SpaceX will double the speed of the Starlink Internet at the end of this year

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

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

Latency is the amount of delay in an internet network, which defines how long a signal takes to travel back and forth from a destination. Latency and download speed are key measures for an internet service provider.

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

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

“The cell phone will always have the advantage in dense urban areas,” Musk said.

To date, SpaceX has launched over 1,000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began launching the service in an early public beta to customers in the US, Canada and the UK – with a service priced at $ 99 per month, plus an initial cost of $ 499 for the necessary hardware for network connection.

The company recently expanded the scope of that public beta, allowing potential users to place pre-orders for the Starlink service. SpaceX, in a file with the Federal Communications Commission earlier this month, revealed that Starlink has “over 10,000 users in the United States and abroad,” in just over three months since the public beta began.

SpaceX mentioned in the FCC that the Starlink service “meets and exceeds 100/20 megabits per second (” Mbps “) for each individual user,” while most users saw latency “at or below 31 milliseconds.”

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