Starlink does not yet cover Bangladesh, and for the past month it has been the most talked-about internet service in the country anyway. The interim government has been in direct contact with SpaceX to bring the satellite service in quickly — the press secretary has framed it as a way to make internet shutdowns impossible — and the chief adviser has invited Elon Musk to visit. Before any of that becomes a dish on a rooftop in Rangamati, look at how the rest of the world has dealt with the same company.
What Starlink is
SpaceX operates thousands of small satellites in low orbit. A user buys a flat antenna, points it at the sky, and gets broadband anywhere with a view of it — a hill village, a fishing boat, a char in the Jamuna. There is no cable and no local tower. The company emphasises encryption and user privacy, and, crucially, it works across borders: the satellites do not care which country is underneath them. Governments do.
The licence always comes first
Starlink can technically serve any territory, but it only switches a country on once the national telecom regulator has granted a licence and the company has agreed to local law and taxes. The record is mixed:
- India took pre-orders in 2021, was forced by the government to refund them, and has still not been approved; a commercial licence from the Department of Telecommunications is pending and Reliance is positioned as the domestic rival.
- China bans Starlink outright and is building its own constellation. Russia permits no official use (though smuggled terminals appeared in the Ukraine war), and Iran and North Korea have none.
- France suspended the service in 2022 after a court case over environmental review, then restored it. Turkey hesitated, then reconsidered because of the value of independent communications. Italy is now planning its own government satellites to reduce reliance on a private foreign network.
- Brazil and Mexico allowed it after Starlink agreed to comply with national internet policy.
What Bangladesh should negotiate
Omar Shehab, a theoretical quantum computer scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, told Prothom Alo that Bangladesh’s internet market is open, that Starlink would be an alternative to the neighbourhood-level ISPs most homes depend on, and that the government has real leverage on price and service standards if it uses it. Remote districts would come inside a network for the first time. BTRC did not respond to questions.
Why "shutdown-proof" depends on where the traffic lands
The press secretary's framing — that Starlink would make internet shutdowns impossible — is testable, and the answer is not a property of satellites. It is a licence term.
A Starlink terminal does not send data to orbit and have it fall out of the sky at its destination. The traffic reaches a ground station, called a gateway, and joins the ordinary internet there. Where that gateway sits is the whole question. Newer satellites can also relay between themselves by laser link, which means traffic from Bangladesh could in principle reach a gateway in another country without touching Bangladeshi soil.
Those two arrangements have opposite political properties, and a regulator has to choose one.
Require the gateway to be inside the country, as most licensing regimes do, and the service becomes lawful-interception capable and taxable — and switchable off, by the same instruction that switches off everything else. Allow foreign routing and the service genuinely does survive a domestic shutdown, at the cost of a regulator who cannot see or stop any of it, which is the arrangement almost no government grants.
So "licensed in Bangladesh" and "immune to a Bangladeshi shutdown" pull in opposite directions. The licence terms, not the technology, will decide which one the country gets — and those terms are the thing to read when they are published.
What it costs elsewhere
Prices vary by country and even by US state. A typical American residential plan is $120 a month with a $349 hardware kit — antenna, stand, Gen 3 router, cables and power supply, about 3.2 kg in the box. Maritime service at 220 Mbps runs $250 a month plus equipment. If Bangladesh gets similar pricing, Starlink will not replace a Tk 500 broadband line in Mirpur; it will replace nothing at all in places that currently have nothing at all — and that is the point.
