan’s range, may also make some potential customers nervous.
One other issue is that we’d normally expect an expensive business tier to be backed up by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or other advanced features, but aside from priority support, we couldn’t see anything like that mentioned on their website. In order to be considered as a true business package, Starlink may need to go further.
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 and Linkedin.
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Haha good luck trying to sell that, what are they going to charge for gigabit? 800 a month and 3 grand for the dish? Elon must think he’s going to offer the prestige premium of broadband services. I feel sorry for those that will be ignored and left out from cellular and cable or WiFi broadband services, and this may be there only choice:
The problem with this, for about a year of this you could in many instances afford to just have Openreach install Fibre under Fibre on Demand. They really should run this at a loss to get people onboard.
Think that price makes more sense in the US where I’m told leased lines are a lot more expensive than they are here.
Well… I live in the UK and can’t get a leased line where I am, not for anything near this price.
My property locations in the US have electricity and phone line – no other service. Phone line CAN use dial-up but you must pay a monthly premium to guarantee a connection.
I think people might be missing the point of Starlink – it’s not intended to be a connectivity solution for the suburban house that has been missed out of FTTP deployments and can “only” get a 25Mbps FTTC connection. In those situations I agree that a leased line or FTTPoD is a better use of your money. Starlink is intended for more isolated locations where a leased line would not be £350/month without *thousands* of pounds up-front in network build costs.
If it delivers as advertised then the pricing isn’t terrible, especially when you compare it with the services it’s meant to compete with which can be $150+ satellite options with sub-30Mbps speeds and data caps.
I’m not generally a fan of Starlink as a fixed access product because I think deploying a network of satellites to solve the ‘problem’ of not being able to put a few km of fibre cable into the ground is ridiculous, but they are addressing a real problem that people have.
Ah ha! Proofs that the so-called Starlink’s a scam, just like Mr Thunderfeets said!
Elon Musk is smelly and can’t tie his own shoelaces!
OneWeb will be a bajillion times faster, have universe beating GPS with fricking laser beams attached and only cost thrupence ha’penny a month, because it’s British goddamnit!
All fun and games until those satellites crash into each other
It’s so funny that Thunderf00t is right though.
It’s a shame that it’s not viable. It’s such a bloody good concept!
Thunderf00t and common sense skeptic are wrong.
Elon and strange writing fellow above are right? lol, ok.
I see something like this being more useful for Islands like Tonga who lost their only internet connection when the recent earthquake hit and took out their only undersea cable.
Perhaps Starlink should first make their service available nationwide (eg in Scottish Highlands) before releasing faster speed tiers? It kind of defeats the purpose of selling a satellite connection if its only available in *some* locations.
The sentiment is understandable, but it would not make any economic sense for them to wait until 100% coverage is achieved before connecting customers, particularly when they can already serve many other parts of the world. The economic model is already hard enough to sustain as it is, so your suggestion would not help.
It’s still in development, I;m not sure they care about the Scottish highlands given the low density there.
They need income, and that means density and users.
The orbits of the satellites will dictate, when a service comes available and you would aim to put them in coverage patterns, which cycle over America and central Europe, Australia and New Zealand, since that’s where you will get the most initial pickup, and you will have the most customers who are already paying a 100x a month to other satellite service providers.
After that you will layer up above, and widen the edges.
It’s SpaceX billions (via deep pocketed backers) that’s going into this, so they must have some confidence, however anything new is a risk.
It is available in the Scottish Highlands, Fort William specifically.
$500 a month as an overhead for a business, either as a primary or secondary line, isn’t a lot. I know companies who would pay that just for a backup link or split capacity link, which would be wholly separate from the link outside the business location.
It would allow companies to site a location where they want to, where land is cheap. Yes a leased fiber line will always be a preference, but sometimes that isn’t an option.
If you think this product is just something that Starlink just thought up, without some outside prompting from businesses/superusers. The level of support that will be expected will be key for these customers.
For those with a need, then the cost becomes secondary, if highspeed low(ish) latency comms is a requirement.
