SpaceX will double Starlink’s Internet speed later this year

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says the company’s Starlink satellite Internet service will “double” customers’ speeds “by the end of this year,” as it continues to build the global consumer network.

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

Latency is the amount of delay in an Internet network, which defines the time it takes for a signal to travel back and forth from a destination. Latency and download speeds are key measures for an Internet service provider.

In a subsequent tweet, Musk added that Starlink will reach customers on “most” of the Earth by the end of 2021 and expects to have full global coverage “for next year.”

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

“Mobile will always have the edge in dense urban areas,” Musk said.

So far SpaceX has launched more than 1,000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began implementing the early service in a public release for customers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with a service priced at $ 99 per month, plus an initial cost of $ 499 for the hardware needed to connect to the network.

Recently, the company expanded the scope of this public beta, allowing potential users to place orders for the Starlink service. SpaceX, in a statement to 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 the FCC filing that the Starlink service “meets and exceeds 100/20 megabits per second (” Mbps “) of performance to individual users,” while most users saw latency “at 31 milliseconds or below “.

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