The satellite broadband service promises up to 350 Mbps with no caps, for $25K a month (plus equipment)
SpaceX announced this week Starlink Aviation, a new business unit of its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite service tasked with expanding into the in-flight Wi-Fi market. The new service will go online in 2023, Starlink said. Each setup sports an initial hardware cost of $150,000, with monthly services priced from $12,500 – $25,000. SpaceX emphasizes that the service is available without long-term contracts, and all plans include unlimited data.
The service will deliver up to 350 Megabits per second (Mbps) with latency as low as 20 milliseconds (ms), according to Starlink. The combination of low latency and high bandwidth will enable in-flight use cases that haven’t been supported up to now, claimed the company, with “video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities” as possibilities. Starlink says the service will work globally, including coverage over land, the oceans, and polar regions.
This new service is aimed at smaller aircraft from companies like Embraer, Gulfstream and Bombardier, not big people-movers from Airbus and Boeing. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires equipment makers like Starlink to submit Supplemental Type Certificates (STCs) to modify airframes; the company lists almost a dozen at present, but encouraged interested parties to hit them up for additional certs if necessary.
Starlink’s gear for airplanes includes a newly designed “low-profile Aero Terminal” which incorporates an electronically steered phased array antenna. The kit is designed to installed with minimal downtime; it includes the terminal, power supply, two wireless access points and harnesses. The company said the hardware is under warranty as long as an active subscription is maintained.
Starlink, no longer earthbound
Currently, Starlink’s broadband service requires a ground-based terminal with a clear view of the sky to operate. But earlier this year, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted SpaceX permission to begin offering service to vehicles. SpaceX responded quickly by introducing new Starlink products for maritime and aviation. After focusing on direct sales exclusively, SpaceX is also moving into the wholesale market: In September, Speedcast announced a partnership with SpaceX to provide Starlink service to enterprise and maritime customers, the first such deal to be announced.
In late August, T-Mobile US announced plans to use Starlink services to provide its customers with nationwide text messaging coverage beginning in late 2023, promising coverage even where terrestrial macro antennas can’t reach. The service will be dependent on SpaceX’s ability to launch a new generation of Starlink satellites into orbit. Those efforts have been stymied by repeated delays from SpaceX to get its Spaceship rocket off the ground. The new reusable rocket is SpaceX’s first designed for heavier payloads like the new second-generation Starlink satellites.
As SpaceX continues to find new markets for Starlink, the growing demand for coverage is affecting performance, according to recent research from Ookla. The company in September said that Starlink has shown signs of slowing down since its initial launch a year ago. The company recorded a drop in median download speed between 9 to 54% from the second quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022.
More recently, Starlink has been at the center of controversy over social media comments made by SpaceX head Elon Musk. About 20,000 Starlink satellite units were sent to Ukraine as part of international efforts to keep Ukrainians connected to the Internet despite efforts by Russian military forces to disrupt and destroy the country’s critical communications infrastructure. Depending on whom you listen to, Starlink either donated the terminals or sent them after someone else paid – namely, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was named in an April report published by The Washington Post.
Ukraine’s digital minister pegged the number of Starlink users in Ukraine at around 150,000, in social media posts this past May. According to sources, a Ukrainian general requested another 8,000 terminals for Starlink over the summer. SpaceX hasn’t responded to that general yet, but the company told Pentagon officials in a September letter that it needed the U.S. government to step up the care and feeding of its Ukrainian resistance efforts.
“We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” said SpaceX.
The company said that continued operating services in Ukraine will cost the company more than $120 million for the remainder of the year, and up to $400 million over the next 12 months. How it’s actually come to those numbers is an open question, however. Some reports indicate those figures represent the full retail cost of Starlink services, as opposed to a lower government rate or the actual operating cost.
Backtracking on Starlink’s Ukraine operations
Elon Musk is ever a lightning rod for social media controversy on Twitter, the social media service it appears that he will only reluctantly own soon. Musk stepped in it pretty deeply after earning a resounding “F off” from Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s outgoing ambassador to Germany, after offering unsolicited and decidedly pro-Kremlin advice on how to settle the Ukraine conflict.
After Starlink’s Pentagon request came to public attention, journalist Jason Jay Smart noted the timing, only days after Melnyk’s caustic retort. Musk, in typical unfiltered fashion, sarcastically replied, “We’re just following his recommendation.”
The social media reaction was swift and merciless on Musk, who appeared to threaten a war-torn nation’s critical communication infrastructure over the decidedly undiplomatic reaction of a diplomat. Last weekend Musk took to Twitter to announced that Starlink, or at least he, had changed his mind.
“To hell with it…even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding the Ukraine govt for free,” Musk tweeted. He followed it up with another indication on Monday that SpaceX had withdrawn its Pentagon funding request.
While Musk and Starlink may get points for their newly rediscovered magnanimity, others are questioning the suitability of any communications service – especially as critical infrastructure – to operate based on the whims of a single chief executive with a reflexive trigger finger aimed at a Tweet button.
