SpaceX will double Starlink’s internet speed later this year

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company’s Starlink satellite internet service “will double” speed for customers “later this year” as it continues to build the global consumer network.

“The speed will double to ~ 300 Mb / s and the latency will drop to ~ 20 ms later this year,” said Musk in a tweet on Monday, responding to a user who showed speed tests between 77 and 130 Mbps.

Latency is the amount of delay on an Internet network, defining how long it takes for a signal to travel back and forth from a destination. Latency and download speeds are important measures for an Internet service provider.

In a tweet to follow, Musk added that Starlink will reach customers in “large parts” of the Earth by the end of 2021 and expects to have complete global coverage “next year”.

He emphasized that Starlink, like other broadband satellite services, is intended for customers in “areas of low to medium population density”.

“Cell phones will always have an advantage in dense urban areas,” said Musk.

To date, SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began launching the initial service in a public beta for customers in the US, Canada and the United Kingdom – with service priced at $ 99 per month, plus an initial cost of $ 499 for the hardware needed to connect to the network.

The company recently expanded the scope of this public beta, allowing potential users to pre-order the Starlink service. SpaceX, in a document with the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month, revealed that Starlink has “more than 10,000 users in the United States and abroad”, in just over three months since the public beta began.

SpaceX noted in that FCC document that the Starlink service is “reaching and exceeding 100/20 megabits per second (” Mbps “) throughput for individual users,” while most users were seeing latency “of 31 milliseconds or any less.

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