STARLINK NETWORK UPDATE
STARLINK'S SPEED AND LATENCY RADICALLY IMPROVED
Over the past year, Starlink has expanded to 42 new countries, territories and other markets around the world while growing by 2.7 million+ active customers globally and serving more than 6 million and counting with high-speed, low-latency internet. During that time, the SpaceX team has also launched more than 100 Starlink missions, adding 2,300+ satellites to the constellation, and invested heavily in our ground infrastructure, network backbone, and internal technologies and systems.
As a result, Starlink can provide download speeds of 100s of Mbps to individual customers. In the United States alone, the median download speed across more than 2 million active Starlink customers during times of peak demand is nearly 200 Mbps as of July 2025. Even Starlink’s lower speed tier offering currently serves customers with 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds in most states and territories. And as we continue to connect more people with high-speed internet around the world in the months and years ahead, the Starlink team is focused on ensuring the overall quality of service for new and existing customers continually improves.
CURRENT NETWORK PERFORMANCE
Starlink’s speed and latency have radically improved over the past year. With an unprecedented level of growth, and more than 6 million active customers and counting globally, the network serves exponentially more users. For example, in the United States the average household is approximately 2.5 people. Starlink also connects schools, health centers, and businesses – including most major cruise lines and several commercial airlines who provide Starlink’s high-speed internet to tens of millions of passengers a year. With an ever-growing number of people using the network in the United States and around the world, the Starlink team has laid the foundation for a massive step-increase in capacity over the next few years.
As previously detailed, Starlink engineering teams have been focused on improving the performance of our network – driving latency as low as possible, with the goal of delivering a service with stable 20 millisecond (ms) median latency and minimal packet loss.
Latency refers to the amount of time, usually measured in milliseconds, that it takes for a packet to be sent from the Starlink router to the internet and for the response to be received. This is also known as “round-trip time”, or RTT. Latency is one of the most important factors in perceived experience when using the internet – web pages load faster, audio and video calls feel closer to real-life, and online gaming is responsive.
Starlink has also deployed the largest satellite ground network ever. More than 100 gateway sites in the United States alone – comprising a total of over 1,500 antennas – are strategically placed to deliver the lowest possible latency, especially for those who live in rural and remote areas. Starlink produces these gateway antennas at our factory in Redmond, Washington where we rapidly scaled production to match satellite production and launch rate.
To measure Starlink’s latency, we collect anonymized measurements from millions of Starlink routers every 15 seconds. In the U.S., Starlink routers perform hundreds of thousands of speed test measurements and hundreds of billions of latency measurements every day. This high-frequency automated measurement assures consistent data quality, with minimal sampling bias, interference from Wi-Fi conditions, or bottlenecks from third-party hardware.
As of June 2025, Starlink is delivering median peak-hour latency of 25.7 milliseconds (ms) across all customers in the United States. In the US, fewer than one percent of measurements exceed 55 ms, significantly better than even some terrestrial operators.
NETWORK RESILIENCE
With more than 7,800 satellites in orbit, Starlink customers always have multiple satellites in view, as well as multiple gateway sites and internet points-of-presence locations (PoPs). As a result, Starlink customers benefit from continuous service even when terrestrial broadband is suffering from fiber cuts, subsea cable damage, and power outages that can deny service to millions of individuals for days.
Additionally, each Starlink satellite is equipped with cutting-edge optical links that ensure they can relay hundreds of gigabits of traffic directly with each other, no matter what happens on the ground. This laser network enables Starlink satellites to consistently and reliably deliver data around the world and route traffic around any ground conditions that affect terrestrial service at speeds that are physically impossible on Earth.
Starlink regularly provides critical connectivity during natural disasters, such as delivering service to thousands of families and first responders during wildfires across Maui, Los Angeles and Canada. When flooding struck the U.S. southeast after Hurricane Helene, dislocating thousands, Starlink stepped up—delivering critical connectivity for free across the region, including areas where all other technologies were incapacitated. During a power outage affecting the entirety of Spain and Portugal, Starlink service remained fully functional for the duration of the outage, despite eventual loss of power that took out nearly all other forms of broadband. Most recently, Starlink provided critical connectivity to support search and rescue teams in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding in Texas Hill Country.
NETWORK SCALABILITY
A fundamental design feature of the Starlink network has been the ability to continually add capacity and new capabilities with the launch of additional satellites into the constellation and the introduction of updated satellite designs. Starlink is currently deploying over 5 Tbps (5,000 Gbps) of capacity per week to the constellation with the current second generation of satellites. The current generation of satellite has four times the capacity of the original Starlink satellite versions, which allows us to deploy more capacity per week than the total capacity of any current GEO or full LEO constellation operating today.
Starlink has rapidly improved its service through adding to the constellation with updated satellites. In the past year alone, SpaceX deployed more than 2,300 Starlink satellites, amounting to nearly 450 Tbps of cumulative capacity added in total.
As Starlink is uniquely capable of quickly connecting those who live in rural and remote regions, we have begun launching additional Starlink satellites into polar orbits to even further improve service in Alaska and other polar regions. We plan to launch more than 400 additional satellites to the polar inclination by the end of 2025 alone, which will more than double the capacity for Alaskan customers alone, as well as other high latitude locations. The first of these additional satellites have begun to serve Alaskan users already, nearly doubling median peak-hour download speeds over the past month.
FUTURE NETWORK CAPACITY
Starlink continues to scale the network with its third-generation satellites and gateway ground stations. These advancements will add an order of magnitude improvement in capacity compared to the current satellite. SpaceX is targeting to begin launching its third-generation satellites in the first half of 2026. Each one of these new satellites is designed to provide over a terabit per second of downlink capacity (> 1,000 Gbps) and over 200 Gbps of uplink capacity to customers on the ground. This is more than 10 times the downlink and 24 times the uplink capacity of the second-generation satellites.
Each Starlink launch of third-generation satellites on Starship is projected to add 60 Tbps of capacity to the network, more than 20 times the capacity added with each launch today. Additionally, third-generation satellites will use SpaceX’s next generation computers, modems, beamforming, and switching and will operate at low altitude to further improve the network’s latency.
Starlink’s system is designed to scale rapidly and improve continuously. From satellite design and production to launch and ground infrastructure, Starlink is uniquely positioned to keep pace with rising demand around the world, support the rollout of 5G and advanced services, and remain resilient in the face of natural disasters and infrastructure failures.
Sign up to receive Starlink email updates here.