Elon Musk’s New Age Internet ‘Starlink’ Expected to Leave Beta this October
The internet is a facet of everyday human life. At this point, nearly half of the global population has access to the world wide web. Countries like India who host over a Billion people have only just begun to access the internet. They have over 560 Million active users, which puts India as the second-largest internet consumer, with numbers expected to grow past one billion users by 2023. With such an enormous growth opportunity, internet service providers indeed are giddy with joy with the profit potential. However, Musk is attempting to target the 3.7 Billion users on this planet who currently have no internet connection with his Starlink program. According to the Starlink website, “Starlink is ideally suited for areas of the globe where connectivity has typically been a challenge.” Starlink aims to circumvent the long-established on-ground connections and “deliver high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable or completely unavailable.” And soon, Starlink is ready to begin going full speed ahead with its Beta program ending in October of 2021, according to a response tweet from Elon Musk when a user asked when the service planned to end the Beta.
So What Exactly is Starlink?
Starlink is a high-speed internet service provider that plans to utilize 12,000 satellites in Earth’s low-orbit to form a constellation and beam continuous broadband internet to your home. Currently, Starlink costs $99 per month, with an initial fee of $499 to account for your home's dish and router. Musk touted in a Tweet that Starlink would be exiting its Beta phase nearing the end of October. Just one year later, after its initial launch in 2020.
Starlink’s Origin:
Starlink has initially been a part of a division within SpaceX, one of Musk’s many operations that focused on revolutionizing space travel. In 2015, SpaceX branched into its project Starlink: a growing “constellation” of orbital internet satellites with its prototype satellites successfully launching into space in 2018. Since 2018, Starlink has been periodically gaining steam. In 2020, Starlink was awarded $885 Million in funding to help provide high-speed internet to rural areas within the United States by the Federal Communications Commission. In June of 2021, Starlink has launched 1800 satellites successfully into orbit. Shortly after that, on August 23rd, 2021, Musk announced that they had shipped over 100,000 terminals for Starlink. For Starlink to achieve global internet coverage, many countries need to approve Starlink to operate within their airspace. Also, Starlink would need to expand its current 1800 satellites to 42,000 within the next few years. Now, Musk has signaled that Starlink would be exiting its beta phase at the end of October 2021, nudging us that Starlink is about to accelerate into full swing.
Starlink’s Obstacles
If you have been reading to this point, excellent, thank you! Though you might believe that Musk is attempting to accomplish incredible feats to help others with the Starlink program. There are still growing pains that Starlink must overcome.
Space Clutter
When we think of Satellites, we picture metal machines orbiting our planet further than the naked eye can see. Though, orbital internet satellites have a huge hurdle to overcome, lag time or latency. Essentially, the further the satellite is in the sky, the greater overall coverage of an area, but the longer your internet takes to be transmitted to your network from space. To reduce latency or lag time, Musk’s Starlink satellites are meant to be low-orbiting. This means that the satellites that are lower to the ground significantly reduce latency but cover a smaller area. Thus the need for Starlink to launch many more satellites to complete their constellation. One of the many drawbacks of having a low-orbiting constellation of satellites is that we, the people, can view them in the night sky. Here in this video, you can see a line of bright orbiting satellites from your backyard.
Close Calls: Responsible for half of all close encounters in Orbit
Satellite operators are forced to control and pilot their satellites to avoid spacecraft and pieces of space junk. According to Hugh Lewis, the head of the Astronautics Research Group at the University of Southampton, U.K., Starlink satellites, in particular, are reported to be involved in over 1,600 close encounters, which comes close to about half or “50% of close encounters every week.” Indeed, when production and satellite launches increase, the number of close encounters is expected to climb substantially.
The Reviews are in: Here’s what people think of Starlink
With Starlink adding more and more users every month, the first few product testers have had a chance to use and think about how Starlink works for them. CNBC reached out to around 50 early users of Starlink’s particular broadband internet. They reported that most of the participants lived in rural or remote areas such as farmland and the wilderness. The consensus was that Starlink provided the best service from the other competition, surpassing their internet speeds and beating out their costs. Though, users did briefly experience outages usually lasting between 20 seconds or in severe cases lasting between 10 and 20 minutes. Users were impressed by most of the equipment, but the router. Saying how they felt confident in the Dish’s durability but felt the router was sub-par and sought out third-party software.
Closing Thoughts
Starlink seems to be revolutionalizing the way the world seeks its internet. Though at the moment, Starlink can only provide around 60Mbps to 200Mbps of download speed with an average latency ranging between 20–30 milliseconds. In comparison, Google Fiber can deliver on average 282Mbps of download speeds and latency ranging from 5–70ms. There is still a long way to go for Starlink to be competitive with traditional on-ground internet, but if you live out in the middle of nowhere, it sure is better than nothing at all.