With the recent launch of SpaceX Starlink for beta testers, the first speed tests of the satellite internet service have started appearing on the internet, and they are showing some impressive download speeds.
Probably the most popular internet speed testing site available is Ookla’s Speedtest.net. Users on Reddit have been able to scour the site and so far found about a dozen speed tests registered to Starlink.
According to this graphic, compiled by a Reddit user and reported by ArsTechnica, show download speeds ranging from 35Mbps up to 60Mbps.
All of the tests seen above were conducted from Los Angeles, California, while some additional tests found on the site and posted to Reddit were from just south of the Canadian border in Seattle, Washington.
Upload speeds ranged from 4Mbps to 17Mbps, while ping, or latency figures, were as low as 20 milliseconds (ms) and up to a high of 90ms.
While these initial tests for download speed don’t meet Elon Musk’s goal of the service delivering speeds of 1Gbps, they are already better than what users in rural areas of Canada see from their current internet service.
According to a study conducted by the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) in April 2020, the median rural download speed in Canada was just 3.78Mbps. That means the current offering from Starlink, in its very early beta form with just 600 of the nearly 12,000 planned satellites, is already 10X faster than what most rural Canadians receive.
