100-150 SpaceX Starlink Satellites Serve 1.3 Million US Customers

The surface area of the USA is about 1.9% of the Earth’s surface but there can be up to 3% of Starlinks are able to service the 1.3 Million US customers.

There are about 100-150 Starlink satellites over the USA as SpaceX has chosen orbits that favor the Northern Hemisphere which has most of the global population and most of the more wealthy potential Starlink customers. Some of the 150 satellites are not active yet because they are not finished deploying to the right orbits and activating.

There were 5186 Starlinks in orbit and 412 were de-orbited out of 5604 total launched. There are about 880 that are V2 mini satellites with 60 Gbps capacity in orbit but only about half of the v2 mini have been activated. The v1.5 satellites had 15 Gbps capacity. 4530 Starlink satellites are active. 1000 V2 mini Starlink satellites is equal to the capacity of 4000 v1.5 and V1 Starlink satellites. 4200 V1.5 Starlink have a total of about 63000 total Gbps and 440 active V2 mini is 26400 Gbps. The total activated SpaceX Starlink capacity is about 90,000 Gbps.

The Starlink satellites orbiting at 400-500 miles into Canada or Mexico could still service some US customers living near the border.

12 V1.5 and 3 V2 mini per 1000X1000 square mile area would have 360 Gbps. This would be enough for about 10% of the US customer base and footprint.

SpaceX with 120 V2 mini launches of 22 Starlink satellites at a time would more than double the overall Starlink capacity. SpaceX would add 158,000 Gbps of capacity. This would be about triple the capacity of the 880 V2 mini satellites and six times the 440 active V2 mini. At the end of 2024, SpaceX would have about 2.5 times the end of 2023 overall bandwidth. If SpaceX is comfortably able to service 1.3 million Starlink US customers now and up to 1.5 million then SpaceX could handle 3.5 million US customer up to 4 million at the end of 2024.

SpaceX could incrementally upgrade the components of the Starlink satellites for a V2.X mini satellite that could add 10-20% more capacity.

The Starlink customers in the rest of the world is about 40% of the total customers. SpaceX needs to market and get more international customers. The Starlink international customers can theoretically be 15 times larger if they were evenly distributed across land area. The Starlink international and those in ships and planes over the ocean can theoretically be 40 times larger if they were evenly distributed across the world surface area. It seems that having global customers at 5X US levels should be a conservative near term 4-6 year goal. Having international Starlink at 2X US customers by 2026 seems likely.

The main bottleneck for SpaceX to get more customer is for the SpaceX Bastrop dish factory to increase satellite dish production to 500,000 to 1 million per month over the 100,000 to 150,000 per month prior to the operation of the new dish factory.

SpaceX can reasonably reach 2.6 million US customers and 3 million international/Rest of world customers by the end of 2024. A stretch goal would be for SpaceX to reach 3 million US customers and 6 million international customers by the end of 2024. The international customers would also include more military, ship and plane customers that are outside the US.

SpaceX adding 200,000 Gbps of satellite capacity each year will continue to increase capacity. This annual capacity increase could be 3-5X faster (600,000 Gbps to 1,000,000 Gbps) with SpaceX Super Heavy Starlink.

IF SpaceX could solve the international expansion by 2027, then Starlink could have up to 15-20 million US customers and up to 100 million rest of world customers.

Starlink has 1.3 million customers in the US, or about 59% of the satellite internet service’s total customer base 🇺🇲📡@Starlink @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/Pg2he4nk5i

— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) December 13, 2023

SpaceX has also announced reaching more than 1 million subscribers in December 2022, 1.5 million subscribers in May 2023, and 2 million subscribers in September 2023.

There is some deep analysis of how many customers can be serviced by SpaceX Starlink. Each Starlink satellite is in a low-earth orbit and the communication footprint is about 500-600 mile radius. There would be about 12-15 major coverage zones in the USA if one were to divide up the country into 1000 mile by 1000 miles sections. This would mean 10-15 Starlink satellites serving each zone.

However, we know that 5000 total Starlink Satellites (mix of Gen 1, 1.5 and 2-mini) are able to provide adequate connectivity to 2.2 million global customers and about 1.3 million US customers. The US customers also include some business customers and premium customers that need to be guaranteed higher speed and service.

SpaceX will more than double the satellite bandwidth capacity in 2024. This will likely be done with fewer Starlink 2-mini satellites with higher bandwidth.