A SpaceX Starlink user from United Kingdom shared they are receiving high-speed internet service from the broadband satellite constellation. Their download speed is 430Mbps (Megabits per second) in West Cornwall, a rural region on England’s rocky southwestern tip. The area forms a peninsula with sandy beaches and wild moorland. SpaceX says Starlink is ideal for rural and remote areas where it is too expensive to get reliable access to internet. A data download speed of 430Mbps is quite fast, compared to what the Starlink user used to experience with their previous internet provider –“[…] The available speed for my new house was 1Mbps so I needed to find a solution fast,” they shared via Reddit. The average download speeds by other telecommunication companies across the United Kingdom is around 79Mbps and in rural Cornwall it is around 25Mbps, according to SkyNews data. SpaceX advertises on its Starlink.com website that Starlink "Users can expect to see download speeds between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps and latency as low as 20ms in most locations."
Source: SpaceX Starlink User In Cornwall United Kingdom via Reddit.
The United Kingdom government is reportedly in discussions with SpaceX officials since last year to bring Starlink broadband internet to rural regions under the country’s ‘Project Gigabit’ program. The program aims to connect rural and remote communities where internet service is unreliable. The $6.9 billion program is working to partner with multiple companies to help enable internet service in rural areas across the nation in an effort to close the digital divide. Around 510,000 households and businesses in the country are set to become the first to benefit from Project Gigabit. United Kingdom’s Minister for Digital Infrastructure Matt Warman, talked to several telecommunication companies leaders, including SpaceX representatives for a potential partnership under the program back in March 2021. It is unknown whether Project Gigabit is already working with SpaceX to connect rural regions across U.K. If U.K. officials select SpaceX as Project Gigabit internet provider, it would serve rural communities located in: Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Dorset, Durham, Essex, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Tees Valley.
SpaceX Starlink constellation of 1,469 active satellites in Low Earth Orbit already serves 145,000 Starlink users across 25 countries, including rural regions located in: United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. The company’s ultimate goal is to launch at least 12,000 internet-beaming satellites to blanket the Earth with broadband internet. Read more about Starlink in the previous TESMANIAN article, linked below.
Elon Musk Shares How Many SpaceX Starlink Satellites Are Operational, Says ‘Lasers Links Activate Soon’https://t.co/OHxSrON6Sg
— Tesmanian.com (@Tesmanian_com) January 15, 2022
Featured Image Source: SpaceX
About the Author
Evelyn Janeidy Arevalo
Evelyn J. Arevalo joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover news as a Space Journalist and SpaceX Starbase Texas Correspondent. Evelyn is specialized in rocketry and space exploration. The main topics she covers are SpaceX and NASA.
