SpaceX tells FCC it has a plan to make Starlink about 10 times faster
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In the article they mention SpaceX claim of 'gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally", but also mention that current speeds are 25-220 megabits and 4 milions customers.
The claimed 10x throughput could get people up to the gigabit speed, but that would work if the number of customers remain stable, right ?
Some back of the envelop calculations = it takes about 7ms in extra latency to travel up and down to the satellite vertically on a round trip, and modeling fiber optic vs starlink as two spheres of different radii starlink will take ~16% more time. Performance will be also extremely affected by the reliability of the medium ie packet loss from errors transmitting through the atmosphere vs fiber optic. Most congestion controls believe latency and packet loss comes from congestion and will aggressively back off. When I tested this on my own 866Mbps WiFi network with iperf and linux qc, with a 100ms latency and 1% packet loss my throughput was 1.86Mbps. At 5ms latency and 0.01% packet loss it was 58Mbps.
Don't ignore the other bands other than Ku for user receivers