Posted on Sunday, August 16 2020 @ 23:04 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Tests results uploaded by early beta testers of the SpaceX Starlink satellite Internet service reveal this new venture from Elon Musk can indeed deliver very speedy Internet to remote places. Beta testers must sign NDAs but anonymized speed tests showed up online. ARS Technica
posted an overview and notes users are seeing download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, and upload speeds of 5Mbps to 18Mbps. Latency is also decent, with results from 94ms to as low as 20ms.
The same tests, conducted over the past two weeks, showed latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms. This isn't a comprehensive study of Starlink speeds and latency, so it's not clear whether this is what Internet users should expect once Starlink satellites are fully deployed and the service reaches commercial availability. We asked SpaceX several questions about the speed-test results yesterday and will update this article if we get answers.
Once fully optimized, SpaceX claims its system will be able to provide bandwidth of up to 1Gbps per user. Musk also claims they're targeting latency "below 20ms".
