Elon Musk wants to surround the Earth with a constellation of Internet satellites, and provides fast, low-latency high-speed Internet services to any person on Earth who wishes to do so. New data from Speedtest.net suggests he is well on his way to doing just that.
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Facts and figures
Musk has already made progress toward this goal. The 11th “Starlink” launch of SpaceX on Tuesday launched 58 more broadband satellites, increasing the number of functioning satellites to probably 650 or 660 beats. (Each Starlink launch can carry 60 satellites, but the company has recently added a few slots on each mission to customers looking for rideshares to ban.)
Tuesday’s launch marked the 98th launch of SpaceX, and its 95th Falcon 9 launch. After delivering its payroll tax, the first stage of the Falcon 9 returned to Earth – SpaceX’s 57th such successful landing. (The specific booster that launched and landed has now made six such rounds.) SpaceX has also successfully ‘net’ both payloads – a $ 3 million device that can now be reused at a future launch .
Musk wants to eventually launch anywhere from 12,000 to 42,000 satellites. However, just 800 or so should be enough to provide moderate coverage for most places in the world – so Musk is now more than 80% of the way to his goal of destroying the Earth in broadband.
Before he does dathowever, he wants to focus on delivering internet to America.
A $ 16 billion grant for SpaceX
Rural America, to be exact.
When we discussed back in June, the FCC gave SpaceX the green light to compete for as much as $ 16 billion for grabs under its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) competition. Under RDOF, the FCC will select one or more companies to provide “gigabit high-speed broadband networks” to “unreserved rural areas” of America.
In order to win even a piece of this business, SpaceX needs to prove that the internet service can provide the job on par with service via terrestrial cable services such as Comcast. Specifically, SpaceX must show that signals sent through its Starlink satellites have less than 100 millisecond latency (aka “lag” or “ping”) between when a command is sent (for example, “buy it now”) and receive a response: “You win ! “
60 down, 940 to go
As Ars Technica reported earlier this week, Internet analysts opted for beta testing of SpaceX’s Starlink network pinged speedtest.net to learn the speeds of the connections they receive from Starlink, and the results posted on Reddit.
What did they find?
So far, results show that Starlink users can expect internet download speeds from anywhere from 11 megabits per second (Mbps) to 60 Mbps, and upload speeds from 5 Mbps to 18 Mbps. At best, those numbers are just 6% of the 1 gig (1 Gbps) speeds the FCC wants to be able to promise under RDOF. But considering that Starlink is still only 80% of the way to having enough rates for “moderate” capacity, it’s still impressive. (And as Ars notes, even 60 Mbps is much faster internet than many rural customers can access today.)
Perhaps more importantly, SpaceX and Starlink seem to clear the FCC bar for competing in the RDOF game. As you may recall, the FCC was skeptical about SpaceX’s ability to deliver sub-100 bearing speeds from space, and promised to apply “very close control” to SpaceX’s performance. Ars, however, says that Starlink delivers ping rates of anywhere from 94 ms (already below 100) all the way up to just 31 ms.
What comes next
As for qualifying to compete for RDOF and the FCC’s $ 16 billion, this seems a lot like “mission accomplished” for SpaceX. Going forward, the company will aim to drive its storage speed below 20 ms while increasing its internet download speed to 1 Gbps. And over time, SpaceX hopes that these levels of performance will win it up to 5 million broadband satellite Internet experts in the US. With an estimated monthly service charge of $ 80, 12 times a year, Starlink is therefore looking forward to an annual revenue stream of $ 4.8 billion for SpaceX.
What does it all mean for SpaceX?
If you think it would take SpaceX to launch nearly 80 rockets a year at a launch cost of $ 62 million each to generate similar revenue from space launches, it’s easy to see how Starlink will soon be primary income Driver of SpaceX could be – and a great candidate for an IPO.
