With Starlink, Elon Musk and his well-known company SpaceX have been planning for several years to stir up the global internet provider market by offering fast satellite-based internet. Now, he and his company are currently making great progress towards this goal. First of all SpaceX has been launching up to 60 new satellites every two weeks with its own Falcon 9 rockets for several months. By now there are more than 900 satellites in orbit, which means that SpaceX had enough satellites in space last month to launch its public beta in the U.S.
Before that, several benchmarks have already been leaked from the closed beta. These revealed average download speeds of 50 Mbit/s, which means that Starlink could already often offer greater download speeds than established Internet providers in rural areas. Now, however, recent speed tests published on Reddit show that SpaceX has been able to significantly increase the available download speeds over the past few months. The latest benchmarks from November for example reveal that an average of 150 Mbit/s is currently available. One test even reached more than 200 Mbit/s.
With these results, the major internet providers in the USA and in many European countries are likely to be very nervous, as there has been hardly any progress in the expansion of high speed internet in a lot of rural areas. Now it looks as if these traditional companies could soon be running out of customers in those rural areas, as SpaceX will often offer significantly more speed for $99 a month plus the $499 for the antenna.