Pe­ter Christo­pher

Guardian se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Trinidad and To­ba­go res­i­den­tial cus­tomers in­ter­est­ed in re­ceiv­ing the satel­lite broad­band in­ter­net ser­vice from the US com­pa­ny Star­link will have to pay a start-up cost of more than $4,000, the com­pa­ny dis­closed on its web­site yes­ter­day.

Star­link yes­ter­day of­fi­cial­ly list­ed its ser­vice as avail­able in T&T on its web­site while Star­link's Twit­ter page al­so an­nounced the ser­vice was avail­able.

On the com­pa­ny's web­site, cus­tomers hop­ing to sign up for the ser­vice can do so by search­ing by street name or area.

Ac­cord­ing to the com­pa­ny's res­i­den­tial sign-up page, the ser­vice will cost $365 per month.

The web­site stat­ed, "Star­link is cur­rent­ly avail­able in your area! Cus­tomers in your re­gion typ­i­cal­ly see down­load speeds around 100 Mbps. No con­tracts. Try for 30 days and, if not sat­is­fied, re­turn the hard­ware for a full re­fund. Ship­ping times are cur­rent­ly es­ti­mat­ed to be 1-2 weeks."

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny says cus­tomers must pay $3,900 for its hard­ware as well as a ship­ping and han­dling fee of $154 for a com­bined to­tal of $4,054 to com­plete reg­is­tra­tion for the ser­vice.

Busi­ness ap­pli­ca­tions were al­so avail­able on the web­site as the com­pa­ny stat­ed, "Star­link is im­me­di­ate­ly avail­able at your ad­dress. No con­tracts, 30-day tri­al, de­liv­ery in 1-2 weeks. Se­lect your month­ly pri­or­i­ty da­ta."

How­ev­er, busi­ness­es would have to fork out $20,000 to re­ceive Star­link's ser­vice.

The ini­tial hard­ware pay­ment for busi­ness­es was list­ed at $19,082.25 while the ship­ping cost stood at $653.34. The to­tal sum for a busi­ness sign up ac­cord­ing to the web­site stood at $19,735.59.

The web­site how­ev­er list­ed three op­tions for busi­ness­es, with 1TB, 2B and 6TB op­tions for $1,080, $2,149 and $6,446 re­spec­tive­ly.

Star­link had first sub­mit­ted an ap­pli­ca­tion to op­er­ate in Trinidad and To­ba­go in Au­gust 2022.

The com­pa­ny of­fi­cial­ly re­ceived a con­ces­sion to op­er­ate a satel­lite broad­band ser­vice in this coun­try by the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion with ef­fect from May 17, 2023.

The Type 2 con­ces­sion for the pro­vi­sion of a pub­lic do­mes­tic fixed (via satel­lite) telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­work and pub­lic do­mes­tic fixed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices on a na­tion­al ge­o­graph­ic scale, is set to run for ten years.

Star­link's ser­vice has been wide­ly pre­ferred in re­mote ar­eas as the ser­vice is de­rived from sig­nals from over 4,200 Star­link satel­lites in Low Earth Or­bit (LEO).

As a re­sult, Star­link's con­nec­tion does not have a ma­jor de­pen­den­cy on ground-based in­fra­struc­tures like fi­bre-op­tic ca­ble lines, which are used by most lo­cal providers.

This it is be­lieved would give the ser­vice an ad­van­tage over its com­peti­tors as cer­tain en­vi­ron­men­tal is­sues which plague fi­bre op­tic con­nec­tions would not af­fect satel­lite ser­vices.

Star­link cur­rent­ly op­er­ates in over 50 coun­tries in­clud­ing Caribbean coun­tries: Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Puer­to Ri­co, Mar­tinique, Guade­loupe, Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos.

Ser­vices in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos be­gan last year.

Star­link is a sub­sidiary of SpaceX, the com­pa­ny found­ed and owned by bil­lion­aire Elon Musk.