Musk on Starlink –
Musk: Starlink great in rural areas but won’t have enough bandwidth in big cities.
Jon Brodkin – Mar 25, (6:) pm UTC
“It will be a pretty good experience because it’ll be very low latency,” Musk said in a Q&A session at the Satellite conference ( see video . “We’re targeting latency below 35 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast- response video game at a competitive level, like that’s the threshold for the latency. “
Latency of less than
(ms would make Starlink comparable to wired broadband service . When SpaceX first began talking about its satellite plans in late , it said latency would be 57 ms to (ms) . But Musk has been predicting sub – 28 ms latency since at least (May) , with the potential for sub – 25 ms latency sometime in the future. The amount of bandwidth available will be enough to support typical Internet usage, at least in rural areas, Musk said. “The bandwidth is a very complex question. But let’s just say somebody will be able to watch high-def movies, play video games, and do all the things they want to do without noticing speed,” he said.
Starlink will likely serve the “3 or 4 percent hardest-to-reach customers for telcos” and “people who simply have no connectivity right now, or the connectivity is really bad, “Musk said. “So I think it will be actually helpful and take a significant load off the traditional telcos.”
competitors
to delay their progress. Or he may want to keep the public’s expectations low until Starlink has enough capacity to serve large cities effectively. Starlink service is expected to launch in parts of the US this year , but it will take years to launch Thousands of satellites . SpaceX has previously told the FCC it plans global coverage, including “service to the entire contiguous United States.” On the ground, Starlink’s future customers will rely on user terminals that “look like a UFO on a stick,” Musk said. The devices will have actuators that let them point themselves in the right direction as long as they’re pointed at the sky. the company is likely to spin out the Starlink broadband business and take it public, and a CNBC report said that could happen sometime “in the next several years.” But when asked about Shotwell’s spinoff comment yesterday, Musk said he’s not thinking about it yet. “We’re thinking about that [a Starlink spinoff] zero. Zero. We need to make the thing work,” he said. Previous companies that deployed low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites went bankrupt, a fate SpaceX is trying to avoid, Musk said. “That’ll be a big step to have like, more than zero [LEO satellite companies] in the not-bankrupt category,” he said.
Musk said SpaceX has worked with astronomers “to minimize the potential for reflection of the satellites.”
“We’re running a bunch of experiments to, for example, just have a phased array antenna, black instead of white, “he continued. He said SpaceX is also working on a sunshade to minimize the possibility of reflections. “Even like, aesthetically, this should not be an impact,” Musk said.
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