How Do I Get Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet?

Starlink internet plans

Starlink offers a single home internet plan for residential customers, though it also has several additional plans designed for businesses and vehicles.

Starlink plans and pricing

Most people looking for a home internet plan want Starlink Residential. Starlink Roam Unlimited is a portable internet service that you can take with you while traveling. This can be a handy feature for digital nomads or those living the RV life, but Roam isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

Roam customers can also use their connection while moving by purchasing a Roam 50GB, which costs $599, or Starlink’s Flat High Performance equipment, which costs $2,500. This is a pretty hefty up-front cost with very niche use cases, so unless you know you need more speed than you can get using your phone as a hotspot, we suggest you skip this one.

How to get Starlink now

If you’re already sold on the idea of Starlink, you can sign up now at sign up for Starlink right now. Equipment shipping takes about two weeks.

So what’s the difference between Residential and Roam plans? With the former, your dish is licensed to a specific address. Your standard dish may not work well while it’s in motion, but you have unlimited standard data.

The $50GB Roam plan is primarily intended for the Starlink Mini, which can be used at speeds up to 100mph. However, you’ll be cut off after you use 50GB per month, with the option to buy extra data by the gigabit. The Unlimited Roam plan works with either a standard or mini dish, and it can be used at a variety of locations. The quality of in-motion use depends on your dish.

Last we checked, Residential customers can switch to Roam, but once you’re on Roam, you may not be able to switch back. This means higher monthly costs and lower speeds than you get with a Residential plan.

Is Starlink unlimited?

Starlink currently offers unlimited data with most of its plans, though there’s some fine print that comes along with that claim. Geosynchronous (GSO) satellite providers, like Viasat and Hughesnet are known for having some of the most restrictive data caps of any type of internet. When GSO satellite customers hit their data cap for the month, their speeds can be deprioritized or throttled, reducing speeds to a crawl far below the advertised speeds.

Initially, Starlink offered truly unlimited data—a first for satellite internet. Unfortunately, as its network struggled with the influx of new customers, Starlink implemented a 1 TB cap. Although this is quite high for a data cap—especially compared to other satellite providers—the move was understandably unpopular with early adopters who had signed up for unlimited data.

Starlink quickly reversed the decision and now divides data into three tiers: Roam, Residential, and Priority/Mobile Priority. Residential plans and roam plans come witih standard data, which can achieve download speeds up to 220Mbps or faster. come with standard data by default, and Roam comes with Mobile.

The Roam 50GB plan also gets standard data, but you’re capped at 50GB. Priority plans, intended for boats and businesses, get priority data but there are caps between 50GB and 2TB, depending on your plan. Here’s what you get with any priority plan:

• Unlimited Inland Data
• In-motion + Ocean Use
• Network Priority
• Priority Support

How fast is Starlink internet?

Starlink promise speeds up to 200Mbps, but actual speeds vary. They can be as slow as 15Mbps when you first set up the dish and even faster than 220Mbps when your dish has oriented itself to all the satellites in the sky.  These speeds blow traditional GSO satellite speeds out of the water.

Download speeds aside, the biggest advantage of Starlink’s technology is not its download speeds, but its low latency. Latency is the amount of time it takes for a signal to travel from one computer to another and back again. GSO satellites like those used by Viasat and Hughesnet are located in geosynchronous orbit, far from the surface of the Earth. Even traveling at the speed of light, it takes a relatively long time (for an internet signal) to get to these satellites and back. This delay makes it hard to do any real-time activity, such as playing online games or using video chat.

The LEO satellites that Starlink uses orbit much closer to the Earth, reducing the distance that signals need to travel, thus providing much lower latency than other satellites can possibly achieve.

Can you watch TV on Starlink?

Starlink is a satellite internet provider, not a TV provider, so you don’t get TV channels like you do with DirecTV or DISH. That said, you can still watch TV shows over streaming services like Hulu or YouTube TV. In fact, with its decent download speeds and (mostly) unlimited data, Starlink is really the only satellite internet service that can handle streaming TV and movies on a regular basis.

For more information, check out some of our other guides on streaming services:

• Streaming on Satellite Internet
• How Much Speed Do I Need To Stream Video?
• The Best Internet Providers for Streaming
• Best Internet Browsers for Streaming

What if I can’t get Starlink?

Starlink is a great option for people in rural areas. It provides high-speed, low-latency connections in areas that lack the infrastructure for connections like cable or fiber. There are, of course, some downsides to Starlink, so it’s not necessarily the perfect solution for every situation.

If you’re looking for something cheaper, faster, or more readily available, there are a lot of other options in rural areas that might be a better fit.

Top rural internet providers

Starlink seems to be living up to the hype of 2020, but it’s still a relatively new service. Speeds could slow down as the company adds more customers in a given region, then speed back up when it deploys more satellites. 

Starlink is great if you can’t get fixed wireless internet, but it’s more expensive than most other plans and it can be a hassle to set up. If you’re still in shopping mode, check out your options for no-contract plans from other great providers.