Tesla Fremont factory has 15 spherical community gateway receivers. The Starlink Community Gateways program is designed to deliver high-speed internet for businesses, remote and underserved areas. This program can provide symmetrical download and upload speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) per gateway. We don’t know if each spherical unit is a gateway or if a cluster of 4 or 5 is a full gateway. Based upon the picture on the Starlink site of the Alaska location with four spherical units for 10 Gbps, I think the Fremont location has 30-40 Gbps.
Elon Musk has stated that a Starlink Gateway terminal offers over 8 Gbps of downlink speed, with plans to exceed 8 Gbps for uplink as well. If we assume the higher figure of 10 Gbps then there is a clear basis for calculation.
Drone flying youtuber, Met God in the Wilderness, captured the Starlink Gateways at the Tesla Fremont factory.
The gateway terminals themselves or antennas are inside protective radomes. It is reasonable to assume that each spherical receiver functions as an independent gateway terminal capable of delivering up to 10 Gbps. This assumption is supported by the program’s design, where ground station facilities are built to handle substantial bandwidth, and multiple units could be deployed to scale capacity.
IF each of the 15 community gateway receivers can provide 10 Gbps, the total communication speed for the location would be the sum of their individual capacities, assuming sufficient satellite and backhaul support. This is a common approach in networking, where multiple terminals can aggregate bandwidth, provided the infrastructure—such as the number of satellites in view and the connection to the internet backbone—can sustain it. The Starlink constellation, with thousands of satellites, has a vast total capacity (with each V2.0 satellite adding 140-160 Gbps), making it plausible that a single location like the Tesla Fremont factory could achieve high aggregate speeds with multiple gateways.
Calculating the total speed:
Number of receivers: 15/4
Speed per receiver: 10 Gbps
Total speed: 3.75 × 10 Gbps = 37.5 Gbps
The 37.5 Gbps aligns Tesla Fremont getting much of the dedicated capacity of a Version 2 mini satellite. If there were five satellites within line of site of Fremont/Silicon Valley, Tesla could take a lot of one satellite capacity while other customers shared four of the satellites.
The total bandwidth would at various times be constrained by satellite availability or backhaul capacity. The estimation was for maximum theoretical speed based on the equipment present
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Almost like they expect a sudden increase in demand like for a robotaxi?