On Tuesday, Elon Musk has announced that his satellite network, Starlink will be everywhere in the world except the North Pole and South Pole.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has launched more than 1,500 satellites so far and has Starlink operations in about a dozen countries, Musk said during a presentation at the Mobile World Congress conference. That’s costing a lot. SpaceX’s total investment in the network will be between $5 billion and $10 billion before cash flow is positive, he said.
“We recently passed the strategically notable number of 69,420 active users,” Musk joked. “We’re I think on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months.”
SpaceX has set its sights to offer broadband to as much as five percent of the world’s population where traditional fibre and wireless networks cannot reach. Musk stated that he has signed two deals with “major country” telecom operators, though he could not name them yet, but he is in discussions with more.
Starlink will provide so-called “data back haul” spines for their networks. The satellite network currently moves about 30 terabits of data per second, and Musk said he’s targeting a user latency — or network response time — of less than 20 milliseconds.
The company will also be launching a new version of Starlink’s satellites next year, which comes with inter-satellite laser links to help them cover polar regions.
