Starlink satellite Internet has about 90,000 users

SpaceX has added subscribers to its Starlink satellite Internet service, with Elon Musk’s company saying it now serves about 90,000 users worldwide.

The company gave an update on Starlink’s growth in a July 29 call with officials from the Federal Communications Commission, noting that the service now has users in 12 countries. The total new user, who appears to count the number of households with a Starlink platform, marks an increase of about 20,000 users in a month, as Musk said in late June that the company had passed “the strategically significant number of 69,420 active users. “

Starlink is the company’s capital-intensive project to build an interconnected internet network with thousands of satellites, known in the space industry as a constellation, designed to provide high-speed Internet to consumers everywhere on the planet. SpaceX first launched the service with a beta program for select consumers for $ 99 a month, and in the past year has sought regulatory approval to test the network’s influence and expand the service to large moving vehicles. , such as ships and trucks.

SpaceX also told the FCC that Starlink has “more than half a million orders / deposits worldwide,” Musk said in June that the company could add as many users by the summer of 2022.

Starlink is the largest constellation of satellites in the world, with more than 1,700 satellites launched to date.

The company also gave the FCC an overview of the “next-generation satellites” that society plans to start launching. The new Starlink satellites will feature “faster speeds,” “lower latency” and “more backhaul capacity” to serve more users, SpaceX said. Latency is the amount of delay in an internet network. It measures how long it takes for a signal to travel back and forth from a destination.