Elon Musk’s Starlink To Provide Internet Nearly Worldwide |

Elon Musk’s Starlink To Provide Internet Nearly Worldwide

Elon Musk’s satellite network Starlink is on track to beam broadband internet everywhere in the world except the polar regions by August.

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 on Tuesday.

The internet network, in the midst of an open beta phase, has launched more than 1,700 satellites to low-Earth orbit since 2018 and recently surpassed a “strategically significant” benchmark of 69,420 active users, Musk said. He said Starlink is already running in 12 countries and expanding. “We’re I think on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months,” he added.

The internet service will be sold directly to consumers in the world’s most rural areas and to governments looking for better military internet connections.

While the cost of each Starlink terminal is $499 for consumers, Musk admitted at the conference that each terminal costs SpaceX double that, over $1,000.

The company has already cut the terminal cost in half from $3,000 and is aiming to reduce it to the “few hundred dollar range within the next year or two,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said in April.

Musk said the Starlink team has signed deals with two “major country” telecom operators, but he didn’t name them. He considers Starlink to be “complementary” to existing 5G providers rather than directly competing with them.

Already, the company has begun talks with the Nigerian government to make its intention known that it wants to be an operator in Africa’s largest economy according to Legit.

Most of that revenue will fund SpaceX’s Starship system, the centerpiece of Musk’s ambitions to ferry humans to the Moon and Mars.

Musk, known for tossing around wildly ambitious development timelines such as launching the first orbital Starship test launch could come sometime in “the next few months.”