In early 2019, SpaceX received approval to launch 12,000 satellites into space to build a low earth orbit network of satellites, enabling the company to sell home Internet. Over the last year, SpaceX put 300 satellites into space to test its Internet service. Today, SpaceX will make its 6th launch with 60 more satellites for their new home Internet service, meaning SpaceX will soon have 360 home Internet service satellites in space. SpaceX had hoped to launch these satellites last week but it was delayed because of the weather.
This puts SpaceX one step closer to having an Internet service live in time for summer 2020 when it hopes to have the network live in North America.
How much will SpaceX Internet service cost? We still don’t know for sure, but earlier at SXSW SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said it would be “low cost.” Exactly how low is unknown, but reports are that SpaceX hopes to make its Internet service extremely competitive. SpaceX also plans to offer high speed Internet in North America sometime in early 2020.
We don’t know how fast it will be but SpaceX says it will be fast enough to game with. “It will be a pretty good experience because it’ll be very low latency,” Elon Musk said in a Q&A session at the Satellite 2020 conference speaking about using SpaceX internet for gaming. “We’re targeting latency below 20 milliseconds, so somebody could play a fast-response video game at a competitive level, like that’s the threshold for the latency.”
If SpaceX can offer speeds for gaming, they could easily offer speeds for streaming. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and more don’t require nearly the speed or latency that gaming needs.
SpaceX is not the only company working on a new home Internet service. Amazon and others are also working to launch satellites to offer high speed Internet. Soon you may have several new options for home Internet.
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