Starlink says 2 game speeds – 25x faster than now – coming soon

Starlink speeds could one day reach speeds of 2 gigabits per second, according to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell.

“The next generation will have smaller beams, more capacity per beam, lower latency,” Shotwell said Friday at the annual Baron Investment Conference.

Shotwell didn’t put a specific time frame on these improvements, but 2-gig speeds are about 25 times faster than what users currently experience in the US.

Ookla’s latest speed test data, from a year ago, shows that US Starlink users received 79 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload speeds on average. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

Shotwell said Starlink users could already get gaming speeds (1,000Mbps) – if they bought more dishes. Starlink’s dishes are currently available for $349 each.

“What we’re going to do is instead of people having to have more dishes, we’re just going to improve the satellite signal and the reception signal and you’re going to have gigabit, 2 gigabit per second speeds,” she explained.

Shotwell didn’t get too deep into a technical explanation of how the company would achieve such a dramatic speed boost — at one point she said Starlink’s transmit and receive antenna “seemed like a little bit of magic to me” — but she compared Starlink’s cycle of increased capacity to Moore’s Law, which observed that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every two years.

The rapid growth has certainly been true for Starlink’s user base, which went from 2 million to 4 million in the past year. But its speeds have not increased at the same pace. In the US, Starlink’s download speeds only grew from 66 to 79 Mbps between November 2022 and 2023 – well below the Federal Communication Commission’s definition of minimum broadband speeds.

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Starlink’s average download speeds in the US increased by 13 Mbps from November 2022 to 2023.

Okla

It also becomes more difficult to increase speed as more users sign up for the service.

“Starlink can legitimately claim to cover a wide area, but spectrum limitations mean Starlink cannot serve every location in that area,” wrote Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff and a telecommunications industry analyst at New Street Research. in a recent note to investors.

Starlink is more confident about its ability to reach concert speeds after its successful test flight last month with Starship, a plane that can send larger Starlink satellites into orbit. An open question is whether existing Starlink dishes will be able to access these improved speeds, or whether customers will have to purchase new equipment.

See this: SpaceX Starship Launch 5: Everything That Happened in 5 Minutes

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches over the next four years,” Shotwell said at the conference. “We’d love to fly it. I’ve got a lot of satellites to fly.”

Starlink wants to increase its satellites in orbit from about 6,600 currently in orbit to nearly 30,000. In an FCC filing last month, the company requested that the FCC open up new radio bands for Starlink’s use and allow satellites to orbit closer to Earth, both of which could help improve speeds. With Donald Trump’s victory and the appointment of Republican Brendan Carr as FCC chairman, these requests are now likely to be approved.

“If you look at Musk’s various efforts to improve his spectrum position, whatever his batting average is, it’s not hot,” Levin told CNET last month. “It will be much higher [after the Trump victory]. And it is a very important victory.”

Starlink did not respond to CNET’s request for comment.

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