Starlink Promises Gigabit Speeds for $2,000 Performance Gen 3 Maritime Dish

Starlink will double peak download speeds for maritime customers using its $2,000 Performance Gen 3 terminal by the end of December, bringing shipboard throughput close to 1 Gbps.

The speed increase was revealed in a message Starlink sent to enterprise customers Thursday morning. The company said maritime users on Performance Gen 3 hardware will receive doubled throughput by the end of 2026, while business customers on land will see the same improvement in 2027. Tim Belfall, a director at UK-based Starlink installer Westend WiFi, shared the message publicly and noted that there was no update on upload speeds.

The expected increase lines up with Starlink’s published specifications. The company’s support page lists the Performance Gen 3 kit with peak throughput of 475 Mbps downloads and 75 Mbps uploads. Doubling the download capacity would bring speeds to around 950 Mbps. Starlink’s business page already advertises “Gigabit speeds available in 2026.”

SpaceX plans to launch the first 26 V3 satellites aboard Starship Flight 14 on Monday, September 28, and the Gen3 satellites are expected to significantly expand network capacity.

For maritime customers, the speed boost follows Starlink’s August launch of a $185 Personal Maritime plan designed for small boats. The same enterprise message also said Local Priority and Global Priority will be renamed the Business Plan and Global Business Plan on December 1, along with UK price increases and static IP addresses for large deployments. Business plans will also be limited to 30 days of use outside their home region, pushing longer stints to the costlier Global Business tier.

“This is obviously dependent on the new V3 satellites being successfully launched at pace,” Belfall wrote.