SpaceX has been able to rapidly expand its Starlink satellite internet service, at last count serving over 400,000 subscribers in 40 different countries on all seven continents. That popularity has also led to network congestion, resulting in slower download speeds and upload speeds over the past year.
The data comes from an analysis by internet speed test company Ookla, which says Starlink’s median download speeds dropped in every country they surveyed over the past year, including in Canada and the US.
The company’s data shows that median download speeds fell between 9% and 54% from Q2 2021 to Q2 2022, attributing the drop in speed to more users signing up for the service. Canada saw a median download speed of 75.73Mbps and 62.53Mbps in the US.
These speeds are below those offered by fixed broadband providers which ranged from 106.41Mbps in Canada to 150.12Mbps in the US.
Despite the drop in speeds, Ookla says the median Starlink download speed in North America was at least 60Mbps, more than enough for a single connected device to stream videos, download games, have video chats, and perform other basic internet functions.
Ookla also points out that those speeds are still higher than Starlink’s competition like Viasat and HughesNet.
The downward trend was also visible for upload speeds, and again in all countries that were tracked.
Latency on the other hand remained relatively stable, but was also still higher than that of fixed broadband services. Starlink in Canada had a latency of 59ms, while fixed broadband in Canada saw a median latency of 12ms.
