Starlink, a satellite internet service made by SpaceX, has a wider coverage. However, the average speed has slowed down.
Based on data from Ookla -- the maker of the Speedtest service -- the company created by Elon Musk is quietly expanding its coverage to countries other than the United States. Namely providing high-speed internet services using low-orbit satellites.
However, the Ookla report also states that the wider coverage has caused Starlink's speed to decrease as well, as quoted by Forbes, Sunday (12/26/2021).
According to Ookla, even though the speed is slowing down, Starlink is still the best satellite internet service provider on the market. The speed offered by Starlink is still much faster than existing competitors.
Starlink is currently able to provide a median speed of 87.25 Mbps, still much higher than similar service providers such as HughesNet, whose median speed is only 19.30 Mbps, while Viasat is only 18.75 Mbps.
Currently, only Starlink can provide satellite internet services that can provide speeds that can be compared to cable-based broadband internet connections, as well as the only service that can qualify to be called broadband internet, namely speeds above 25Mbps.
Not only the download speed is fast, the upload speed is also much faster than the requirement to be called broadband internet, which is 13.54 Mbps (the minimum requirement is 3 Mbps).
Even so, Starlink's median speed is currently lower than it was some time ago. For example, in Q1 2021, Ookla said Starlink's median speeds were 97.23 Mbps download and 13.89 Mbps upload. But then the median speed dropped to almost 10Mbps for download and 5 Mbps for upload.
For information, Starlink currently promises that users can get download speeds between 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps, of course, many factors affect this speed, such as weather and also the location of the nearest satellite.
However, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk through his Twitter account once promised that Starlink's speed will later be doubled to 300 Mbps, namely at the end of 2021. But Musk's promise is unlikely to be fulfilled based on Ookla's report.