Starlink Dish Comparison 2026

Starlink's hardware page shows four dishes stacked next to each other with price tags and a paragraph of marketing copy. What it doesn't tell you is which one is engineered for your situation, where each dish quietly fails, and how the upgrade path actually looks when your needs change. A family that buys the Mini for an RV trip and then moves into a rural farmhouse doesn't need to start from scratch — but they do need to know which dish to buy next and when. That decision is what this guide is built around.

If you already know the plan side of the equation and just want hardware sized against your specific situation, our plan picker pairs each plan with its compatible dishes. Otherwise, read on for the full four-dish deep dive.

All four dishes at a glance

Before diving into any single dish, put the full spec sheet on one page. The gaps jump out immediately: the Mini is a quarter of the Maritime's weight, and the HP draws three times as much power as the Mini at peak.

Gen 3 Standard — the 80% answer

The Gen 3 Standard is what four out of five Starlink customers end up buying, and for good reason. At $599 it hits the price-to-performance sweet spot: 19×11×3 inches, 4.2kg, 75W average draw, and real-world speeds that hover in the 150-250 Mbpsband once a service address is dialled in. Compared to the outgoing Gen 2 dish, the phased-array electronics are faster to boot, the antenna has no motor (quieter, fewer failure points), and the mounting options have multiplied — ridge, eave, chimney, pivot, and ground pole all work out of the box.

Installation is the other thing that separates Standard from everything else. The box ships with 75 feet of included cable, a basic mount, and a Gen 3 router that handles most home meshes without a third-party add-on. A competent DIYer has the dish on the roof and active in under two hours. Power-wise it runs through a 120V AC wall brick that outputs 48V DC to the dish, which matters if you're planning any off-grid use — see our off-grid power sizer for the DC-direct bypass. Who it's for: rural homes, suburban dead zones, cabins with shore power, family households of up to six heavy users, and any Residential-plan subscriber.

One detail the product page glosses over: the 45W idle figure. Even with no one streaming and no devices connected, the Standard dish burns 45 continuous watts to maintain satellite handoffs and keep the phased-array electronics warm. Over a full month that's about 32 kWh, or $4-5 at US utility rates — negligible on the grid, but a real factor if you're sizing batteries. It's also the reason Starlink doesn't ship a sleep mode; the cold-boot time (90 seconds plus satellite reacquisition) would break any always-on use case. The dish's thermal management is passive above 40°F, with an automatic heater kicking in below freezing — useful for snow shedding, but it can push cold-weather draw briefly toward the 95W peak figure.

Mini — the travel-first rewrite

The Mini is the most interesting dish Starlink has ever shipped, and it's the one that most fundamentally changes who can use satellite internet. At 11×9×1 inches and just 1.1kg, it fits in a laptop sleeve. The built-in WiFi router means there's no second box to wire up: one DC cable in, WiFi out, done. Power draw averages 45W — low enough that a 100Ah LiFePO₄ battery can run it for a full day without solar input. Speeds land in the 100-200 Mbps range, roughly 30% below Standard but more than enough for streaming, video calls and everything short of 8K editing.

The tradeoffs are real but survivable. The Mini's smaller aperture is less forgiving of partial sky obstruction — a single cottonwood tree at 30° elevation that Standard would punch through will cost you 10-20% of throughput on the Mini. It's also physically flimsier; the plastic housing is travel-rated but not suited for permanent outdoor mounting under winter ice loads. On the plus side, the Mini is the only dish that accepts 12V DC input without a buck converter, making it the no-brainer choice for van, boat and backpack use. To see whether it pairs with your plan at all, run our plan picker — the Mini works with Roam Regional, Roam Global and Mini Roam plans but not with Priority or Maritime.

The Mini's best-kept secret is its thermal behaviour. Because the aperture is smaller and the antenna electronics run cooler, the dish can sit in full desert sun at 110°F without throttling — something the Standard dish will do briefly around 115°F ambient. That makes the Mini genuinely viable for Southwest US and Australian Outback use where the Standard occasionally has a rough afternoon. On the other end, the Mini's self-heating is weaker, so in sustained sub-freezing conditions you may see slower initial link-up and occasional drops until the array reaches operating temperature. The dish is IP67-rated — submerge-proof for brief periods, which is mostly a way of saying it shrugs off heavy rain and wave spray without incident. For full-time RV and boat owners, those two datapoints matter more than the raw speed numbers on the box.

