I have some updates on the availability situation, here's a tweet from the man himself for someone asking the availability of Starlink in India.
And
here's an article from last month that mentions the Philippines government is in talks with Starlink and its licencing procedure. Even
Japan had to go through similar process. As you can see, there is no way around it. Every provider has to go through each countries regulatory commissions to make their services available within that country. It's further confirmed by
this article from late last year where thy clearly says;
Outside the United States, SpaceX is working nation by nation to get authorization to offer the service. âEvery country has its own process,â said Shotwell.
And then there is
this presentation from 2015 where Elon himself addresses this very problem. I'll leave a quote of this exact reply below.
"From our standpoint we could conceivably continue to broadcast and they'd have a choice of either shooting our satellites down... or not. China can do that. So we probably shouldn't broadcast there. <laughs> If they get upset with us, they can blow our satellites up. I mean, I'm hopeful that we can structure agreements with various countries to allow communication with their citizens but it is on a country by country basis. I don't think it's something that would affect the timeline. At least, it's not going to take longer than five years to do that. Not all countries will agree at first. There will always be some countries that don't agree. That's fine."
Want more official information? Look at their
terms of services page for Starlink.
6.3 Trade Laws. You must comply with all applicable International Trade Controls in the context of these Terms, which means applicable export control, economic sanctions, customs/import, anti-money laundering, and anti-corruption laws and regulations. You acknowledge that you are only authorized to access Services at the location identified on your Order, and you will not divert the Starlink Kit or Services to any other locations, or to users or for uses that are prohibited under International Trade Controls.
It gets even worse when you look at the
ITU constitution,
our relationship with US government will also affect the situation.
"While fully recognizing the sovereign right of each State to regulate its telecommunication ... the States Parties to this Constitution ... have agreed ..." In theory all countries should respect fair trade treaties they signed but in reality some countries may impose high fees or unacceptable conditions on Starlink. It is the job of the US government to make other countries abide to fair trade policies.
Okay, now that we've learned more about availability side of the things, lets see the state of
data caps. Yup, believe it or not, they don't have any for now, but in their
RedditAMA thread, they've said that
caps might be imposed in the future. It's obvious that
major satellite based internet providers like Viasat in the USA already has "thresholds" in place, not to get confused with hard data caps. Basically they'll deprioritize traffic after certain usage threshold is reached, making their connections slightly slower and prioritizing users who haven't reached thresholds and personally I believe Starlink would follow the same practice once they come out of their Beta program.
So we really don't want to implement restrictive data caps like people have encountered with satellite Internet in the past. Right now we're still trying to figure a lot of stuff outâwe might have to do something in the future to prevent abuse and just ensure that everyone else gets quality service.
It'd still be better than sub 100kbps FUPs imposed by our ISPs, but on a good day you're looking at under 300mbit down, 50mbit up so you're not getting nowhere near gigabit speeds (yet). The more and more users Join, speeds will only go further down and there are already tons of complains on random disconnections, massive lags when gaming online, its even mentioned in their TOS so unless SpaceX can keep launching new Starlink satellites into the orbit constantly we're far from reaching advertised gigabit speeds.
Now to a fun fact: Did you know,
a set of 60 first gen Starlink satellites add about 1tpbs bandwidth to the entire Starlink network?
Last but not least; here are some info on the frequency bands used. This isn't my area of expertise so do as you may with the info below.
| uplink (ghz) | downlink (ghz) |
| user | 14 - 14.5 | 10.7 - 12.7 |
| gateway | 27.5 - 29.1 & 29.5 - 30 | 17.8 - 18.6 & 18.8 - 19.3 |
| telemetry | 13.85 - 14 | 12.15 - 12.25 & 18.55 - 18.60 |
Most of the info I posted here was taken from r/starlink wiki section, if you wanna know more, head over there.
Edit: Uh it looks like Starlink has no plans to adopt region-based pricing model according to screenshots posted by OP. That's not good at all. I was hoping that Elon would eventually drop prices down to $69/month because you know, memes.
Edit 2: For those who are wondering about the state of p2p over Starlink, you should be able to use a VPN and torrent over it. Not any random free VPN, a premium one that supports p2p and port forwarding should do the trick. If you wanna be extra careful, look specifically for provider who respects "no logs" policy, is independently audited, operates outside of 14 eyes countries, uses wireguard protocol over traditional ssl/ovpn based profiles.
Edit 3: I just learned that if some country decided not to allow Starlink to operate, even if you could somehow get the dish antenna imported, it 100% will NOT work because the restrictions are implemented at satellite level. Meaning any satellites that are in the range of broadcasting for that country will simply NOT broadcast any signals making that dish you have one expensive hotplate mounted on a roof/pole. Crazy right?