Starlink India Pricing Unveiled: Costs of Elon Musk’s Satellite Internet Service

However, these subscription charges and benefits may not be final as the company’s availability map still shows that it is ‘pending regulatory approval’ in India. The Starlink India web page also does not carry the pricing and other details of its Business subscription tier.

Starlink has been gearing up to make its debut in India for years, working through regulatory hurdles and laying the operational groundwork. With around 7,000 satellites in orbit, Starlink operates the world’s largest satellite constellation. It could be crucial in providing high-speed connectivity to remote and underserved regions in India.

Under its residential plan, Starlink claims that the set-up will operate in all weather conditions and is engineered to deliver more than 99.9 per cent uptime. The company also highlighted ease of installation, noting that customers only need to plug in the equipment to begin using the connection.

Satellite communication services rely on an array of satellites in orbit to offer connectivity to homes and businesses on the ground. They are an alternative to ground based communication, called terrestrial networks, such as cable, fibre, or digital subscriber line (DSL), and they don’t require wires to transmit data.

However, Starlink may not work as expected in densely populated areas. “It can be much more effective in rural areas where the internet connection is much worse, and often people either sometimes have no access to the internet or it’s extremely expensive or the quality is not very good,” Musk said on a recent podcast with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath.

Notably, Musk also said Starlink works complimentary to broadband and wireless internet services provided by telecom companies. In the past, the satcom major was locked in a fierce battle against the country’s telecom giants Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel, over how frequency for India’s space waves should be assigned to satcom operators.

Since then, Starlink has inked separate retail partnerships with Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, and Bharti Airtel, for them to offer its service to their customers.

In June this year, Starlink became the third entity in India with a satcom licence, officially called Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) licence, after Eutelsat’s OneWeb and Reliance Jio. It has also been granted a Unified Licence by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), marking the end of Starlink’s long and complicated efforts to secure regulatory approval in India.

Starlink parent SpaceX also listed four job openings on LinkedIn for its Bengaluru office in October this year, as per news reports. The company was reportedly hiring for the positions of Payments Manager, Accounting Manager, Senior Treasury Analyst, and Tax Manager.