The war for satellite Internet is over, and Starlink has won by technical KO. Traditional operators that rely on geostationary satellites are not only unable to compete, they are seeing their customer base crumble. And what the company plans to unlock with Starship leaves no room for doubt: Elon Musk’s company is no longer looking at its former rivals. Its new focus is terrestrial broadband, including fiber optics.
The old guard, erased from the map. The Ookla data They are devastating. With its megaconstellation of satellites 550 km above the Earth, Starlink’s connection is not only twice as fast as that of HughesNet or Viasat, but it offers an average latency of 45 ms, while its competitors in geostationary orbit move in the range of 680 ms.
The market has responded accordingly. As Starlink surpassed six million customers worldwide, HughesNet lost 29% of its subscribers and Viasat plummeted almost 68%. They cannot compete with the verticality of SpaceX, which is the only company in the world that routinely lands and relaunches its rockets.
Satellites like hotcakes. Thanks to its commitment to propulsive landing and the internal development of Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket has achieved an unprecedented launch rate in the history of the space industry. The company began deploying Starlink in 2019 and has just surpassed the barrier of 10,000 satellites launched.
Although the first models have already re-entered the atmosphere, the active constellation is close to 8,700 satellites in orbit. To put it in perspective: Starlink satellites already represent 65% of all active satellites orbiting the Earth. There are more Starlink satellites than everything else combined.
They’re not going to stay there. SpaceX not only has the technology to offer stable, global low-latency satellite Internet connectivity: it has the financial muscle to take it to another level.
An analysis of TMF Associates compares Starlink’s revenue to the rest of the industry combined. To continue growing at this pace, Starlink needs to expand the market beyond traditional satellite users.
Its objective is no longer just to connect rural areas: it is to convince the urban or suburban user that its service is a viable alternative to fiber or cable. The company has deployed a parallel Direct to Cell connection service to connect directly to LTE mobiles, and has made a historic move to acquire radio spectrumcornering competitors like AST SpaceMobile.
Starship is the key. The current v2 mini satellites are “mini” because they are limited by the size of the Falcon 9 rocket. The real revolution will come with the V3 satellites, designed to be deployed by the gigantic Starship rocket. According to SpaceX itselfthese larger V3 satellites will be the ones that bring “gigabit connectivity” to users.
Each Starship launch will add 60 terabits per second of download capacity to the network, which is “more than 20 times the capacity added with each V2 Mini launch on a Falcon 9,” SpaceX says. If Starship becomes a reality, there will be nothing to stand between Starlink and its goal of connecting everything.
Image | SpaceX
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