Update, October 2026 — This article ended on the two questions nobody at the stall could answer: when the service would reach homes, and what it would cost. Both now have answers, and the second one turned out to matter far more than the speed test. The answers are below the original article.
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.
The two answers
When. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission granted Starlink its operating licence on 29 April 2025, and the service launched officially on 18 July 2025 — inside the 90-working-day window this article describes. BTRC built an entirely new non-geostationary orbit licensing framework to do it, in a matter of weeks.
How much. Two residential plans: Starlink Residential at Tk6,000 a month and Residential Lite at Tk4,200, both with unlimited data and speeds up to 300 Mbps. And a one-time hardware and installation charge of Tk47,000.
Ground infrastructure did follow, contrary to the Malaysian-gateway arrangement described above: facilities at Hi-Tech City in Kaliakoir, Gazipur, with further sites at Rajshahi and Jashore.
Why the price answer settles the question the speed test raised
The trial recorded 170 to 220 Mbps with 45 people sharing one terminal, which was genuinely impressive and, it turns out, beside the point.
Reporting since has found the service among the most responsive in the Asia-Pacific region and simultaneously out of reach for ordinary households. Both things are true because they are the same fact: the capacity that makes a satellite link fast is expensive, is not shared with a dense local network, and has to be paid for by whoever is on it.
The Tk47,000 entry cost is the figure that decides who the product is for. A monthly fee can be weighed against a fibre package; a one-time payment of that size is a different category of decision, and it arrives before any service does.
What it is actually for
Read the pricing as a description of the intended customer rather than as a failure to be cheap, and the product makes sense.
Satellite broadband is not competing with urban fibre and was never going to. Where it wins is where fibre does not reach and cannot be justified — remote installations, offshore and riverine work, disaster response when terrestrial links are down, and organisations that need a connection independent of the local network entirely. For those uses Tk47,000 is a modest capital cost.
For a household in a city already served by fibre at a fraction of the price, it is not a competitive offer, and the company has not pretended otherwise.
What changed the picture again
In September 2026, Banglalink received BTRC approval for a limited Starlink Direct-to-Cell service. That is a materially different proposition from the one in this article: no terminal, no installation fee, no dish — an ordinary handset connecting to a satellite where there is no tower.
The capability is narrow at this stage, and nothing about it makes satellite a replacement for mobile coverage. But it removes the Tk47,000 barrier entirely, which is the thing that put the service described above out of most people's reach — and it is the development worth following rather than the speed figures.
