Start-up hardware to cost $4,054 - Trinidad Guardian Trinidad and Tobago Guardian Online

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Star­link avail­able in T&T:

Start-up hardware to cost $4,054

by

Peter Christopher
587 days ago
20230615
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, which operates the the satellite broadband internet company Starlink

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, which operates the the satellite broadband internet company Starlink

Michel Euler

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.


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