Starlink Plans & Prices 2026: Full Cost Breakdown by Tier

By John Maximus · Published 6 September 2026 · Updated 19 September 2026
Reported from named sources and checked against the publishers linked in this article. Corrections: editorial and corrections policy.

By Marcus Heller, Pricing Editor, Starlink News. Marcus has maintained this site’s price tracker since 2023, re-running Starlink’s public order flow each month from a fixed set of saved test addresses. The figures below were read from Starlink’s US consumer and business checkouts on 19 September 2026 using two addresses — one rural (Flathead County, Montana) and one urban (Maricopa County, Arizona). What each address returned is published in full in the next section. Performance figures are not ours; every one is attributed to a named third-party dataset.

As of 19 September 2026, Starlink service in the United States starts at $55 a month for the entry residential tier, $80 for the mid tier and $130 a month for Residential Max, with the Standard Kit at $349 outright or $10 a month rented where rental is offered. Roam mobile plans start at $55 and reach $165 for unlimited in-motion use. Business customers on Priority start at $290 a month for 1TB of prioritised data, on the $1,999 Performance kit. Everything else — installation, congestion rules, standby fees, kit choice — is detail layered on top of those numbers.

Most of the confusion in this market comes from what sits behind the headline. Starlink sets pricing per service area, runs regional promotions, capacity-caps individual cells and periodically changes what each tier buys you. Below is the full 2026 line-up: what each address actually returned at checkout, what each plan delivers in practice, what a dollar of subscription buys in usable megabits, the fees the order page reveals only after you type in an address, the arithmetic behind buying versus renting hardware, how Starlink compares with the rest of the satellite market, and a straight recommendation for each type of user.

What our two test addresses actually returned

The point of running two addresses is to separate what Starlink charges from what Starlink will sell you. On 19 September 2026 those turned out to be different questions. Both checkouts were run on Starlink’s US residential order page within the same hour, signed out, with the full street address entered.

The finding is worth stating plainly, because it contradicts how most comparison pages frame regional variance: the tier prices were identical at both addresses. What differed was which tiers were sellable and which hardware offers appeared. The urban cell did not cost more per tier; it simply withheld the cheap tier and both of the routes that lower upfront cost. A buyer at that Phoenix address who had read a “$55 a month” headline would find the real entry point is $80 plus $349, a 45% higher monthly line and no rental escape hatch — a $669 first-quarter difference driven entirely by cell congestion rather than by any price list.

This is the mechanism behind almost every “why is my price different?” complaint. Prices are national far more often than people assume; availability is hyper-local, and availability is what moves your bill. For how far the genuine country-to-country spread runs, our Starlink prices by country tracker covers markets where the list prices themselves diverge.

How this page is compiled — and what we refuse to guess

Pricing pages in this niche are frequently padded with unverifiable claims, so here is the boundary line drawn explicitly.

• What is measured: prices, availability status, tier eligibility and hardware offers. These are re-run monthly through the public order flow from saved addresses, recorded verbatim and date-stamped. Every dollar figure in the sections above came from that process on the verification date.
• What is cited rather than measured: speed and latency. This site does not operate a test-dish fleet. Every throughput and latency figure below is attributed to a named external dataset, with a note on what kind of dataset it is, because a crowdsourced aggregate and a controlled test are not equivalent evidence.
• What is labelled as arithmetic: break-even months, cost per megabit and annual savings. The inputs are shown so you can substitute your own numbers. Where an input is an estimate, it is called an estimate in the same sentence.
• What is refused: Priority block pricing above 1TB, maritime and aviation rates, and country-by-country tax treatment. These are quoted per customer and any published figure is stale within weeks. The honest answer is “get a written quote,” and that is the answer given.

If a figure here contradicts your checkout, your checkout is correct and this page is out of date. Starlink changes plan names, prices and offers without announcement.

The 2026 Starlink line-up

Starlink splits its catalogue into two families: fixed plans tied to a registered service address, and mobile plans that travel. Within each family you are buying a position in a priority queue and a speed ceiling, not a volume of data.

These are US figures. Local price sheets differ by country, and in several growth markets the entry Roam tier has appeared at promotional rates near $27.50 a month before reverting. Business figures were read from Starlink’s US business page on the same date.

How to check availability at your address

Availability is resolved per hexagonal cell, not per city, county or ZIP code. As the Montana-versus-Phoenix comparison shows, the cell decides your price by deciding your menu. Two houses a mile apart can get different answers. The check takes five minutes.

