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Elon Musk says SpaceX Starlink satellite broadband beta testing starts in a few months:
This week [SpaceX] launched another batch of 60 satellites to bring the total size of its growing Starlink broadband constellation to more than 400. While it has the go-ahead to launch more than 12,000 satellites in the coming years, Musk said Wednesday that a "private beta" test of the service will begin in about three months, followed by a public beta about three months later for testers at northern latitudes.
In response to a Twitter user, Musk said Germany qualifies as far enough north, which could mean that much of northern Europe, Canada and the northernmost parts of the US may be eligible to try the service.
There is only so much bandwidth per satellite, so your pizza-box-sized transceiver would experience more congestion and lower throughput in an urban area than it would in a rural setting.
How many Soylentils are interested in signing up?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @09:23PM
https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/7xzkl5/starlink_satellite_bandwidth/ [reddit.com]
They could use more bandwidth. Hopefully, future revisions will increase bandwidth per satellite beyond 20 Gbps. They also haven't done sat-to-sat laser links yet.
Given the rural users this is targeting, per-GB-pricing, data caps, or speeds much lower than 1 Gbps would still be an improvement. The top tier of customers won't be home users, but banks and the U.S. Air Force.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]