Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is getting close to rolling out a venture called Starlink, which will provide superfast internet to almost anyone on the planet by using a network of satellites to beam service down to Earth.
Since launching in October, the service has more than 10,000 users in six countries and has been particularly popular in remote parts of northern America, where it was first rolled out for $99 a month.
Musk’s successful space transportation company SpaceX is currently in charge of creating and growing Starlink. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, speaking at a satellite conference on Tuesday, said that Starlink was focused on building customers in rural and hard-to-reach areas and added that the company “will be able to serve every rural household in the United States,” or “roughly 60 million people.”
She also said that Starlink was still in an experimental phase and does not “have a time frame for getting out of the beta phase,” saying that the company still has “a lot of work to do to make the network reliable.”
The Starlink service is not cheap, though, a major obstacle to the company’s growth. On top of the $99 monthly subscription, customers must shell out $499 upfront for a mounting tripod, a Wi-Fi router, and a terminal to connect to the satellites.
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Shotwell said Starlink expects the upfront equipment cost to come down to “the few hundred-dollar range within the next year or two,” slightly more expensive than the equipment needed for broadband internet from regular cable companies such as Verizon and AT&T.
The SpaceX executive said Starlink was not trying to replace or beat the internet service of “giant providers AT&T, Comcast, etc.,” but rather said that her company was “very complementary to the services that they provide.”
“The Starlink system is best suited to highly distributed rural or semi-rural populations,” Shotwell said.
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Although the average internet speed for Starlink beta test subscribers last year was between 50 and 150 Mbps, some users have reported receiving much higher speeds, including speeds of 175 Mbps in freezing temperatures, high winds, and snow, which is 20 Mbps faster than the speeds of other internet services.
Starlink currently has over 1,200 working satellites in orbit, and the goal is to have up to 42,000 satellites in space by 2027.
The internet-beaming satellites get into space by being blasted into orbit by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which usually releases up to 60 satellites per launch.
