SpaceX President Shares Starlink Will Provide Global Broadband Coverage By September

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SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell had a virtual conference with the Macquarie Group (MQG.AX) during which she mentioned some details about the company’s Starlink network. SpaceX is deploying 12,000 internet-beaming satellites to provide service worldwide, primarily in areas where connection is unreliable of completely unavailable. To date, SpaceX has launched 1,737 satellites to low Earth orbit. The company continues to launch Starlink satellites atop its reusable Falcon 9 rocket fleet every month. Shotwell says that deploying the entire Starlink constellation will cost the company $10 billion. The company says that over half-a-million already pre-ordered the Starlink service.

During the conference, Ms. Shotwell shared that Starlink will provide global broadband coverage by September this year. “We've successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe,” she said, according to Reuters. Each Starlink satellite is equipped with a single solar array and krypton-powered ion thrusters that are utilized to rise into its operational orbit. Once the newest clusters of satellites reach their designated orbit they can start beaming signal to the user terminals on Earth. –“But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services,” Shotwell added.

Many countries around the world are still pending approval, Shotwell shared that Starlink currently beams its internet service to 11 countries. Some of the countries SpaceX is actively beaming Starlink internet to include: portions of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France, Austria, Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealand. More European countries, regions in the United States, and Mexico, could have coverage during the second half of 2021 and early 2022.

Starlink is still in its beta phase, SpaceX is still working towards improving the network’s capabilities. The company still has “a lot of work to do to make the network reliable," Shotwell said last month during the Satellite 2021 LEO Digital Forum, adding that they do not “have a timeframe for getting out of the beta phase.” Regarding service pricing, Shotwell said that the company has no plans to set varying price data plans for the Starlink internet service. –“I don’t think we’re going to do tiered pricing to consumers. We’re going to try to keep it as simple as possible and transparent as possible, so, right now there are no plans to tier for consumers,” Shotwell said. The Starlink service currently does not impose data caps, users across the world pay the same $99 USD price for internet connection.

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