SpaceX’s most powerful dish for its Starlink satellite internet system is expanding outside business customers to target residential users.
The company updated Starlink.com to let residential subscribers order either the standard $599 Starlink dish or a “high performance” dish, which costs a whopping $2,500.
The high-performance dish was originally introduced in February. But at the time, it was offered through a new Premium tier that later became Starlink Business, which also required interested customers to pay $500 per month for the internet service.
SpaceX is now selling the high-performance dish to regular consumers, but nixing the $500 monthly internet fee. Instead, consumers can buy the $2,500 dish and pay the standard $110-per-month residential fee to receive internet via the dish.
The company seems to be marketing the $2,500 dish to users who live in harsh or rugged environments. On the Starlink support page, the company notes the dish performs better in hot, cold, and rainy conditions compared to the standard dish.
“High Performance is best for power users and enterprise applications,” the support page says, adding: “The High Performance can see 35% more sky, allowing it to connect to more satellites and better serve users with atypical installations, unavoidable obstructions, or in polar (>59 degrees latitude) and equatorial regions where there are fewer visible satellites.”
The dish is also physically larger than the standard residential Starlink dish, and features double the antenna capability, which can allow it to receive faster download speeds. The Starlink Business tier currently offers expected speeds between 150 to 300Mbps—up from the 50 to 200Mbps speeds for the normal residential tier.
That said, if you buy the high-performance dish, faster speeds aren't guaranteed. The Starlink website mentions nothing about any speed benefits when buying the $2,500 hardware. The reason is probably because the Starlink network is already stretched to capacity in many areas across the US. As a result, congestion problems can drag down the broadband speeds in cells already full of Starlink subscribers.
A few users who have access to a high-performance Starlink dish have also said on Reddit they haven’t seen major speed increases over the pricier hardware. “I have a residential Starlink up and running at my place. I bought Premium, set it up, trialed it. They were the exact same,” wrote one customer.