SpaceX announced this week Starlink Aviation, a new business unit of its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite service tasked with expanding into the in-flight Wi-Fi market. The new service will go online in 2023, Starlink said. Each setup sports an initial hardware cost of $150,000, with monthly services priced from $12,500 – $25,000. SpaceX emphasizes that the service is available without long-term contracts, and all plans include unlimited data.
The service will deliver up to 350 Megabits per second (Mbps) with latency as low as 20 milliseconds (ms), according to Starlink. The combination of low latency and high bandwidth will enable in-flight use cases that haven’t been supported up to now, claimed the company, with “video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities” as possibilities.
