The CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has revealed that the on-going expansion of Starlink‘s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based broadband satellites will, by the end of this year, push customer download speeds up to around 300Mbps and bring network latency down to around 20ms (milliseconds). A cheaper budget package is also planned.
At present SpaceX has already launched well over 1,000 LEOs into orbit (space) around the earth and their initial ambition is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024, which could potentially be followed by up to 12,000 at a later date (possibly late 2026). The service has already gone live in the USA, Canada, UK and is now extending into other parts of Europe, albeit mostly still in the beta phase but you can also pre-order it.
The LEOs sit at a very low altitude and can thus deliver fast latency times (Starlink states a range of 20-40ms – roughly akin to FTTC lines), as well as downloads of between 50-150Mbps and uploads of c.20Mbps. All with unlimited data usage. So far this has been proven by the on-going beta test, albeit without much network congestion for customers to worry about (yet) and some service outages (due to be fixed as the network grows).
The catch is that you need lots of LEOs to deliver good performance and coverage, which makes the network very expensive to deploy and thus the beta service costs £89 per month, plus £54 for shipping and £439 for the kit. But the good news is that Elon Musk now expects some positive price and performance changes to come by the end of 2021.
Musk told Twitter yesterday that he expects customer speeds will “double to ~300Mb/s” and latency will “drop to ~20ms” later this year. The company’s CEO added that he expected most of the world to be covered by the end of 2021 (commercial launch) and after that the focus would be on densification (i.e. adding more satellites boosts speeds and reliability).
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, added:
“[Starlink will cover] most of Earth by end of year, all by next year, then it’s about densifying coverage.
Important to note that cellular [mobile] will always have the advantage in dense urban areas. Satellites are best for low to medium population density areas.”
Meanwhile Starlink has also petitioned the FCC for the ability to offer an extremely cheap budget package for those on lower incomes, which could cost just $9.25 (£6.60) per month for broadband or $5.25 (£3.70) per month for a phone-only (VoIP) service. But crucially there’s no mention of what usage allowances or service speeds would apply to this (you can bet on some restrictions at that price). The cost of hardware is another issue.
Overall, it’s another positive development for Starlink, but the real test – both economically speaking and in performance terms – will be in how the network copes when placed under the demands of a million customers or more. But of course, Starlink has already talked about developing a 10Gbps (per user) capable service in the future (here), so they clearly intend to adapt.
At this point it’s worth considering that, assuming Starlink is successful in its business model (too early to tell), then their service may also place some competitive pressures on alternative fixed line fibre network builds in rural areas. But much of that may depend upon whether or not the monthly cost stays high or comes down in the future, as at present £89 would be considered too expensive by many UK users.