We may not like the bloke, and his PR is pants, but the companies he has do tend to stick at it, until they get it right.
As the TV program goes “Location, Location, Location”, whether that’s for the rich, business, armed forces.
“$500 a month as an overhead for a business, either as a primary or secondary line, isn’t a lot.”
I would change that to..
“$500 a month as an overhead for some businesses..“
Also notice it provides estimates for speed and latency, nothing about packetloss which thus far with the regular starlink there is a fair bit of low level packetloss going on.
What are you basing this on? As a Starlink user, I see very little Packetloss.
Maybe they mean when there is no satellite above, since that would qualify 🙂
I’m basing it various ping graphs and the L2TP LCP loss rate on a tunnel I have in place to AAISP from my own Starlink.
There is some low levels of packet-loss, which isn’t surprising given how it works, it doesn’t seem to be enough to cause problems for the most part but if you had an loss sensitive application you might notice it.
matt what does the L2TP tunnel do for you? I see a lot of people taking out this service but I don’t really understand why. Surely it just adds to the overhead no? I see people using it on three too, i’d love to know why. Since it’s capped at some really small amount like most AAISP things.
I Use the L2TP Mostly for the Static Routable IPv4 and Static IPv6 block, Also allows to avoid the CG-NAT, I had the 3Mbit capped option for a little while as I wasn’t usually putting much in the way of traffic over it, I upgraded it to the normal one the (200Mbits/, 2TB) as I wanted to see if makes a difference with a couple of things.
(Mostly NowTV dropping to low bitrates on the Xbox and downloads from the gamepass servers)
There is IPv6 on Starlink but it’s not officially supported yet and sometimes seems to stop working (Although I think that’s actually more likely my end).
I use Policy routing to choose as to if I use the Tunnel Or Starlink Directly.
As a Starlink customer in the UK, I’m already getting latency and speed within those quoted numbers. So, the question is are they planning on downgrading or implementing caps on non premium users?
I think your service will naturally degrade as these users come online.
By maintaining user caps in cells, this is the way that throughput is maintained. It is just like contention into a comms cabinet. If you overload it (cough Virgin), then everyone suffers.
I think the layers that will go above/below, will have the ability to raise the user caps in each cell.
This would be very good value for money in the marine environment. Do they offer ocean coverage
Not yet, since that requires satellite to satellite communication to get to shore, if you are in the middle of the Atlantic (for instance) and none of the first gen satellites had that, which is currently the first layer.
All of the second gen have it (currently launching), but Starlink have been quiet on that, so they may not have reached a viable number, or they be having problems, who knows. The 2nd gen are heavier, hence why there aren’t as many in each launch.
Realistically you could use this as the backbone to a WISP. But not sure what the reselling rules are for Starlink.
The less said about the above 2 posts the better.
@Damien
You make a good point about the cost-effectiveness of a leased line compared to the new Starlink product. It’s very helpful to have the perspective of an existing customer, particularly regarding current pricing.
Performance-wise, at least some leased line products come with guarantees of throughput all the way from the end-point to the handover to the Internet. I suspect that there is contention involved with Starlink and you have to consider the potential impact of weather on performance. The SLAs on leased lines should make them much better suited to business users and prices are likely to continue to reduce; you also have the option to upgrade bandwidth if needed.
I’ve no doubt there are some very valid use cases for Starlink Premium but I hope potential customers do their homework first as many will find leased lines offer better performance at a similar or lower cost.
Except it isn’t your name, ‘Damien’.
Be more honest to list yourself as ‘fantasist’.
Stop stating nonsense, this can’t be used to resell internet as ISP, there would be different contract.
Absolutely ludicrous.
Isn’t this meant to be a service which is meant to help people who don’t have access to easily accessible internet? Why charge such crazy levels of money.
You still got 100$ plan. This isn’t supposed to be cheap service.
I hope they offer the other way eventually, 5 or 10 Mbps for £10 a month would be really interesting to many. Should only need a small portable unit too.