Starlink Toys with Cheaper Residential 100Mbps Broadband Satellite Plan

The Starlink (SpaceX) internet service, which reflects a mega constellation of ultrafast broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), recently introduced a new residential package for consumers – currently only available in the USA (but it may yet come to the UK) – that caps download speeds at 100Mbps, but drops the monthly price to just $50 (c.£30).

Starlink currently has around 8,940 satellites in orbit (c.5,400 are v2 / V2 Mini) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km. Residential customers in the UK usually pay from £75 a month, plus £299 for hardware (currently free for many areas) on the ‘Standard’ unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers) directly from Starlink, which promises UK latency times of 26-33ms, downloads of 116-277Mbps and uploads of 17-32Mbps. Cheaper, albeit more restrictive (data capped), options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £50 per month for 50 GigaBytes of data).

Suffice to say that one of the obstacles to Starlink’s wider adoption by home users in the UK has been the relatively high price point of their unlimited data service. As above, you can get cheaper roaming options, but these aren’t really intended for homes and would only really work well as a backup solution or for those with low usage requirements. Ofcom states that the average monthly data usage per UK broadband connection is now 531GB (GigaBytes) across “all technologies“ or 766GB for full-fibre lines.

The difficulty with expensive-to-run satellite broadband networks is that it’s hard for them to offer truly mass-market affordable packages and deliver unlimited usage with fast speeds at the same time. But this seems to now have become more viable for Starlink as they expand the capacity of their ground stations, spectrum use and launch more capable satellites into orbit.

The new “Residential 100Mbps” package in the USA is a good example of that, since it offers unlimited data but does obviously cap download speeds at 100Mbps (this is still a good level of performance for most people) in order to hit that attractive $50 (c.£30) per month price point. Upload speeds aren’t throttled, but then they rarely go much above 20Mbps anyway. The other catch is that availability of this plan remains limited to certain parts of the USA (most likely states where capacity is in abundance).

Customers in the USA can alternatively pay $80 (c.£61) per month for “Residential Lite” and speeds up to 250Mbps (this is closest to the UK’s Standard plan) or take “Residential” for $120 (c.£91) and speeds up to 400Mbps. Normally we wouldn’t cover Starlink package changes in other countries as they have different approaches right across the world (reflecting differences in capacity, ground stations, spectrum availability etc.), but we do think there’s a good chance of something similar coming to the UK in 2026.

The reason for thinking this is four-fold. Firstly, Ofcom has recently been granting Starlink access to more spectrum capacity, and on top of that they’ll shortly start launching their first high-capacity GEN3 satellites into orbit. In addition, the recent agreement with BT and EE to launch a rural broadband solution would mark a perfect opportunity to launch such a package (here). Finally, Starlink is about to face more competition from Amazon’s Leo service, so what better way to respond to that than by leveraging the advantages of a more mature network via competitive pricing. Time will tell.