📡 One month with Starlink

Starlink is bringing rural communities into the high-speed era.

Starlink is bringing rural communities into the high-speed era. It’s all in this subscriber-only edition of Musk Reads+ #105.

---

Johnny S. works remotely as a software developer for a major technology company. In January 2021, he moved with his wife and child from London to rural Kent. The south-eastern county is known as the “Garden of England” due to its idyllic scenery and views.

That’s nice for fresh air and open skies, but for broadband? Not so good.

Enter Starlink. SpaceX’s under-development service promises high speed and low latency internet access to anywhere with a view of the skies. Just unpack the kit, point the dish at the sky, plug in, and go.

The company claims users can expect speeds of between 100 and 200 megabits per second, and latencies as low as 20 milliseconds, in most places. SpaceX rolled out Starlink services to the U.K. at the end of 2020, just months after the U.S. and Canada.

It’s received a warm reception in the U.S. — in Musk Reads+ #35, cybersecurity expert and Starlink user Nicholas Underwood declared it was “non-tech person ready.”

Johnny ordered Starlink on September 23. SpaceX shipped the kit on October 15. When Johnny spoke with to Inverse, he’d been using it for a month.

“I’m happy with the service,” he says. “I was worried about outages [but] they are not really noticeable.”

The catch? It costs around twice as much as their old connection.