High Performance — the business-grade option

At $2,500 the High Performance dish is four times the price of Standard, and on a spec sheet the jump is real: 35% larger aperture, a rated wind load of 110 mph (vs 60 mph on Standard), thermal tolerance down to -22°F, and peak speeds that consistently land in the 250-400+ Mbpsband. It has integrated Ethernet, a commercial-grade mount, and a 100-foot weatherproof cable as standard. The phased-array electronics inside are the same generation as Standard, but the antenna itself is physically bigger — which directly translates to better performance in marginal conditions, more concurrent streams, and longer satellite lock during storms.

Power consumption is the honest tax: 140W average, 180W peak, 90W idle. That's nearly twice what Standard draws and three times the Mini. It adds about $14/month to an off-grid electricity budget at US utility rates, and it rules the HP out for most solar-first installations unless you're willing to size a 1.5kW+ array. Before you commit to this dish, run the full ownership cost through our 5-year TCO calculator — the $1,900 hardware premium plus the Priority plan requirement usually pushes 5-year total cost north of $32,000. Who it's for: medical clinics, small schools, rural construction sites, fleet yards, and anyone whose business loses more than $50 in a day of downtime.

There's a second, quieter reason the HP dish exists: concurrent users. The Standard dish handles roughly 15-20 simultaneous active connections before the built-in router becomes the bottleneck; the HP's dedicated Ethernet feed can push well past 50 concurrent sessions when paired with a proper commercial router. That's why clinics and co-working spaces keep picking it over Standard even when total bandwidth would be theoretically adequate. The hardware also carries an IP56 rating and a published MTBF of over 50,000 hours — genuinely commercial-grade, and the kind of number that matters when your insurance underwriter asks about equipment reliability. One last note: the HP's Ethernet port is PoE-compatible, which lets you run 100+ feet of CAT6 without a local power drop at the antenna.

Maritime — the open-ocean specialist

The Maritime dish is the weirdest and most specialised unit in the Starlink lineup. At $10,000 for hardware and $5,000/month for service, it exists for exactly one customer: commercial ocean operations. The 23-inch square antenna is rated for 30+ Gs of impact, salt fog, continuous 60-mph wind, and ambient temperatures from -40°F to 131°F. It tracks satellites pole-to-pole — the only dish in the lineup that holds signal above 70° latitude, which matters for shipping lanes crossing the Arctic and for research vessels working the Southern Ocean.

Speeds land in the 220-350 Mbpsrange, actually lower than the land-based HP dish, because the Maritime unit is tuned for signal stability under vessel motion rather than peak throughput. It draws 180W average with a 220W peak, enough that marine installations typically wire it directly into the house battery bank via a dedicated DC feed. Commercial crews love it; nobody else should buy it. If you're a weekend sailor asking whether Maritime is right for you, the answer is no — see our full plan comparison for the recreational boating path, which lands on Roam Global plus Standard every time.

What you're actually paying for with Maritime is certification and redundancy the land dishes can't match. The antenna is vibration-rated to marine standards, the cable terminations are sealed against salt intrusion, and the internal gyro compensates for pitch and roll up to 25 degrees without losing lock. The service contract also includes guaranteed satellite prioritisation, 24/7 commercial support, and insurance against data-loss events — things a leisure sailor does not need and cannot justify. Recreational boaters who go Maritime almost always regret it within six months once they see the bill. If you want the full boat-specific breakdown, we keep a dedicated guide that walks through Roam Global vs Maritime with real decision criteria, and it consistently lands the same way: unless your hull is insured for more than $2M, you are not the Maritime buyer.

Upgrade paths: Mini → Standard → HP

Most Starlink owners don't buy their final dish on day one. They buy the one that fits today's situation, then upgrade as usage changes. The good news is Starlink makes this genuinely easy — no activation fee, no plan reset, no cable regauging. The key is knowing which signal tells you it's time to move up.

The most common upgrade path is Mini to Standard, usually triggered when a traveller decides to put down roots. The old Mini gets reassigned as a second-line travel dish or sold on the secondary market for about two-thirds of MSRP. The second most common is Standard to HP, which almost always comes with a plan change from Residential to Priority — the HP is fundamentally a business dish and the Priority plan is where it earns its keep.

The "which dish should I buy?" decision matrix

Strip away the marketing and the decision collapses into a two-column lookup. Match your user type to the recommendation, then sanity-check it against the spec table above. If the two disagree, trust the use case — specs are easy to over-index on when the actual bottleneck is mobility or mount location.

Two edge cases worth flagging. First, if you're on the fence between Mini and Standard for home use, buy Standard — the Mini's smaller aperture costs you roughly 25% of peak throughput and you'll feel it during busy evenings. Second, if you're between Standard and HP for a home office, start with Standard and upgrade only if you actually hit congestion — the HP rewards heavy concurrent use, not solo work-from-home. To validate your real speeds after installation, bookmark our speed test and run it at peak hours for a week before judging.

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