Starlink’s broadband speeds will double to 300 Mbps “later this year,” said Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX wrote on Twitter yesterday. SpaceX has been telling users to expect speeds from 50 Mbps to 150 Mbps since the beta began a few months ago.
Musk also wrote that “latency will drop to ~ 20 ms later this year.” This is not surprising, as SpaceX promised latency of 20 ms to 40 ms during the beta and had said months ago that “we expect to reach 16 ms to 19 ms in the summer of 2021.”
It looks like speed and latency improvements will be implemented at the same time as Starlink moves from beta to broader availability. Two weeks ago, Starlink opened pre-sales for the service that is expected to be available in the second half of 2021, although with limited availability in each region.
Global coverage, but low density
Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday this Starlink will be available for “most of the Earth” at the end of 2021 and for the entire planet next year. But even so, the number of slots available to users would be limited in each geographic region.
Musk wrote that “densifying coverage” is the next step after Starlink is technically available across the globe. “It is important to note that cell phones will always have the advantage in dense urban areas. Satellites are best for areas of low to medium population density, ”he wrote.
This is consistent with Musk’s statement last year that Starlink will have limited availability in major cities like Los Angeles “because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough” and that “Starlink will serve the most difficult customers to note that telcos would have trouble doing with landlines or even … cell towers. “In the United States, Internet users who currently rely on DSL or traditional geostationary satellite service would benefit most from orbit satellites Starlink’s low landline.
SpaceX has provisionally received $ 885.51 million in funding from the Federal Communications Commission over 10 years to bring Starlink to 642,925 homes and businesses in 35 states. Rival ISPs have tried to block funding, claiming that SpaceX will not be able to provide the 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds required by the FCC program.
SpaceX told the FCC that it has more than 10,000 users in the United States and abroad so far and is already providing the necessary speeds and “95 percent performance of network round-trip latency measurements at or below 31 milliseconds. ” In another FCC document, SpaceX said that Starlink will eventually reach download speeds of 10 Gbps.
Starlink has recently become available in the UK.