SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says consumers’ Starlink internet speeds “will double” later this year. In a tweet on Monday, Musk said the network’s latency is poised to decrease and that Starlink’s coverage will continue to expand.
“Speed will double to ~300Mb/s & latency will drop to ~20ms later this year,” Musk said in response to a user who showed speed tests ranging between 77 and 130 Mbps.
He added that Starlink is on track to reach customers in “most” parts of the world by the end of the year and achieve complete global coverage “by next year.” Musk stressed that Starlink is geared toward customers in “low to medium population density areas.” He said cellular service “will always have the advantage in dense urban areas.”
User base growing
Last week, SpaceX launched another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit, bringing the mission’s total up to 1,145. The company’s goal is to eventually launch a total of 12,000 internet-providing satellites.
In a recent filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), SpaceX said that “over 10,000 users” started using Starlink’s internet service in the U.S. and other parts of the world in just three months following the expansion of the public beta program.
“Starlink’s performance is not theoretical or experimental ... [and] is rapidly accelerating in real time as part of its public beta program,” SpaceX wrote in the FCC filing.
The company added that Starlink’s service is “meeting and exceeding 100/20 megabits per second (‘Mbps’) throughput to individual users.” Most users have seen latency “at or below 31 milliseconds,” according to the filing.
Service is priced at $99 a month, plus a $499 initial cost for the hardware required to connect to the network.