Starlink satellites are taking the world by storm. Every day, airline companies are subscribing to Starlink and providing exponentially better internet services to their customers. There are many who are wrongly and ignorantly contending that Starlink is not providing anything new to the airline industry, and even before Starlink, airlines had internet on board the aircraft. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
A key difference between Starlink and legacy satellite internet operators is that Starlink functions in Low Earth Orbit (around 340-550 km above Earth), enabling better latency, whereas the legacy operators have their satellites in geostationary orbit (around 36,000 km above Earth), due to which the latency is very high.
To understand the prowess of Starlink, we first need to understand the global internet bandwidth or capacity. It is on the order of 2000 Tbps (Terabits per second), and this figure does not meaningfully include Starlink bandwidth since it is based on LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites. Now, Starlink’s bandwidth/capacity alone is around 700-800 Tbps.
You might think that yeah, okay, Starlink has reached around 35-40% capacity of total internet speed, but still it has a long way to go. True. At this juncture, it is important to know a bit about the technology behind Starlink. Currently, Starlink provides internet through its V2/V2 Mini satellites that add roughly 2-2.7 Tbps of capacity per launch of 23-29 satellites on Falcon 9. The speed is around 96 Gbps downlink per satellite.
The game-changer is the V3 satellite of Starlink that has already been tested and will be actively deployed in the future. V3 has 10x more capacity than V2 satellites in downlink capabilities and around 22x more capacity in uplink capabilities. Each V3 can provide around 1 Tbps downlink and 160 Gbps uplink. In the future, one Starship load can carry around 60 satellites, adding up to 60 Tbps of network capacity. Basically, V3 will enable much higher data density and lay down the path to gigabit-class consumer speeds at scale.
To provide further perspective, a total of around 12,500 Starlink satellites have been launched so far, out of which around 1,500 have been deorbited. Starlink already has FCC authorizations up to 15,000 second-generation satellites (Gen2) and has longer-term filings up to 30,000-40,000 more for Gen2 alone. Apart from that, more authorizations are being filed for up to 100,000 Gen3 satellites.
However, Starlink is not without competition. Its main competitors are Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper), which has around 400 satellites in orbit and focuses primarily on AWS integration. There is Eutelsat OneWeb with around 650 satellites that focuses mostly on governments and B2B. Other formidable competitors of Starlink are Qianfan/Guowang, which also have hundreds of satellites in orbit and plans for around 10,000 more.
Starlink has the unique advantage of vertical integration that no other venture has. It has its own launch, manufacturing, and operations capabilities. Also, rapid iteration has already given it a substantial lead. V3 satellites are likely going to widen this gap further.
Starlink will replace a lot of conventional cable and terrestrial infrastructure in the long run because of its coverage and deployment speed. Fibre optic cable requires years of trenching and capital, whereas Starlink can add capacity almost anywhere in months via satellite launches. Further, in sparsely populated areas, the marginal cost of serving one more user favours the satellites. Also, Starlink provides the much-needed redundancy. In case of any geopolitical conflict or natural calamity, the cables can get destroyed, whereas a distributed LEO mesh provides alternative paths.
Starlink is not merely an incremental upgrade. It is a fundamental shift in how connectivity can be delivered at planetary scale. With V3 satellites and Starship capacity on the horizon, the gap between Starlink and every other system will only grow wider.