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.