SpaceX is still betting on Starlink. Elon Musk's satellite internet service, which recently opened its beta in Spain, continues to expand throughout the world (and throughout low earth orbit). Although the service is seeing slow adoption, especially when it comes to price, SpaceX has a new plan to make the service more attractive.
How? Through a new premium subscription modality that, in exchange for a higher monthly payment, the Starlink connection speed skyrockets. Under the name of Starlink Premium, the company plans to offer speeds between 150 and 500 Mbps with 20 to 40 milliseconds of latency, a big increase over the 50 at 250 Mbps with the same latency.
Upload speeds also go up with this premium plan, going from 10 to 20 Mbps in the standard to 20 to 40 Mbps in Premium. A very interesting and important upload to maintain stable connections. However, for much increase, Starlink is still far from offering symmetrical connections, even paying extra. Although it is also said that its objective is not to replace the classic cable connections.
Starlink Premium forces you to pay almost 10,000 dollars the first year to use it
Credit : SpaceX Logically, this increase in both upload and download speeds also entails an increase in price. The Starlink Premium plan also carries a premium price , forgive the redundancy. In this sense, the monthly fee goes up to 500 dollars per month. It is a considerable increase considering that the standard plan is 99 dollars, quite in line with other similar services.
And they are not the only costs that rise. Starlink Premium speeds require specific hardware compared to the standard plan. That means users who want to upgrade to this plan have to shell out $2,500 extra for the antenna and other hardware. On the normal plan, the hardware costs $499. Oh, and you'll also have to leave an additional $500 deposit to book Premium.
That is, $3,000 to start and another $500 per month for using the Starlink Premium service each month. That means that users who want to use this new service will pay the first year 9000 dollars for Starlink's high-speed satellite connection service.
The good news is that those using SpaceX's Starlink Premium will have satellite service available that works better in “extreme weather conditions” and 24/7 priority support. The bad news is that in some regions, premium may be the only possible way to access the internet.
