Explained: What is Starlink Premium, and where is the company in India?

Elon Musk's space internet company Starlink has unveiled a new 'premium' service for its customers, with deliveries expected to start in Q1 2022.

While the company struggles with setting foot in India, here's what you need to know about the Premium service:

What is Starlink Premium?

Targeting 'businesses and high demand users', Starlink Premium is a service that offers higher bandwidth even during times of peak network usage. According to the company, users of Premium can expect up to 150-500 Mbps and latency of 20-40 ms.

The upgrade doesn't come for cheap, however, as the antenna alone can cost $2,500 (compared to $499 for the regular) and the service costs $500 a month, compared to just $99 for the regular, according to a report by The Verge.

Why is the company offering it?

The company has crossed 1.45 lakh users across 25 countries, and CEO Musk has expressed confidence that they're on their way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users 'within 12 months. The premium service is likely to cater to a more wealthy clientele with cash to spare while living in remote areas where wired connections are hard to reach.

Where is Starlink in India now?

The company is currently in troubled waters in India, as it was recently ordered to refund pre-orders taken from prospective customers as it did not have the requisite permissions to offer its satellite-based internet service in the country. Not only that, its India Country Director Sanjay Bhargava resigned last month, citing 'personal reasons'.

The company had earlier said it plans to focus on 10 rural Lok Sabha constituencies to provide internet services, and Bhargava, while at the helm, said the company aimed to start operations in December 2022 with 2 lakh active terminals subject to government approval. However, a lack of approval from the government has effectively stalled its headway into India, where remote regions can often struggle to get stable internet access.

Can India claim a piece of the satellite communication pie?

The user base of satellite communication in India is expected to increase to about 1.5-2 million by 2025, clocking revenue of nearly Rs 5,000-6,000 crore annually, if the operating environment eases, rating agency Icra said. However, "restricted" operating environment, "vague" licensing policies and "uncertainty" around spectrum allocation for satellite communications put India in the backseat, the agency said.

While satellite communication would be beneficial to areas deprived of the traditional network, it will be "quite expensive", making its adoption slow.

While the adoption of satellite communication has started globally, with the US having more than 4.5 million subscribers and European Union having more than 2.1 million subscribers, the penetration in India is only restricted to 0.3 million enterprise subscribers.

With agency inputs.

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