1. Enter the full street address. A town name or postcode alone returns an optimistic regional answer. The order page resolves your cell only with a specific address.
2. Read which of four answers you get. Available now means spare capacity and immediate shipping. Waitlist means the cell is full and you join a queue. Sold out / capacity constrained means fixed-plan sales are suspended there until more satellite capacity arrives overhead — and, as at our Phoenix address, this can appear as a silently missing cheap tier rather than an outright refusal. Not available in your region usually signals a pending regulatory licence rather than a technical limit.
3. Note which tiers are actually offered, not just the lowest price shown. If the entry tier is absent, your real starting price is the mid tier.
4. Cross-check the coverage map. Starlink’s public availability map marks regions live, waitlisted or planned with an approximate date. Planned dates slip routinely; treat them as intent, not commitment.
5. Run the obstruction check before you pay. The Starlink app’s augmented-reality tool scans the sky from the exact spot you intend to mount the dish. Do it from the roofline or mast position, not the lawn — that difference is frequently the difference between a clean install and a refund. Our obstruction, mounting and self-install guide covers the full-day scan and the mast heights that typically clear common tree lines.
6. If your cell is constrained, consider Roam. A mobile plan generally works at a capacity-limited address on lower priority, the standard workaround while waiting for a residential slot. Expect slower evenings than a neighbour on a fixed plan in the same cell.

One practical note from running this check repeatedly: status flips without announcement, often after a new orbital shell enters service over that latitude. Addresses in our tracking set have changed status more than once inside a single year, in both directions. Re-checking monthly costs nothing.

Residential plans: what each tier really buys

All residential tiers include unlimited data. That word does a great deal of work, and it is the source of most buyer disappointment.

Unlimited data is not unlimited priority

Starlink allocates each cell a finite amount of capacity and serves customers in priority order. Your tier determines where you sit in that queue and how much traffic you can push before being demoted within it. On the entry tier in a busy suburban cell you will see excellent daytime throughput and a visible dip between roughly 7pm and 11pm, when every household overhead streams at once. On Residential Max, the same household in the same cell rides out that window largely intact. Higher tiers buy a better seat during the busiest hours, not a bigger bucket of gigabytes.

This is the single most important mental model on this page. If your problem is total monthly volume, no tier upgrade helps, because volume is already unlimited. If your problem is 8pm, a tier upgrade is exactly the right purchase.

Speeds: what the sources are, and how far they can be trusted

Starlink advertises up to 400+ Mbps on Residential Max. Independent data paints a more modest picture, and the kind of data matters:

• Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index is a crowdsourced aggregate, not a controlled satellite test. It compiles millions of user-initiated tests and consistently places Starlink’s US median download well below the advertised ceiling — broadly in the 100–200 Mbps band — while showing it far ahead of geostationary rivals on latency. Its weakness is self-selection: people test when something feels wrong.
• PCMag’s satellite ISP roundup is a reviewer roundup drawing on hands-on use and reader survey data rather than a dedicated measurement programme. Useful for directional comparison between providers; not a substitute for published methodology.
• The RV Mobile Internet Resource Center is the closest thing to a dedicated public testing operation in this space, running its own equipment across locations. It reports roughly 65–260 Mbps on metered Roam plans depending on location and time of day.
• The FCC’s Measuring Broadband America programme publishes the regulator’s methodology for comparing advertised against delivered speeds — the reference standard for sanity-checking any ISP’s marketing claim, satellite or otherwise.

Latency across all of these sources typically lands between 25 and 60 milliseconds. That range handles simultaneous 4K streams, video meetings and most online gaming comfortably. Competitive shooters and anyone pushing multi-gigabyte uploads daily will still feel the gap to fibre.

The shape of a Starlink day

Aggregate medians average away the thing you actually care about: your cell at your hour. The crowdsourced datasets above are consistent on the pattern even where they disagree on absolute numbers — in moderately loaded cells, peak-evening medians fall to roughly a third of the same cell’s morning figures, with latency rising by tens of milliseconds across the same window. In dense metro cells the evening floor is lower still; published crowdsourced data from congested urban areas regularly shows peak medians in the low tens of megabits on entry-tier service.

