Starlink doubled its price and Viasat is shutting off Ku. Two deadlines, one quarter.

Here is what actually changed, what it costs, and how to think about it without making a six-figure decision on two weeks of noise.

What Starlink changed

SpaceX restructured its aviation plans and raised hardware pricing at the same time. The service change takes effect with billing cycles on or after August 7, 2026, and it applies to existing customers, not just new ones. There is no grandfathering.

Read the coverage column carefully, because it is the part being under-discussed. The old Unlimited plan was one product. The new structure splits it into global and regional, and the regional tiers lock you to a single continental region. An operator who genuinely never leaves North America can now pay $12,500 instead of $20,000. An operator who crosses the Atlantic four times a year cannot.

That is the actual design of this repricing. It is not a flat increase, it is a segmentation exercise, and whether it hurts depends almost entirely on your mission profile rather than your aircraft.

What Viasat is doing

Separately, Viasat is ending Ku-band business aviation service in September 2026 and pushing those customers onto JetXP, the Ka-band product that unified the legacy Jet ConneX and Viasat Ka services after the Inmarsat acquisition. To move people along, Viasat has offered incentives of up to $140,000 per aircraft for Ku customers who transition, applied through existing Gogo Plane Simple Ka or Honeywell JetWave terminals, or the newer JetWave X.

This is a hard cutoff rather than a price change. If you are on Viasat Ku, the service is going away, and doing nothing is not one of the available options.

Why both at once matters

Individually, each of these is a vendor announcement. Together they are a market event, because they push two large and mostly separate populations into the same decision at the same time.

Starlink customers are re-running economics they thought were settled. Viasat Ku customers have a date on the calendar. Both groups are shopping in the same quarter, for the same installer capacity, from the same finite number of shops.

That last point is the one operators consistently miss. Connectivity decisions do not fail on hardware availability. They fail on hangar slots. When two populations start calling the same installers in the same eight weeks, the constraint stops being what you want and starts being who can take your aircraft, and when.

Running your own numbers

The instinct is to compare monthly rates. That is the wrong first move, because the monthly rate is the smallest lever in the decision for most operators. Work through it in this order.

1. Start with hours flown, not with price

Twenty thousand dollars a month is a number without meaning until you divide it by how much you actually fly. An owner flying 200 hours a year is paying a very different effective rate per flight hour than a charter operator flying 800. Do that division first. It reframes the entire conversation, and it is frequently the moment somebody realizes the plan tier they are on was never right.

2. Then look at where you actually fly

Pull twelve months of flight logs, not your impression of your flying. The regional tiers only make sense if the log supports them, and the failure mode here is expensive: a regional plan on an aircraft that leaves the region occasionally is a bad month waiting to happen. Conversely, plenty of owners are paying for global coverage they have not used in two years.

3. Add the cost of the decision itself

Switching systems is not just a subscription line. It is hardware, an installation, an approval path, downtime, and a removal. If you are contemplating moving off Starlink because the monthly doubled, the switching cost has to be amortized against the monthly difference before the comparison means anything, and on a large-cabin aircraft that math frequently favors staying put even at the higher rate.

4. Count downtime as money

Installation downtime clusters in two bands. Shops running efficient single-type programs report roughly 10 to 14 days. Shops covering a broader range of large-cabin airframes report 15 to 25 days depending on the aircraft. Whatever your operation values a day of unavailability at, multiply it. For many operators that number rivals the hardware.

And there is a way to avoid paying it twice, which we wrote about separately: if an inspection is already coming due, the installation can frequently be absorbed into that event, converting most of the downtime from incremental to concurrent. That sequencing question is worth more than any plan tier.

5. Only then compare systems

Once you know your hours, your geography, your switching cost, and your downtime exposure, the system comparison becomes tractable. Before you know those things, it is just spec sheets. We broke down how Starlink, Gogo Galileo, and Viasat JetXP actually differ here.

The question nobody is asking their dealer

One structural fact explains a great deal about how this repricing happened, and it is worth understanding before you pick up the phone.

SpaceX owns the constellation, the terminal, the network, and the customer relationship. Dealers install; they do not set service pricing. So when the price changed, there was no distributor in the chain to absorb it, negotiate it, or soften it. Compare that to Gogo, which resells capacity across other people's constellations and owns the distribution and service relationship instead, or Viasat, which owns its satellites but does not sell direct at all.

None of that makes any one of them the right answer. It does explain why your dealer cannot help you on the Starlink number, and it is worth knowing whether the system you are choosing has a counterparty you can talk to the next time pricing moves.

What we would do in the next two weeks

1. Confirm what you are actually being charged from August 7. Ask your dealer in writing which plan your aircraft moves to and what the billing cycle date is. Do not assume the plan name maps cleanly to the old one, because the names changed.
2. Pull the twelve-month flight log and answer the regional versus global question with data rather than instinct.
3. If you are on Viasat Ku, start now. September is not far, the incentive has conditions worth reading, and installer capacity is being consumed by the other population as you read this.
4. Check your due list before scheduling any installation. If an inspection lands within a few months, sequencing them together is usually the single largest saving available.
5. Get more than one quote. Comparable scope on comparable airframes does not produce comparable quotes, and this is the quarter when shops know demand is high.

Where we come in

We are not a repair station and we do not perform installations. What we do is take your aircraft and your requirement, confirm the current approved installation route for your make, model, and serial, write one scope, and put that identical scope in front of qualified installers so the numbers coming back describe the same job. You compare price, downtime, and the first real slot date side by side, then deal directly with the shop you choose.

In a quarter where two populations are competing for the same hangar capacity, the slot date is frequently worth more than the price. It is also the number shops are least likely to volunteer.

Request competing installation quotes, or read more about how the process works.

Sources: Corporate Jet Investor, "Starlink doubles business aviation prices, adds regional locking." TechSpot, "Starlink just doubled its prices for private jets, and hardware now costs $200,000." Private Jet Card Comparisons, "Here's how Starlink price increases will impact private jet flyers." Viasat, "Viasat launches incentives to support business aviation customers transitioning to next-generation in-flight connectivity." Aerospace Global News, "Viasat offers $140K upgrade incentive to business jet operators." Pricing and plan structure as of July 25, 2026.

Virtual Hangar is not a repair station and does not perform installations. We scope the work, run the competition, and coordinate the event. The installation is performed by the certificated facility you select, and your agreement is with them.