The average download speeds with Starlink have recently decreased significantly in several states. This is shown by Ookla speed tests.
As more people subscribe to Starlink satellite internet, average download and upload speeds seem to be declining. This is suggested by figures from the US company Ookla. It offers one of the most popular internet connection speed tests.
In the USA, around 63 MBit/s are still achieved with Starlink for downloads, at the end of 2021 it was well over 100 MBit/s, and in the first quarter of this year around 90 MBit/s. According to the figures, the average in Germany has fallen from over 110 Mbit/s to 95 Mbit/s most recently. The service has also become significantly slower in Canada and Great Britain.
Enough for normal internet use with one device
The declines in speed between the first and second quarters of this year in the six markets of Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Great Britain and the USA range from 9 to 54 percent. Starlink is the slowest in the USA, followed by Canada, Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand and France. Starlink was released in these countries in exactly this order.
Average download speeds of 60 Mbit/s in North America are still “more than enough to use most applications on the Internet, including video streaming, game downloads and chats, with at least one connected device,” says Ookla.
According to the figures, the situation in Europe looks better than in North America. In 16 states, the speeds determined for Starlink were higher than the respective average speeds for broadband landline connections, and in ten states an average of over 100 Mbit/s was achieved. According to the Ookla numbers, Starlink was the fastest in Portugal and the Netherlands, with an average download speed of over 120 Mbit/s.
Starlink only has to lose feathers everywhere when it comes to latency, so on average the connection reacted fastest in Great Britain and Spain with just under 40 ms each. In contrast, the highest average latencies in the Internet via a cable connection in the analyzed countries are 14 ms.
Half a million customers
It was foreseeable that Starlink would have capacity problems as the number of users grew. SpaceX boss Elon Musk had also repeatedly admitted this. According to the latest figures, the service had in early June almost 500,000 customers worldwide. With the steadily growing number of satellites, however, speeds should improve, according to Starlink.
The company now has more than 3,000 active satellites in space and is conducting at least tests with Starlink on every continent. The speed and latency values achieved are significantly higher than those of other satellite Internet services, despite the slowdowns. In August, Starlink reduced the monthly fee, in some cases significantly.
SpaceX has been building Starlink since 2019, with the aim of providing fast Internet access to places that cannot be connected economically with other technology. Starlink is the first and by far the most advanced project to build a so-called megaconstellation. There are other plans for alternative offers, such as from OneWeb or Amazon with the Project Kuiper. When the US telecommunications regulator FCC decided last month that SpaceX would not get almost a billion US dollars from the US treasury to provide remote rural regions with satellite internet via Starlink, it was based, among other things, on speed tests. SpaceX has appealed against this.
