For a few days this week the fastest internet connection in Dhaka was at a trade-show stall. At the Bangladesh Investment Summit in the InterContinental hotel, the Bangladesh Satellite Company Limited put a Starlink terminal on its stand and a QR code beside it, and anyone who scanned it could use satellite broadband — the first time the service has been switched on in the country.
What the test showed
Zahidur Rabbi, who tried it on his phone, told Prothom Alo that fast.com measured between 170 and 220 Mbps while roughly 45 people were connected at the same time. That is a single household terminal, shared by a crowd, and still faster than most fibre packages sold in the capital. The connection was routed through Starlink’s Malaysian gateway rather than local infrastructure, which is how the company serves a country before it has ground stations there. Coverage was available across the summit venue, and the receiver, router and mounting hardware were on display.
What it did not show
Zarif Faiyaz, a technology professional at the summit, put the missing piece plainly: nobody at the stall could say when the service would be available to homes, or what it would cost. Those are the two questions that matter, and they are not yet settled. What is settled is the paperwork. Starlink received investment registration from the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority on 29 March, with 90 working days to begin operations, and the government has said it wants the service running quickly.
A guess at the price
The nearest comparison is Bhutan, where Starlink launched earlier this year: residential service costs Nu 4,200 a month, about Tk 5,800, plus the hardware kit, which sells for a few hundred dollars in most markets. That is ten times the price of a typical Dhaka broadband line and comparable to a small office’s dedicated connection. Starlink will not be a mass consumer product in Bangladesh at those numbers. It will be a product for the places fibre never reached — the haor basins, the hill districts, the chars, offshore vessels — and for organisations that need a link that no local operator, and no local shutdown order, can switch off.
