After pictures of a new and mysterious Starlink Mini dish with integrated router emerged, Elon Musk confirmed its existence and said that it will cost just "about half the price of the standard dish to buy."

Elon even bragged that he is currently posting from the Starlink Mini dish that fits in a backpack, and took only 5 minutes to set up.

Starlink Mini dish price and release date

• $299
• July/August 2024

The half-price blurb means that the Starlink Mini dish kit price will be set around the $299 mark, considering that the current Starlink Standard Kit with a standalone router costs $599.

This $299 Starlink Mini dish set price could bring much wider Starlink satellite Internet adoption, and increase the number of subscribers on the run-up to an eventual IPO.

"This product will change the world," opined Elon Musk in his typical flamboyant style, while saying that Starlink Mini will be available in select places a few months from now.

The engineer who leaked the Starlink Mini dish specs, however, says that it will be launched in a month or two, so it could arrive as early as July or August.

Elon Musk posted an Internet speed test of his Starlink Mini dish with 100 Mbps downloads, but the other important piece of info in the screenshot was the very low latency of 23 ms.

Since such latency numbers are better than the ping of plenty of land Internet connections, Elon advised that the Starlink Mini dish can even be used as a cheap backup to an existing cable Internet subscription.

Starlink Mini specs

The proverbial "fits in a backpack" phrase is valid for the Starlink Mini dish, whose 11.4-inch x 9.8-inch dimensions make it way more compact to carry than the current 23.4-inch x 15.07-inch Starlink dish.

Mum's the word on the exact Starlink Mini dish weight with the integrated router, but the inside is basically just a motherboard and power/connector ports, so it should be much lighter, too.

Starlink Mini supports the fast 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6 standard, with operation over the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, as well as 3x3 MIMO. Elon Musk says that the backpack-fitting Starlink Mini dish supports multiple simultaneous 4K video streams.

The FCC lists the Starlink Mini connectivity as provided by MediaTek's affordable MT7629 Wi-Fi SoC, as well as its MT7762/61 chips with internal power amplifiers.

This AC1900 platform is basically what is found inside the popular TP-Link Archer C9 gaming router, and might be one of the ways SpaceX achieved the low Starlink Mini dish price.