Starlink Premium Service Demands Astronomical Fee

In Starlink news, SpaceX has announced a premium service with a sturdy new antenna and promises of about three times the performance, and operation in more extreme environments.

The new service boasts a performance peak of about 500 Mbps (and reportedly a possibility of close to a full gigabit per second), and a bunch of perks - most notably 24/7 prioritized support, and assurances that Premium users will maintain bandwidth during time of peak network usage. So basically the new premium package is for businesses, which makes sense when you take a look at the cost.

And wow, is it costly. While the default package costs around $500 to begin with, and $99 per month; the Premium dwarfs that. The dish will cost $2500 up front, then the service requires a $500 deposit, and then you get to pay $500 per month. Serious hardware needs serious maintenance fees.

But what are the exact specs? Well, while both service packages offer the same latency (20-40ms) and no data caps; the Premium makes a huge leap to 500 Mbps peak download, and 40 Mbps upload speeds. Getting that sort of connection where folks don’t normally have one is pretty incredible, and current users of Starlink confirm better speeds than they’ve ever had.

Starlink is still growing, and with that comes new tech to try. It’s projected that the system will need over 12,000 satellites to function optimally, but with only 1700 in the constellation we’re already seeing gains for folks who have had to live with little to no access to the internet. Now with this new commercial service, Starlink looks to be making ready to step into the gap left by other ISPs.