Elon Musk has been on a perpetual mission to change the world, and so far he’s been pretty successful. Aside from inventing Tesla, Musk has launched SpaceX, has made plans to create land travel that’s faster than commercial flights, and one of his more recent inventions is his über fast internet service named Starlink.
The Initial Starlink service has been named “Better Than Nothing Beta” and it costs at least $99 a month to those users who willingly paid to try out the brand new service. Users also needed to pay an initial $499 for the ground equipment that includes a mounting tripod, a Wi-Fi router, and a user terminal to connect to the SpaceX satellites.
On October 26th, SpaceX put Starlink to the test and many users shared very favorable results. In fact, a number of users claimed that they managed to hit download speeds of more than 160 megabits per seconds. According to popular speed-test provider, Ookla, this is actually faster than around 95% of other connections throughout the United States.
Musk shared in an email after the release that day, “As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations. Expect to see data speeds vary from 50 Mb/s to 150 Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.”
One such user from the West Coast actually posted a screenshot showing that he was reaching download speeds of up to 161 Mbps, which far exceeded Musks original claims of 150. The screenshot was actually shared on a Starlink Reddit community page, with many other users sharing their own high speeds on the Reddit thread as well.
One user from rural Montana also shared via Reddit that they got a download speed that was faster than 174 Mbps, while their upload speed was 33 Mbps. They wrote on the page, “Starlink will forever change the game.”
Meanwhile, most of the other users that also listed their results on Reddit had very similar results, although some had listed theirs even before the public beta test had even started. SpaceX had shared in their email to “lower your initial expectations” about the beta test, but it seems that they far exceeded anyone’s expectations.
The email also shared that its users should also expect “brief periods of no connectivity at all,” with some actually dealing with this during the trial. One West Coast user even shared that “interruptions are about ten to fifteen seconds, and seem to happen every few minutes.”
Of course, considering that being able to reach speeds of 160 Mbps is otherwise unheard of, having a couple interruptions every so often during a trial period isn’t considered too bad. There is also a possibility that it was due to a lack of users on the almost 900 satellites that happened to be transmitting the internet service to earth.
SpaceX has also shared that “nearly 700,000” people across the U.S. are conveying interest in subscribing to Starlink once it’s completely up and running.
SpaceX’s hope is to be able to transmit internet service not only in America, but throughout the globe using its Starlink satellites. The company also explained via Starlink’s mobile app, “Under Starlink’s Better Than Nothing Beta program, initial service is targeted for the U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.”
Eventually, the hope of Starlink is to be able to get to the hard-to-reach or rural areas around the world that lacks access to the internet. And with the 900 Starlink satellites that have since been launched into space via SpaceX, they are more than enough to provide major service in most areas.
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