Verticals

The great connectivity disruption

If I were a telco, I'd be anxious about Starlink.

14 January 2021

It's quite something, watching the deployment of Starlink satellites. They slip out of the rocket that carried them into space, floating away in a bunch and separating over days to find their spots in the sky. It's a quiet revolution if I ever saw one. At the time of writing, SpaceX had delivered nearly a thousand of these satellites, and there are many more to come.

Once done, this constellation will cover the globe, providing accessible broadband-speed internet to anyone with a base station: a satellite dish about the size of a decoder's. Early beta results are impressive – the performance and latency seem to be that of a 5G connection, which in my experience (of commercial 5G) fluctuates between the low teens and low hundreds of megabits per second, and latencies of between 10 and 40 milliseconds. The equivalent of a temperamental fibre link, so to speak.

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