I have never made any secret of the fact that I am a huge supporter of the Starlink project. Utilising satellites to effectively bring affordable and fast internet to everyone around the world certainly sounds like a very worthy pursuit. Albeit, I freely concede that while the availability of the service has expanded quite significantly over the last year, at the time of writing, it hasn’t exactly managed to tick that ‘affordable’ box yet.
Sticking with the overall theme of infrastructure, however, following a report via CNET, Starlink has confirmed that based on current projects, worldwide availability and access to their internet service should be set to arrive before the end of September this year!
Starlink on Track for Global Coverage
Effectively operating as an offshoot of the SpaceX project, Starlink is touting itself, with more than a little success, as being basically the worlds first world internet provider. And I mean this literally as in they intend to bring access to their service to literally every corner of our planet.
Offering fibre-like speeds, this is clearly something that will be of exceptional interest to many and in first-world situations, an absolute Godsend for those living in rural areas with exceptionally dated phone services, where double-digit access seems like the stuff of legend. – Bring connectivity to the world, however, not only provides some amazing possibilities in humanitarian aspects, but it could also be the final hurdle to solving Starlink’s greatest problem as a business.
What Do We Think?
As we noted above, one of the biggest overall issues for consumers and Starlink at the moment is that getting it right now is not cheap. For UK customers, it costs around £500 in a ‘set-up’ fee with an additional monthly charge of £99. This is basically 4 times what I’m currently paying for my internet service and, as such, as much as I would like it, it’s not exactly ‘affordable’.
With this almost certainly just representing the early adopter ‘tax’, however, (don’t forget, Starlink is still exceptionally new) the moment this drops down to something a little more reasonable, given that my home internet is currently determined by how well my phone lines are maintained (which in short, isn’t very well), I’m going to be all over this. And I suspect many others will be too!
If you do, incidentally, want to learn more about Starlink (and see what your current coverage is) you can check out their official website via the link here!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
