Don't you just love it when you buy a product that doesn't solve the problem it says it's going to that was sarcasm that's what many folks are experiencing with starlink the satellite internet project from Elon Musk That was supposed to revolutionize internet access in areas with bad infrastructure but this past July customers were reporting speeds of less than one megabit per second what is this 2002 where are all the frosted tips and yes satellite internet has traditionally been notoriously slow especially for the prices you pay but starlink was touted as a solution to this as it uses a constellation of satellites that are much closer to Earth than the satellites used by Legacy providers like via sad and HughesNet starlink has advertised speeds between 100 and 200 megabits per second with latency as low as 20 milliseconds fast enough for gaming and video calls which are applications that often sputter to the point of being unusable over a typical satellite connection our own testing we did in early 2021 showed that starlink did indeed deliver a usable gaming experience so why are so many people now reporting problems see it's like this starlink currently has over 3 000 satellites in low earth orbit and that sounds like a lot especially when you consider ViaSat and HughesNet only use 12 satellites combined but SpaceX is planning to one day have tens of thousands of satellites in the sky.
Why in the world do they need so many when their
competitors make do with just a handful well because they're so close to the
Earth their line of sight to the ground is much more limited than far away
satellites to provide truly worldwide coverage starlink may need as many as 42
000 satellites at some point the current lack of coverage combined with the
fact that these satellites themselves are quite small only about one-fifth the
weight of a Honda Civic means that they simply don't have the aggregate
capacity yet to deal with a growing customer base but just how bad has it
gotten in terms of speed quarter to the second quarter of 2022 download speeds
for Starling customers in the United States dropped nearly 30 megabits per
second going from about 91 down to around 63 if we're considering medians
upload speeds and latency also suffered from more modest yet still noticeable
performance losses several customers in rural areas complained that the falling
speeds meant that they couldn't work effectively at their jobs and this is
after paying 110 bucks a month for the service on top of a 600 charge for the
initial hardware setup yikes these setback Acts were not only frustrating for
customers but they also caught the attention of the U.S Federal Communications
Commission which used star link’s declining performance as a reason to refuse
to give the company a grant of nearly 900 million dollars to be fair Elon Musk
did say that the network would have capacity limits initially but he indicated
the issues would be primarily cantered around urban areas not the rural ones
where people have suffered from unacceptably slow performance however the good
news is that starlink is indeed continuing to actively launch more satellites
and does have approval from the FCC to launch up to a total of around 12 000 of
them and it's not like starlink is unusable for everyone since they're still significantly
faster than Legacy satellite internet services but still with the amount of
money starlink charges every month let's hope that it doesn't scare too many
people away before they complete their Network there's still a few spots in the
upper atmosphere I'd hate to see them go to waste.