Starlink for yachts and large ships costs $5,000 per month plus $10,000 for equipment

SpaceX is expanding its Starlink internet service to oceans, rivers and lakes – at a high cost. 

Starlink Maritime is now available and the company is targeting the owners of superyachts, oil rigs and merchant vessels as potential customers.

The service has an upfront hardware fee of $10,000 for two ‘ruggedized’ Starlink dishes and regular costs will run $5,000 per month.

In comparison, the space-based internet costs $110 a month with a $599 one-time equipment fee for residential customers; it’s also available for businesses and RVs.

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Starlink Maritime currently only extends outward to waters around North America, Europe and Australia. 

By the fourth quarter of this year, the company plans to extend that coverage to a much wider swatch of the oceans in the Northern Hemisphere, with plans to extend it out to the rest of the world’s oceans in the first quarter of 2023.

The company projects maritime performance speeds of 100-350Mbps down and 20-40Mbps up on its site.

Twitter user Whole Mars Catalog wrote that the maritime service is ‘the exact same thing as residential Starlink but on a boat but is priced 50x higher, smart vertical pricing’ and tagged SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

Musk replied to say: ‘No, it’s dual, high performance terminals, which are important for maintaining the connection in choppy seas & heavy storms.’

‘Still obv premium pricing, but way cheaper & faster than alternatives. 

‘SpaceX was paying $150k/month for a much worse connection to our ships!’

In side-by-side comparison of live video footage shot on a SpaceX drone ship, there’s a noticeable difference between footage captured over Starlink Maritime versus the unnamed service on the left that was apparently costing Musk’s company $150,000 (the case study sheet they released lists it as $165,000). 

‘Before Starlink Maritime, the 1-2 second latency of VSAT would cause lag and delayed feedback from gigabytes of telemetry, closed-circuit television (CCTV), and navigation data streaming from the Droneship,’ the company claims. 

VSAT refers to very small aperture terminal, which is a type of satellite communications system. 

‘With a latency of 50ms, Starlink enables even greater awareness on systems offshore, empowering operators to make the most informed decisions.

‘In addition to latency challenges, with VSAT, the lack of bandwidth coupled with the intense vibrations from the rocket engines often led to total dropouts in video and data.’ 

‘Also, being ruggedized for relentless salt spray & extreme winds & storms in deep ocean is not easy,’ Musk explained on Twitter.

SpaceX has launched some 2,700 Starlink satellite into low Earth orbit and has more than 400,000 subscribers worldwide. 

However, the tech company hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites. 

The tech company also notes that as SpaceX conducts more launches, more time is being spent offshore by its launch teams – so that team members are able to have video calls with family members while they’re at sea and also enjoy online games or streaming movies with no problems.