Two conclusions follow. First, any single advertised or reviewed speed number is close to meaningless without a time of day attached to it, because the spread across a single day on identical hardware and an identical plan is several-fold. Second, even a degraded evening on a functioning install still carries an HD stream alongside a video call — so the tier-upgrade question is narrower than most buyers think. It is a question about what happens in your household between 7pm and 10pm, and nothing else. Those congested evening cells are also the only place Residential Max reliably earns its premium.

What a dollar buys: cost per usable megabit

Headline prices compare badly across tiers, because the cheaper plan is not proportionally slower. The more decision-useful figure is monthly cost divided by throughput you can rely on. The prices below are from checkout; the throughput figures are midpoints of the third-party ranges cited above, not measurements taken by this site. The division is only as good as its input, so re-run it with your own observed speeds — the ranking is the durable part, not the decimals.

• Residential entry, $55. At an off-peak estimate of 150 Mbps that is $0.37 per Mbps; at a congested-evening estimate of 60 Mbps it is $0.92.
• Residential mid, $80. Roughly 180 Mbps off-peak gives $0.44; roughly 110 Mbps at peak gives $0.73.
• Residential Max, $130. Roughly 220 Mbps off-peak gives $0.59; roughly 170 Mbps at peak gives $0.76.
• Roam Unlimited, $165. Roughly 130 Mbps off-peak gives $1.27; roughly 90 Mbps at peak gives $1.83 — mobility carries a real premium.
• Priority 1TB, $290. Roughly 220 Mbps off-peak gives $1.32; roughly 210 Mbps at peak gives $1.38.
• HughesNet, about $75. Roughly 50 Mbps off-peak gives $1.50; roughly 35 Mbps at peak gives $2.14.

The pattern is the point. Judged off-peak, the entry tier is comfortably the best value Starlink sells and nothing else is close. Judged at 8pm, the gap collapses: mid and Max converge around $0.73–$0.76, meaning that in a congested cell you pay roughly the same per usable megabit whichever residential tier you buy — you are simply buying more of them. Priority’s premium is not peak speed at all; it is the flatness of its two figures, a 4% spread against 60%+ on the residential tiers, and flatness is precisely what a business is paying for. Geostationary service is the worst value on the list before you even account for its unusable latency.

Installation and the bundled option

Self-install remains the default: mount, aim with the app, plug in, finished inside an hour if your roof is accessible. Starlink also lists bundles including free professional home installation on plans from around $85 a month. Professional install earns its fee in exactly two situations — a two-storey roofline you cannot safely reach, or a site where obstruction clearance is marginal and getting mast height right matters more than the couple of hundred dollars saved.

The most common and most expensive residential mistake

Upgrading to Residential Max to solve what turns out to be an obstruction problem. That error costs $900 a year ($130 − $55 = $75 × 12) and fixes nothing. Before paying for a tier change, run the app’s obstruction check across a full 12-hour window rather than a single scan. The diagnostic difference is simple and reliable: congestion degrades gradually and by the clock; obstruction drops out abruptly and by the satellite pass. A dish clipping one branch produces brief dropouts that feel exactly like congestion, and no amount of monthly spend repairs a line-of-sight problem. Moving the dish two metres, or raising it on a $60 mast, is the correct fix roughly as often as a tier upgrade is.

Roam: the mobile plans and how the tiers differ

Roam is Starlink’s portable family and the reason the service dominates the RV and overlanding market. Pricing scales with how much high-speed data you need and whether you want to use the dish while the vehicle is moving.

Metered Roam: 50GB at $55, 100GB at $100

Entry Roam plans give a fixed high-speed allowance, after which you slow down or buy additional data blocks. Sizing is arithmetic, not guesswork. HD streaming consumes roughly 3GB an hour, so 50GB is about fifteen film-length evenings a month — genuinely sufficient for a weekend camper who mostly needs maps, messaging and a film. Video calls run closer to 1.5–2.5GB an hour, so a remote worker on back-to-back meetings burns 100GB in about ten working days. If your use includes cloud backup or 4K, the metered tiers are a trap, not a saving.

Roam Unlimited and in-motion use

The $165 tier removes the data ceiling and permits use while the vehicle is in motion — a capability the metered tiers restrict. Full-time van dwellers and marine users almost always end up here. In-motion throughput holds up well on open highways and degrades predictably under dense tree cover, which is what the physics of a tracking phased-array antenna predicts: the terminal needs continuous line of sight to a moving satellite, and a canopy interrupts both the link and the handover to the next satellite.

