Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s (SpaceX) Starlink satellite-based internet service has surpassed 150 Mbps in average download speeds worldwide according to data gathered by a new aggregation tool that includes results from the U.S., Europe, and other countries. The tool, dubbed as Starlink Statuspage, has so far gathered results from a little more than seventy users, which isn't much given the number of beta testers currently using the service. However, it lets us compare Starlink speeds for the different world regions, alongside the highest and lowest speeds and latencies experienced by users who submitted their results to the tool.
Starlink Performs Strongest In European Union With 176 Mbps Reveals Aggregated Data
According to the results, users in the European Union are experiencing higher speeds for Starlink than their counterparts in the U.S. The average download speed for a European user is 176 Mbps, and the highest and lowest download speeds are 422 ad 2.2 Mbps, respectively. However, while the download speeds are the highest in Europe, North America posts the lowest latency scores.
The average latency for European users is lower than their American counterparts, with those in America clocking 51 milliseconds, higher than the 33.4 milliseconds for the Europeans. However, when we delve a bit deeper into the data to check the highest and lowest speeds, the highest latency for an American user clocked out at an eye-watering 985 milliseconds, which is almost thrice the highest European latency of 365 milliseconds.
However, the lowest latency for the EU clocked out at 18 milliseconds, which is nearly double the lowest American latency of 11 milliseconds. Latency, which is the time taken for a packet of information to travel from and to a user, is a key concern for SpaceX, which expects to improve this area over the coming months.
While the tool provides tabulated performance statistics only for the EU, U.S. and Worldwide, it provides performance graphs that show the download speeds for the U.S., U.K., Denmark, France, The Netherlands and Australia.
These graphs show download speeds for the last three months and reveal that Australia had the highest Starlink download speeds worldwide for this time period. So far, SpaceX has installed 13 Starlink ground stations in the country, and the high speeds are likely due to fewer people per ground station than in the U.S. or in Europe.
The aggregated data also reveals that users in the United Kingdom have reported the lowest download speeds. Since Starlink is still building out its satellite constellation, these results are not indicative of the network's final performance.
SpaceX chief Elon Musk hopes to reduce his service's latency below 20 milliseconds, with his company planning to set up more ground stations and introduce software updates for this. Starlink has just finished deploying roughly one-third of its first phase satellites, and it is dependant on ground stations to provide users with internet connectivity.
The service is crucial to SpaceX's plans of conducting interplanetary missions with its Starship next-generation launch vehicle system. The company is planning user terminal upgrades and looking at ways to reduce the price of its terminals, which it is already subsidizing to ensure that a sufficient number of users can sign up for and use the service. Starship is also crucial for Starlink since it will let SpaceX deploy a significantly larger number of satellites than the company can right now with its Falcon 9 rocket.
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