SpaceX’s Starlink starts taking orders in Vietnam, on Hanoi’s terms

SpaceX’s Starlink has begun taking orders for its satellite-internet service in Vietnam, opening one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing markets to Elon Musk’s orbital broadband.

It is a notable win for a business that has become SpaceX’s cash machine, though this time the company is arriving very much on Hanoi’s terms.

The sums involved are not trivial. A monthly subscription costs VND1.71m, or roughly $65, while the Standard 4X equipment kit runs to VND10.27m, about $390.

Add shipping of around $22 and an upfront deposit of some $70 that is later applied to the kit, and a first-year outlay lands near VND31.4m, or approximately $1,190. This is a premium proposition rather than a mass-market one.

For that money, Starlink promises download speeds of 135 to 305 Mbps and uploads of 20 to 40 Mbps, while hedging, as it always does, that the figures vary by location, network density and weather.

In practice, that still puts it comfortably ahead of the patchy or non-existent connections it is meant to replace. The performance is beside the point for most likely buyers, who care less about peak throughput than about having any reliable signal at all.

The service operates under a five-year pilot programme, approved by Vietnam and running until 1 January 2031. The framework is unusually accommodating in one respect and pointedly restrictive in another.

It lets SpaceX keep 100% local ownership, a rare concession in a tightly controlled telecoms sector, but caps the number of subscribers at 600,000, ensuring the venture never grows large enough to unsettle the domestic order.

Hanoi is policing the hardware, too. Authorities require that only officially distributed equipment be used, and have warned against imported devices, which carry the risk of fines or confiscation.

Grey-market Starlink dishes have quietly proliferated across parts of Asia, and Vietnam is signalling that it wants the service on the books, taxed and traceable, rather than smuggled in through the back door. The message is clear enough: Starlink is welcome, provided the state can see exactly who is using it and how.

On price, Vietnam sits towards the pricier end of the neighbourhood. At around $1,190 a year, it is roughly 12% above the global average of about $1,061, and dearer than Malaysia at some $909 or the Philippines at $1,045.

It remains cheaper than Indonesia, where a year costs about $1,491, so the premium, while real, is hardly extortionate by regional standards.

Crucially, Starlink is not chasing the city dwellers already served by fibre. Its pitch is aimed at the underserved: rural areas, remote islands, fishing vessels, construction sites and farms, the sort of places where a dish pointed at the sky beats waiting for cables that may never come.

It is the same gap the company fills from Africa to the American Midwest, and the same one rivals such as Amazon are only now scrambling to reach.

Vietnam formally licensed Starlink earlier in 2026, after clearing the foreign-ownership rules that had long kept it out, a move made easier by the broader climate of US trade considerations.

The timing is not incidental. Satellite broadband has quietly become another bargaining chip in the choreography between Washington and its trading partners, and Hanoi, keen to keep its export relationship with the US on an even keel, has read the room.

Letting an American firm operate freely, but on a tight leash, is the sort of compromise that keeps everyone at the table.

For SpaceX, Vietnam is another dot on a map that keeps expanding, from its recent round of price rises to markets where state-backed challengers are still finding their feet.

For Vietnam, it is a calculated bet that it can import American connectivity without importing American dependence. Both sides, for the moment at least, appear content to call that a fair trade.