SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite service is rapidly expanding its coverage around the globe. Now providing internet service to at least 16 countries, including: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, United States, United Kingdom, and service became available in Mexico this week. People living in these countries can pre-order via Starlink.com.
The company currently provides service to a limited number of users per coverage region, as it deploys more satellites to orbit the network will be capable of providing internet to more customers per country. With nearly 1,800 satellites in low Earth orbit, SpaceX provides broadband to over 100,000 users worldwide. The company has over half-a-million service pre-orders that it looks forward to fulfill in 2022.
A Starlink user, who has been using the service since it became available in Portugal over the summer, shared via Reddit today that they have seen “100x improvement” of the Starlink network’s speed over the course of a couple months. They live in Algarve, Portugal, where they are experiencing high-speed Starlink internet with download speeds over 300Mbps (megabits per second).
According to SpaceX’s Starlink.com website, users can expect download speeds ranging between 100Mbps to 200Mbps but many users have reported speeds way faster than what the company newly advertised on its website. In the beginning of the year, Starlink beta generated download speeds varying from 50Mbps to 150Mbps. SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in March that by the end of this year, they aim to double download speeds from 150Mbps to 300Mbps, and it looks like a lot of users are already seeing that massive speed jump. The Portugal Starlink user’s speed test screenshot shows Starlink download speeds of 384.40Mbps, upload of 55.37Mbps, with latency of 36ms (milliseconds). “Amazing, same here! Just hit 356 [Mbps] this evening, and I wasn’t even that close to the router! Speed & stability increases over the last ~2 months have simply been incredible,” another Reddit user shared in the comments section.
Source: Reddit user dazld
Featured Image Source: Starlink.com
About the Author
Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo
Evelyn J. Arevalo joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover news as a Space Journalist and SpaceX Starbase Texas Correspondent. Evelyn is specialized in rocketry and space exploration. The main topics she covers are SpaceX and NASA.
