ISP’s can use last-mile fibre, fixed wireless and mobile wireless to transmit connectivity from Starlink’s low earth orbit satellite network to remote communities.
“The Community Gateway represents the beginning of something great for delivering Gbps speeds to anywhere on the planet. Areas that never dreamed of having this capability will now be able to develop new ideas for making use of this technology” said Emmett Fitch, CEO of OptimERA
OptimERA is an Alaskan ISP that owns a cell tower next to the first community gateway that was deployed, in Unalaksa, Alaska. The tower distributes the signal from Starlink's gateway around the town of 4,000 people.
Starlink promises download and upload speeds of up to 10Gbps and latency of less than 99ms from the new service.
Speaking to local press when the community gateway was first installed, Fitch said that 10Gbps was far more than the community needed.
The service is priced at a minimum of $75,000/Gbps/month with a one-time upfront cost of $1.25 million.
Lluc Palerm Serra, principal analyst at NSR, a boutique satellite research firm acquired by Analysys Mason, described the pricing as “aggressive” in a Linkedin Post.
“But when considering the upfront costs ($1.25M), and the minimum buy (1 Gbps), this is not as far as one may think from the rest of the industry,” he said.
Serra also noted that this is the first Mbps-based offer from Starlink and that it claims 99% uptime. “This seems to denote that Starlink is incorporating SLAs to its portfolio,” Serra said.
The Community Gateway traffic transits through Starlink's global laser mesh network and utilises its high bandwidth gateways operating in a dedicated Ka spectrum band.
Serra also noted that the new offer seems to be using Starlink’s gateway beams.
“This means that Starlink could be competing with its gateway partners using its direct-to-consumer offer. Another example of Starlink being a tricky partner,” Serra said.
