SpaceX’s Starlink program caught a lot of attention when first announced as a concept, as it promised to bring high speed broadband Internet connection in a different way. You are probably aware that there are plenty of locations where such a service is unavailable or perhaps unreliable which is where Elon Musk’s original concept comes into play. By providing satellite driven Internet, it would be easy to provide proper Internet access to even the most desolate of places on our planet.
At the time of writing this, first testing results of the infrastructure are coming in and the numbers are very promising. Official SpaceX’s tests show download speeds of up to 103Mbps and upload speeds of 40.5Mbps, which is what one would call an appropriate bandwidth for simple, most common online tasks. Third party tests are averaging at 37Mbps download (with the upper extreme being 91Mbps), with upload speeds reaching 42Mbps. Latency is proving to be no problem at all, as it averages at 18ms, which is totally acceptable in any case scenario.
These results have been accomplished by making use of 775 satellites launched by SpaceX, which is only a fraction of the planned 30,000 satellites in total. Obviously, as the number of satellites increase, the results would show lower latency, higher download and upload speeds and, most importantly, more coverage around the entire planet.
Source: ZDNet
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