SpaceX will double Starlink’s internet speed later this year

A Starlink user terminal installed on the roof of a building in Canada.

SpaceX

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

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

Latency is the amount of delay in an internet network, which determines how much time it takes to travel back and forth from a destination. Latency and download speed are the most important metric for an internet service provider.

In a subsequent tweet, Musk adds that Starlink will reach customers on most of the planet by the end of 2021, and he expects to have full global coverage by next year.

He stressed that Starlink, like other satellite broadband services, is intended for customers in a low to medium population density area.

“Cellular will always have the advantage in dense urban areas,” Musk said.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Inc., arrives at the Axel Springer Awards in Berlin, Germany, on Tuesday, December 1, 2020.

Liesa Johannssen-Koppitz | Bloomberg | Getty Images

To date, SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began implementing early public beta service to customers in the US, Canada and the UK – at a cost of $ 99 per month, plus an upfront cost of $ 499 for the hardware required be to connect to the network.

The company recently expanded the scope of the public beta, enabling prospective users to place pre-orders for Starlink services. SpaceX, which was submitted to the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month, announced 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 that the FCC has argued that Starlink’s service is ‘throughput and involves more than 100/20 megabits per second (‘ Mbps ‘) throughput to individual users,’ while most users ‘delay’ at ‘or less than 31 milliseconds’ see.

SpaceX uses 60 Starlink satellites in orbit.

SpaceX

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