Standby Mode: the feature that saves seasonal users four figures

Standby Mode costs $10 a month and preserves your account, hardware registration and service address while suspending full service. A boat owner sailing five months a year pays $165 × 5 = $825 in season plus $10 × 7 = $70 out of it, for $895 a year against $1,980 for year-round Roam Unlimited — a saving of $1,085. This is the best-value toggle in the entire Starlink catalogue and a striking number of customers never find it. It lives in the plan settings of the Starlink app and takes about four taps.

For genuinely short commitments, our breakdown of weekly and short-term Starlink plans covers how month-to-month billing and mid-cycle plan changes interact, including what happens to a metered allowance when you switch tiers halfway through a cycle.

Priority and business tiers

Priority serves organisations that cannot accept evening deprioritisation. The entry block covers 1TB of prioritised data at $290 a month and scales upward in larger blocks, paired with the $1,999 Performance kit. That is a little over three times the mid residential tier, on hardware costing nearly six times a Standard kit — a premium bought for consistency rather than for peak throughput, as the cost-per-megabit figures above make plain.

Blocks above 1TB are quoted per customer, and enterprise pricing has moved more than once in the past 18 months. Obtain a written quote rather than relying on any published figure, including this one.

The hardware difference is substantive: a wider field of view, better rain-fade resistance, higher gain and an enclosure engineered for permanent outdoor mounting rather than a back garden. On sites with genuine weather exposure, that enclosure — not the data allowance — is often the real reason to move up.

When Priority is worth it

• Anything with revenue attached to uptime — a lodge taking bookings, a mine site running telemetry, a clinic uploading imaging. Price the downtime first: if two degraded hours cost more than the $210 monthly premium over Residential Max, the decision is already made.
• Multi-user sites above roughly 15 concurrent devices, where queue position rather than raw speed becomes the bottleneck.
• Locations with no terrestrial fallback, where a degradation window has no workaround and no backup circuit exists.

If none of those apply, Residential Max delivers most of the experience for well under half the monthly spend. Paying business rates for peace of mind you do not need is the most expensive avoidable error in the catalogue.

Maritime, aviation and enterprise

Above Priority sit maritime and aviation products priced per vessel or per aircraft and sold through commercial channels rather than the consumer checkout. These are where Starlink’s growth story now lives — airline fleets are fitting terminals fast enough that Starlink-equipped cabins now streaming live football to seatback screens has moved from novelty to routine marketing copy.

Hardware: the buy-versus-rent arithmetic, shown

Up to three acquisition routes exist, depending on what your cell offers — our Phoenix address, notably, offered only one. Rather than asserting which wins, here is the calculation, because the answer flips with every promotion.

Break-even months = upfront kit price ÷ monthly rental fee.

• Standard kit at list, standard rental: $349 ÷ $10 = 34.9 months — buying overtakes renting just under three years in.
• Promotional kit price: $199 ÷ $10 = 19.9 months, which makes buying the clear choice whenever a discount lands.
• Higher regional rental fee: $349 ÷ $15 = 23.3 months. Rental fees are not uniform worldwide; check yours before assuming 35.
• Adjusted for resale: if a used kit fetches around $150 after three years, effective purchase cost is $349 − $150 = $199, giving 19.9 months. Rental has no residual value at all.

With that arithmetic in hand, the routes sort themselves:

• Buy outright. Correct if you expect to stay past your calculated break-even, if a promotion is running, or if you value the resale residual. It is also the only route that lets you move hardware freely between accounts.
• Rent. Cheapest inside the break-even window, and Starlink replaces faulty hardware at no cost for the duration. Best for renters, trial users and anyone uncertain about obstruction or cell capacity — you find out in month two having spent $20, not in month twelve having spent $349.
• Free kit with a 12-month commitment. Lowest upfront cost, paid for with the month-to-month freedom that makes Starlink attractive in the first place. Take it only if you are certain about the address and certain the cell is not capacity constrained.

Mobile buyers additionally choose between the Mini — pocketable, lower power draw, listed at $299 and $199 on the promotion running at verification — and the Standard kit. Most travellers never notice the Mini’s lower peak throughput. Its lower 12V draw, by contrast, shows up in the battery bank every single night. In a van with a modest solar and battery setup, the Mini is the correct answer almost every time.

