- Starlink is offering free gear to new broadband customers in areas where it has excess capacity
- The customers have to commit (and pay for) a 1-year plan
- One consultant thinks Starlink could be a great stop-gap measure for unserved customers, even as BEAD progresses with fiber for the longer-term
It looks like Starlink is striving to gain market share for its home broadband offering, both across the U.S. and globally. On April 28, Starlink announced in a post on X that it is offering its broadband equipment for free when customers sign up for a 12-month residential plan.
Normally, the startup cost would be $349, so this is a significant contribution from the company.
Customers who receive the free equipment must commit to a 1-year plan, and they can chose from one of two residential options. An $80 per month “residential lite” tier offers speeds between 50-100 Mbps, and a $120 per month tier offers speeds of 250 Mbps.
The offer is only available where Starlink has excess capacity, which is about half the U.S., according to its coverage map. In several places in the U.S., Starlink’s residential plan is waitlisted.
The analysts at TD Cowen wrote today, “We've noted in the past that Starlink can best serve those isolated rural areas in which broadband is otherwise not an option, but has capacity limitations in denser markets; meanwhile, it's difficult to charge high prices to rural customers (who are typically lower-income and/or older). This offer finally brings pricing down and could potentially compete with the few million rural homes that have ~30 Mbps DSL and no other options.”
According to its website for the $0 Starlink kit, the company is giving the same offer to other countries where it also has excess capacity. It’s offering the deal countrywide to several European nations including Italy, Germany, Spain, Greece and Austria. And its deal spans much of Australia, New Zealand and Britain, as well.
Starlink and BEAD
There’s been a lot of fretting in the U.S. broadband community about what’s going to happen with the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program now that the Trump administration has signaled changes, which will remove the preference for fiber, and which could result in a boon for satellite broadband.
But with the new offer of free gear, it appears Starlink is not waiting around for the BEAD program to gain more market share for its broadband business.
However, it's possible the fiber community doesn’t have as much to worry about with satellite as it thinks it does.
Chris Scharrer, founder and CEO of DCS Technology Design, crunched some numbers. He notes that the most recent report for unserved locations eligible for BEAD was estimated in 2024 to be around 6.4 million for all 56 states and territories.
Scharr said, “The current cost for a residential ground mount installation kit for Starlink is $349 online. Add $199 for a roof mount. If BEAD buys every unserved home a deluxe roof-mounted kit for $548, 6.4 million kits would cost the program $3.5 billion.”
Scharr said it’s “not a terrible idea” for BEAD to provide all unserved homes with Starlink as a stop-gap measure. The program would still have more than $40 billion to deploy fiber as a longer-term, faster and more reliable technology.
Maine in fact is basically doing just that. It has instituted a plan to buy 9,000 Starlink systems, out of its own pocket, so people can get online now. But it is not stopping its plans to still get fiber to the more than 28,800 unserved homes in Maine with BEAD.