Starlink broadband speeds will double to 300 Mbps later this year, “said Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX wrote on Twitter yesterday. SpaceX has told 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 no surprise, because SpaceX promised a delay of 20 ms to 40 ms during the beta and said months ago that ‘we expect to reach 16 to 19 ms by the summer of 2021.’
It sounds like the speed and latency improvements will roll out at about the same time as when Starlink switches from beta to more availability. Two weeks ago, Starlink opened pre-orders for service that is expected to be available in the second half of 2021, although there was limited availability in each region.
Global coverage but low density
Musk wrote in another tweet yesterday that Starlink will be available for most of the earth by the end of 2021 and the entire planet by next year. But even then, the number of slots available to users in each geographic region is limited.
Musk wrote that ‘densification of coverage’ is the next step after Starlink was technically available across the planet. “It is important to note that cellular devices will always have the advantage in dense urban areas. Satellites are best for low to medium population density areas,” he wrote.
This is in line with Musk’s statement last year that Starlink will have limited availability in large cities such as Los Angeles’ because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough ‘and that’ Starlink will serve the most difficult customers that the telecommunications company would otherwise struggle to do. with landlines or even with … cell towers. ‘In the US, Internet users who currently have to rely on DSL or traditional geostationary satellite service will benefit most from Starlink’s low – Earth orbit satellites.
For more than ten years, SpaceX has been awarded $ 885.51 million in the Federal Communications Commission to bring Starlink to 642,925 homes and businesses in 35 states. Competitive ISPs have tried to block the funding, claiming that SpaceX will not be able to deliver the download speeds of 100 Mbps and 20 Mbps required by the FCC program.
SpaceX has told the FCC that it has more than 10,000 users in the US and abroad so far and that it already delivers the required speeds and performance of 95 percent of the network return latency measurements at or below 31 milliseconds. ‘ In another FCC filing, SpaceX said Starlink would eventually reach 10Gbps download speeds.
Starlink recently became available in the UK.