New “Starlink Premium” costs $500/month, ships sooner than standard Starlink

Enlarge / Starlink Premium antenna. (credit: Starlink)

Starlink has started taking orders for a premium service with a bigger antenna that delivers download speeds of up to 500Mbps, and it costs five times as much as the standard service: $2,500 for the hardware and $500 per month for Internet access.

"Starlink Premium has more than double the antenna capability of Starlink," the product's website says. More specifically, the higher-performance user terminal has "twice the area of our standard phased array with broader scan angle," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter. It's intended for small offices, stores, and residences. The exact physical dimensions of the new user terminal don't seem to be available.

Ordering Starlink Premium requires a $500 deposit, and deliveries are scheduled to start in Q2 2022. It will be the latter part of Q2, as an FAQ says, "We expect to begin fulfilling Starlink Premium orders mid-2022." But the timing still means that people who order Starlink Premium could get service before people who have been waiting many months for a shipment of regular Starlink equipment.

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