SpaceX’s Starlink Internet Service: First User Reports

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Posted on EVANNEX on March 06, 2021 by Charles Morris

Starlink is a satellite internet service operated by SpaceX by Elon Musk. Its main mission is to provide good internet coverage to rural areas and other areas that have poor or no service today. SpaceX has been launching satellites regularly since 2018, and the end goal is to have a constellation of tens of thousands of small spacecraft in orbit, providing near-global service.

At the moment, Starlink has over 1,000 satellites in service and the service is in semi-public beta. Where is the service currently available and what are early adopters saying?

Ookla Speedtest (via PCMag) has created a map of current Starlink beta testers. He estimates that the service now has more than 10,000 users, who see connection speeds of up to 170 Mbps with no data limits.

So far, most of Starlink’s customers are in the Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana) with a handful of users in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine, as well as a few clusters. around Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Starlink’s service is primarily intended for low-density regions that currently have few options for high-speed Internet service. However, Ookla has found a significant number of users in urban and suburban areas such as Chicago, Seattle, and Minneapolis.

Starlink plans to add services to more US locations during this year.

Starlink is also now available in parts of the UK, and Science Focus recently posted some of the impressions from early adopters of the service.

Twitter: @HazardOnTrack

Aaron Wilkes, who lives in Kent, in the south-east of England, told the PA news agency that his existing British Telecom landline service, which is advertised at a paltry speed of 20 Mbps, often offers much slower speeds, making streaming movies impractical. . Using Starlink he saw an average of 175 Mbps and sometimes up to 215 Mbps. “The ability to download content so quickly compared to our standard BT range is amazing,” Wilkes said.

The Starlink service doesn’t come cheap: UK users pay £ 439 for hardware and a monthly fee of £ 89. In the US, it’s $ 99 per month plus $ 499 for hardware. This is much higher than alternatives from cable companies or telephone companies, but for business users in underserved areas, it may be worth paying more for higher speeds.

“If you need connectivity to run a business and if you need connectivity for communication, especially in times of COVID, £ 90 per month is very justifiable,” Martin Langmaid told PA. He noted, however, that Starlink suffers from periodic outages, so it is also hanging on to its existing landline service for the time being. “I think a lot of people will do something similar, where they leave their DSL in place for now, combine it with Starlink. The outages should eventually go away once the coverage is in place, so I think people are starting to roll back things like DSL and 4G dongles. “

Elon Musk recently said that Starlink aims to double its connection speed to around 300 Mbps and expand its coverage area to “most of the Earth” by the end of the year, and to l entire beach ball in 2022.

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Written By: Charles Morris; Sources: PCMag, Science Focus