SpaceX’s Starlink -Seatellite -Internet Service now has more than 4.6 million users around the world, the company wrote in a post on X on the last day of 2024.
In a report filed with the Federal Communications Commission in August 2024, Starlink said it had grown to about 1.4 million subscribers in the United States since its debut in 2021. It amounts to only approx. 1% of all internet connections in the country, but it has been a gift to people in rural areas.
“People buy a house out here, and they assume there is internet, and then they find out that there is not,” Edwin Walker, a retired electric engineer in Chattaroy, told Washington, to Cnet. “There is literally a few hundred people close to us who have Starlink.”
2024 was a year of rapid growth for the satellite internet company. It started the year with 2.3 million customers globally and ended with 4.6 million.
In November, Starlink began putting customers on a waiting list in US cities such as Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego and Austin. It also added a one -off “overload fee” of $ 100 for customers in areas of high use.
There has been some concern about whether Starlink can keep up with rising demand for service. FCC defines broadband as 100 megabits per day. Second download and 20 Mbps upload. It’s a bar starlink has never reached the United States.
The latest data from Ookla found in 2023 that Starlink users in the United States receive 65/10 Mbps on average with 58 milliseconds of latency. (Information: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as Cnet, Ziff Davis.)
In its three years of collecting speed test data at Starlink, the company has never reached the benchmark set by FCC. The closest it was the last quarter of 2021 when it hit 105/12 Mbps.
Read more: Inside the increase of 7,000 Starlink -Stellites – and their inevitable downfall
By 2022, Starlink was denied nearly $ 900 million in broadband grants through Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) because it could not meet FCC’s speed requirements. Elon Musk wrote on X in January 2024 that the idea that Starlink had not reached these speeds was “completely false” and that “Starlink exceeds it right now.”
The current FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, said it was unlikely that the Commission could visit the RDOF Subsidies to Starlink, but told Politico in October that he thinks “it would be fair to get [Starlink] Back ”into FCC’s broadband program.
See this: Starlink satellites bring the Internet to millions. We explain the advantages and disadvantages