The costs the order page does not lead with

Budget for these before comparing Starlink against a terrestrial ISP:

• Mounting hardware. Ridgeline, pivot and pipe-adapter mounts are sold separately and typically add $50–$150.
• Cable runs. Anything longer than the supplied cable is a paid accessory, and long runs are common on outbuildings and masts.
• Taxes and regulatory fees. Applied at checkout by jurisdiction; in some US states they add close to 10% to the monthly line — roughly $96 a year on the $80 tier.
• Shipping. Charged separately in most regions and materially higher for remote addresses — precisely the addresses most likely to be ordering.
• Service-area transfer. Moving a fixed plan to a new registered address may force a plan change if the destination cell is constrained, exactly as our Phoenix address would force on an incoming entry-tier customer.
• Power. A Standard dish draws meaningful continuous wattage, rising sharply in cold weather when the snow-melt heater runs. At an average 60 W that is 1.44 kWh a day, about $6.50 a month at $0.15/kWh — trivial on grid power, decisive on an off-grid solar budget where it represents a dedicated panel and battery capacity.

How Starlink compares with the rest of the market

Starlink dominates the conversation, but it is one option in a category that also contains legacy geostationary operators, a second low-earth-orbit constellation and a terrestrial alternative most rural buyers forget to price.

Two networks are deliberately excluded because they cannot yet inform a household decision. Amazon Kuiper is the first credible LEO rival and is rolling out commercially market by market, but published consumer pricing remains limited and inconsistent between regions; when it firms up it will be the biggest single variable on this page, and our Amazon Kuiper vs Starlink explainer tracks where it stands. Eutelsat OneWeb sells through partners to business, maritime and government customers on quotation and has no household product, so a residential price column for it would be fiction.

The practical hierarchy for a rural household is straightforward. If fibre or cable reaches you, take it. If fixed-wireless 5G reaches you with a decent signal, it will usually beat satellite on both price and total cost of ownership. Failing both, Starlink is the default satellite choice, because 25–60 ms makes video calls and gaming workable while 600 ms-plus simply does not, whatever download figure sits beside it. HughesNet and Viasat remain relevant in three narrow cases: where a Starlink cell is sold out, where their entry price meaningfully undercuts Starlink for a genuinely light user, or where an existing contract still has time to run.

Which plan should you choose?

• One or two people, email, streaming, occasional calls: entry Residential at $55 — the best off-peak value Starlink sells. Upgrade only if your evenings genuinely degrade, and measure before you pay.
• Family of four, remote work, multiple streams: the $80 mid tier, where peak-hour cost per usable megabit bottoms out.
• Heavy household, 4K plus gaming plus uploads, or a congested urban cell: Residential Max at $130 — in a constrained cell it may also be the cheapest tier actually offered to you.
• Weekend camper: Roam 50GB at $55, dropped into Standby out of season.
• Full-time traveller or boater: Roam Unlimited at $165 with the Mini kit, and Standby for every off-season month.
• Small business or remote site with revenue on the line: Priority 1TB with the Performance kit, quoted in writing.

Three ways to cut the bill

1. Start one tier lower than you think you need. Plans are month-to-month and changeable in-app in under a minute; an unnecessary jump from entry to Max costs $900 a year.
2. Use Standby aggressively. In any month you will be away more than half the time, the $10 line beats the full subscription outright — and across a five-month season it saves $1,085.
3. Rent the hardware for year one where rental is offered. If obstruction or cell capacity turns out to be marginal, you walk away having spent $120 rather than $349, and you learn it in month two rather than month twelve.

What to watch through late 2026 and into 2027

Three pressures will shape the next price sheet. First, capacity: as higher-throughput satellites enter service, Starlink has historically loosened restrictions and reopened constrained cells before it touches headline prices — so expect menus like our Phoenix address’s to widen before any number falls. Second, competition: Kuiper reaching broad commercial service would apply the first genuine downward pressure on the $55 floor, and the geostationary incumbents would have to answer it as well. Third, regional rebalancing: Starlink discounts in markets it wants to grow and constrains cells running hot, so what you pay is increasingly a function of how busy your neighbours are.

The practical takeaway has not changed. Starlink pricing in 2026 becomes transparent once you accept three things: the menu is local even when the price list is national, “unlimited” describes volume rather than priority, and the cheapest tier paired with honest self-assessment beats the most expensive tier paired with optimism. Check your full street address, write down which tiers and hardware options it actually returns, price the alternatives — including any fixed-wireless option — at that same address, and compare the result against what your household really does online between 7pm and 10pm. That single hour is the whole decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Starlink actually cost in the first year, all in?

