SpaceX's Starlink Announces It Now Has 1 Million Users
upstart writes:
Apparently a lot of people have signed up to Elon Musk's internet service provider:
SpaceX has announced that its internet service provider Starlink now has over 1 million active subscribers. It seems CEO Elon Musk's ongoing Twitter trash fire didn't stop enough people from signing up to his ISP to hold it back from this milestone.
[...] Though no doubt intended to sound impressive, Starlink's significant subscriber count may not be great news for its existing customers. According to a September report by Ookla, Starlink's median download speeds have dropped year-on-year since 2021's second quarter in every country the internet speed measurement company tracks. (Note: Ookla and Mashable are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)
[...] SpaceX also announced in August that it was partnering with T-Mobile to allow customers' mobile phones to connect directly with Starlink satellites, with beta testing to run in late 2023. This will potentially add even more people to Starlink's user base.
The company is likely aware of Starlink's flagging speeds, and appears to have taken steps to mitigate both use and expectation. In the ISP's new fair use policy introduced in November, SpaceX states that customers who exceed certain data limits during their monthly billing cycle will now have their internet speed throttled - that is, deliberately slowed down. Users will then have to pay extra to get their speeds back up.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.