Customers of SpaceX’s popular Starlink ultrafast broadband service, which harnesses a mega constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and is already home to 1 million subscribers, may like to know that it’s slowly adding a new ‘Sleep Schedule‘ feature to help save electricity.
As the name suggests, this feature simply allows customers to define a time period for when the system will go into a sleep (i.e. pausing its internet service and disabling other features, such as heating to melt snow). In effect, this is a kind of standby feature, although anybody expecting snowfall will need to make sure they clean off the accumulation first when re-enabling (i.e. using the heater to do this could take several hours).
The new feature doesn’t appear to be available for everybody yet, and initially it may only be intended for those on their Starlink for RVs (motorhomes) service, where energy saving is most important. But it’s a useful feature for everybody to have – especially given UK electricity prices – since the Starlink service does tend to consume a fair bit of power (up to around 100 Watts).
Customers in the UK typically pay from £75 per month, plus £460 for the regular home kit (standard dish, router etc.) and £40 for shipping on the ‘Standard‘ Starlink package, which gets you unlimited usage, fast latency times of 25-50ms, advertised downloads of c. 50-200Mbps and uploads of c.5-15Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).
The latest launch means that Starlink now has around 3,480 LEO satellites in orbit around the Earth (altitude of c. 500km+) and their initial plan is to deploy a total of roughly 4,400 by 2024, with approval already granted to add around 7,500 more to this by the end of 2027.
