Lauren Dreyer, the VP of Starlink Business Operations and SpaceX executive, has clarified that the Starlink India website is still not live and thus the service pricing for customers in India has not yet been announced. Dreyer took to X and said, “we are not taking orders from customers in India.”
She further added that a temporary configuration error caused some “dummy test data” to appear, but they were not indicative of Starlink’s actual pricing for India and were corrected quickly. She said the company is excited to bring Starlink’s high-speed internet to India and is currently working on securing the final government approvals needed to launch both the service and the website.
What did the glitch reveal?
The Starlink India website on Monday briefly listed the home internet plan at Rs 8,600 per month, along with a hardware kit priced at Rs 34,000.
These figures were almost the same as what Starlink normally charges in the US, where the monthly fee is about $120. For comparison, most fiber broadband plans in India cost only Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 a month, which would make Starlink a very high-end choice for customers.
Meanwhile, the starting prices in nearby countries are lower, roughly Rs 3,000 a month in Bhutan and about Rs 4,400 a month in Bangladesh when converted to Indian currency.
‘We’d love to be operating in India’ – What Musk said on Nikhil Kamath’s podcast
During a recent conversation with Nikhil Kamath, Elon Musk spoke about bringing Starlink to India. He mentioned that SpaceX is making strong progress with Starlink and is already offering affordable, dependable internet in many parts of the world. He added that the company would be thrilled to launch the service in India since it’s already active in about 150 countries.
Musk also added that Starlink is especially useful in rural regions where regular networks don’t work well. In cities, cell towers are placed close together, but in the countryside they’re far apart and less efficient. Laying fiber cables or building high-capacity towers in remote areas is costly and difficult, which often leads to poor internet access. Because of that, he said Starlink fits in well with existing telecom services by covering places that are hard to reach.
