Starlink is a satellite Internet service run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Its main mission is to provide good internet coverage to rural regions and other areas that have little or no service today. SpaceX has been gradually launching satellites since 2018, and the ultimate goal is to have a constellation of tens of thousands of the cute little spacecraft in an orbit that provides service almost worldwide.
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Above: example of a Starlink user terminal installed on the roof of a building in Canada (Source: SpaceX)
Starlink currently has more than 1,000 satellites, and the service is in a semi-public beta phase. Where is service currently available, and what do early adopters say?
Ookla Speedtest (via PCMag) has created a map of current Starlink beta testers. It is estimated that the service now has more than 10,000 users, who see connection speeds up to 170 Mbps, without data capital.
So far, most of the Starlink customers are in the Northwest – Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana – with a few users in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Maine, plus a few groups around Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Starlink’s service is primarily targeted at low density regions that currently have few high speed internet service options. However, Ookla has found a significant number of users in urban and suburban areas such as Chicago, Seattle and Minneapolis.
Starlink plans to provide service in more US territories later this year.
Starlink is also now available in certain parts of the UK, and Science Focus recently published some impressions of the service of the early adopters.
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Aaron Wilkes, who lives in Kent in the south-east of England, told the PA agency that his existing British Telecom fixed-line service, which is advertised at 20 Mbps, often delivers much slower speeds, making it impractical to to stream movies at all. . With Starlink, it averages 175 Mbps and sometimes up to 215 Mbps. “The ability to download content so quickly compared to our standard BT line is incredible,” Wilkes said.
Starlink service is not cheap – UK users pay £ 439 for the hardware and a monthly fee of £ 89. In the US it is $ 99 per month plus $ 499 for the hardware. It is significantly higher than alternatives for cable or telephone businesses, but for business users in underserved areas it may be worth paying more for higher speeds.
“If you need connection to run a business and if you need communication, especially in COVID times, £ 90 a month is quite justifiable,” Martin Langmaid told PA. However, he noted that Starlink suffers from periodic outages, and that it is currently also dependent on its existing fixed line service. ‘I think a lot of people would do something similar, where they would leave their DSL at the moment and combine it with Starlink. The interruptions should eventually disappear once the coverage is in place, then I think people are starting to cancel things like DSL and 4G dongles. ”
Elon Musk recently said that Starlink plans to double the connection speed to around 300 Mbps, and to expand its coverage area for most of the earth by the end of the year and to the entire beach ball in 2022.
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Written by: Charles Morris; Sources: PCMag, Science Focus