Don't you just love it when you buy a product that doesn't solve the problem it says it's going to?
That was sarcasm. That's what many folks are experiencing with Starlink,
the satellite internet project from Elon Musk that was supposed to revolutionize internet access
in areas with bad infrastructure. But this past July, customers were reporting speeds
of less than one megabit per second. What is this, 2002?
Where are all the frosted tips? And yes, satellite internet has traditionally
been notoriously slow, especially for the prices you pay.
But Starlink was touted as a solution to this, as it uses a constellation of satellites
that are much closer to Earth than the satellites used by legacy providers like Viasat and HughesNet.
Starlink has advertised speeds between 100 and 200 megabits per second
with latency as low as 20 milliseconds. Fast enough for gaming and video calls,
which are applications that often sputter to the point of being unusable
over a typical satellite connection. Our own testing we did in early 2021
showed that Starlink did indeed deliver a usable gaming experience.
So why are so many people now reporting problems?
See, it's like this. Starlink currently has over 3,000 satellites
in low Earth orbit. And that sounds like a lot, especially when you consider Viasat and HughesNet
only use 12 satellites combined. But SpaceX is planning to one day
have tens of thousands of satellites in the sky. Why in the world do they need so many
when their competitors make do with just a handful? Well, because they're so close to the Earth,
their line of sight to the ground is much more limited than far away satellites.
To provide truly worldwide coverage, Starlink may need as many as 42,000 satellites at some point.
The current lack of coverage combined with the fact that these satellites themselves are quite small,
only about one-fifth the weight of a Honda Civic, means that they simply don't have the aggregate capacity yet
to deal with a growing customer base. But just how bad has it gotten in terms of speed?
From the first quarter to the second quarter of 2022,
download speeds for Starlink customers in the United States dropped nearly 30 megabits per second,
going from about 91 down to around 63
if we're considering medians. Upload speeds and latency also suffered
from more modest yet still noticeable performance losses.
Several customers in rural areas complained that the falling speeds
meant that they couldn't work effectively at their jobs. And this is after paying 110 bucks a month for the service
on top of a $600 charge for the initial hardware setup.
Yikes. These setbacks were not only frustrating for customers,
but they also caught the attention of the US Federal Communications Commission,
which used Starlink's declining performance as a reason to refuse to give the company a grant
of nearly $900 million. To be fair, Elon Musk did say
that the network would have capacity limits initially, but he indicated the issues would be primarily centered
around urban areas, not the rural ones where people have suffered
from unacceptably slow performance. However, the good news is that Starlink is indeed
continuing to actively launch more satellites and does have approval from the FCC
to launch up to a total of around 12,000 of them. And it's not like Starlink is unusable for everyone
since they're still significantly faster than legacy satellite internet services.
But still, with the amount of money Starlink charges every month, let's hope that it doesn't scare too many people away
before they complete their network. There's still a few spots in the upper atmosphere.
I'd hate to see them go to waste. Thanks for watching this video so much.
Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Check out our other videos
and comment below with video suggestions. Don't forget though to subscribe and follow.
Sometimes you guys do the other thing, but you don't do that one and it really pisses me off.