On the entry residential tier bought outright, budget about $1,200 for year one in the United States: $660 in subscription ($55 × 12), $349 for the Standard Kit, roughly $66 in state and regulatory taxes on the service line at a 10% effective rate, about $50 shipping and about $75 for a basic mount. Year two drops to roughly $726, because only the subscription and tax recur. Renting the kit instead changes the shape: $660 subscription plus $120 rental plus tax and shipping is about $900 in year one, but rental never stops, so the cumulative lines cross at about 35 months.

Why is my Starlink checkout price different from the price I saw quoted elsewhere?

Four mechanisms cause the gap. Starlink prices per service area rather than nationally, so two addresses in different cells can be offered different tiers. Regional promotions run and expire without announcement, including discounted or free hardware tied to a 12-month commitment. Cells at capacity simply stop offering the cheapest tier, which pushes the displayed starting price upward. And taxes, regulatory fees and shipping are added only at the payment step, adding close to 10% to the monthly line in some US states. Your checkout is always the authoritative number; any published figure, including ours, is a snapshot.

What happens to my plan and price if I move house?

Fixed residential plans are bound to a registered service address that you update in the Starlink app, and the destination cell decides what happens next. If the new cell has spare capacity, service usually resumes within minutes of the address change. If it is capacity constrained, you may be offered only the higher tiers, placed on a waitlist, or asked to switch to a mobile plan to keep working. Update the address before you move rather than after, so you find out which of those three outcomes applies while you still have options. A Roam plan avoids the problem entirely, which is why long-distance movers often toggle to Roam for the transition month.

Can I change Starlink tiers mid-cycle, and is the difference prorated?

Consumer plans are month-to-month and changeable from the Starlink app in under a minute. Upgrades generally apply immediately with a prorated charge for the remainder of the billing cycle; downgrades typically take effect at the start of the next cycle, so you keep the higher tier until the period you already paid for ends. The practical consequence is asymmetric: upgrading is cheap to test and reversible within about 30 days, so there is no reason to buy a tier speculatively. On metered Roam plans, switching tiers mid-cycle resets the high-speed allowance rather than carrying the unused portion across.

Does weather affect Starlink, and what does the snow-melt heater add to a power bill?

Heavy rain and wet snow cause brief rain-fade dropouts measured in seconds rather than the sustained outages typical of geostationary services, because the link budget at low earth orbit is far more forgiving. The bigger cost is thermal. A Standard dish draws meaningful continuous wattage, and the self-heating element that melts snow off the faceplate raises that sharply in freezing conditions. At an average 60 W the dish uses about 1.44 kWh a day, roughly $6.50 a month at $0.15/kWh — negligible on grid power, but on an off-grid solar system it represents a dedicated panel and a meaningful slice of battery capacity, which is the main argument for the lower-draw Mini.

Is the free-kit, 12-month-commitment offer worth taking?

It is worth taking only when you already know the address works. The offer removes $349 of upfront cost and replaces it with a contractual year, and the whole reason Starlink is attractive to rural buyers is that it is otherwise month-to-month with no termination penalty. Take it if you have run the obstruction scan, confirmed the cell is not capacity constrained and intend to stay put. Avoid it if you are testing feasibility, renting your home, or ordering into a cell that recently changed availability status — in those cases the $10-a-month rental costs you $120 to learn the answer and leaves you free to walk.

How many devices and simultaneous streams can one Starlink dish handle?

The bottleneck is almost never the router’s device count — the bundled Wi-Fi hardware comfortably handles a normal household’s phones, laptops, cameras and smart devices. The bottleneck is your share of cell capacity at peak hour. A 4K stream needs roughly 25 Mbps, HD about 5 Mbps and a video meeting 2–4 Mbps, so even a degraded evening throughput of 60 Mbps carries two 4K streams or a dozen calls. Problems appear above roughly 15 concurrent active users, which is the threshold at which a site should be pricing a Priority plan rather than a residential one.

Should I pick Starlink if 5G home internet also reaches my address?

Usually not. Fixed-wireless 5G home plans from T-Mobile and Verizon typically sit around $50–$70 a month with no hardware purchase and latency in the 20–50 ms band — comparable to Starlink at a lower total cost of ownership, because there is no $349 kit and no mounting. Starlink wins where the cellular signal is weak or the tower is congested, where you need the connection to travel, or where you want a second, physically independent path for redundancy. Check the 5G option at your exact address first; if it delivers a stable signal, satellite is the more expensive answer to a solved problem.