SpaceX Will Increase Starlink Download Speed to 10 Gbps from 100Mbps Now

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SpaceX says it plans to increase Starlink’s download speeds from ~100 Mbps currently to 10 Gbps in the future.

20 thoughts on “SpaceX Will Increase Starlink Download Speed to 10 Gbps from 100Mbps Now”

  1. Imagine a competitive edge on communications around Earth, then a monopoly around Mars. NASA will pay Space X for their services around the red planet. Probably the belt shortly after.

  4. Right now they lease satellites for Amazon Web Services traffic. Bezos' other company, Blue Origin, plans to launch Kuiper internet satellites in a couple of years, for home delivery of Amazon Prime video and internet traffic.

  5. Every satellite operator needs to be licensed by each country it wants to operate in. This is a carry-over from the early days of radio. Radio waves don't respect national borders. So if you want to operate in a given country, you need a license from them. Starlink home terminals are radio transmitters (the uplink). So it applies to them too.

  6. Place a wifi router close to a tree and it dies.
    Now we launch trees killing satellites to make sure we need to go to mars ?.

  8. Yes.

    As in they appear to be targeting V band for the highspeed RF. They still have phased array polarization tricks since they only use a left (or a right?) polarization currently, so they can double what they have now.

    The recent polar starlinks had prototype intersatellite laser (ISL) links installed, and Musk tweeted that all starlink sats next year will be ISL equipped, and probably all polar sats this year (though this year's ISL are still v0.9). This allows some offload to a nearby sat for ground comms if the current one is oversaturated with gateway traffic.

    Starlink currently isn't proposing sat to ground lasercomm though…

    Australian scientists recently think they may have figured how to defeat atmospheric disturbances for lasercomm (well they tested for timing links, but they believe it's directly applicable for conventional lasercomm). If that allows sat to ground lasercomm (assuming you pick frequencies that hit atmospheric windows well, and figure out how to deal with precipitation better) with ground station optical terminals that don't need to be on desert mountaintops, all the better.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-20591-5

  9. There is the theory that FAANGT (or whatever) don't really care about your politics, but they are running to stay ahead of the really bad actors in the US deep state political/bureaucratic/academic/riot/boycott complex who do care.

    But in practice it doesn't matter who instigated the power grab, the only thing that matters is neutralising it.

  10. exactly.. space x is offering a pplatform and ideology revolving around truly open internet.. something facebook, twitter, amazon, apple and alphabet have been colluding to control

  11. Exactly brett… Perhaps the commenter who responded to me would bother researching amazon and their Amazon web services and how they effectively killed parler because they and their friends didnt like the competition.. they can use any excuse but its ultimately about maintaining their monopolies which of course amazon really wants to own the pipes and satellites next. not conjecture but fact. they arent even trying to hide it anymore

  12. I suppose it would be possible for SpaceX to host websites in orbit, or even on the ground, but there's no inherent reason SpaceX is more of a threat to AWS than any other ISP in a business sense.

    But SpaceX is a potential threat to Amazon's ideological ambitions, because they're becoming a large IT provider, and show no signs of being interested in joining the internet censorship cartel that Amazon is part of. 

    In principle Starlink could route around all their censorship efforts, comprehensively, in a way an ordinary ISP couldn't, thanks to being end to end all over the globe. And I suspect they might have plans of this sort.

  13. I suspect Amazon is seeking to frustrate competition, as they might perceive Starlink as a threat to AWS.

  14. "Per the FCC approval for the Starlink space stations, "SpaceX proposes to operate in the 10.7-12.7 GHz, 13.85-14.5 GHz, 17.8-18.6 GHz, 18.8-19.3 GHz, 27.5-29.1 GHz, and 29.5-30 GHz bands.""

    These are standard bands for satellite communications, not a big deal.

    In theory you could certainly achieve 10 GBPS over a 29.5-30 GHz carrier, especially if you got a little fancy with your encoding scheme. Per other sources, they're also planning on eventually using the 40-75 GHz band, which, yes, absolutely would have atmospheric absorption issues, but would be better for sustaining high data rates.

  16. Yes, actually they are… planning to be! They want to compete with Musk in the satellite internet business, with their own Project "Kuiper". (You'd think they'd have latency problems, wouldn't you?)

    They're way behind SpaceX, though. 

    The big difference with their service, I assume, is that they'll shut it off without warning if they decide they don't like your politics.

  18. 10 Gbps downlink, is that even possible with satellite RF?

    I ask because at higher frequencies, a lot of it is absorbed by the atmosphere. And satellites, even low orbiting ones, have to go through all of it.

    Or are they planning to get into laser comms for the end users?

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