Starlink arrived in Germany at the end of January, to the Twitter user Viv (@flcnhvy), Elon Musk is one of her followers. The offer is therefore already stable in this country. Users in rural areas without a broadband connection can therefore hope. No wonder that the service is already in high demand around the world. Worldwide, the number of users of the offer, which is still in the test stage, should already amount to over 10,000.
Download rates of 100 megabits per second are common
This shows a letter from SpaceX to the US Telecommunications Administration FCC. In it Elon Musk’s space company also states that most Starlink users are currently receiving download rates of at least 100 megabits per second. This means that the Starlink offer is already above the value that Internet users in most US states can expect, as Mashable writes. And Starlink is still under construction, the download rate should move in the future in the gigabit range. SpaceX currently states that the latency is less than 31 milliseconds.
In Germany, both Deutsche Telekom and Federal Minister Andreas Scheuer, who is responsible for digital infrastructure, is interested in the technology. According to its boss Timotheus Höttges, Telekom is in talks with the SpaceX subsidiary Starlink about a partnership. According to his own statements, Höttges is a “great admirer of Elon Musk and his ideas”. The reason is that the expansion of broadband internet in rural areas is taking longer than planned – and causing enormous costs.
Starlink voucher for German households?
Starlink promises to be cheaper here. The equipment, user terminal, satellite dish plus tripod and WLAN router, costs a one-time fee of a few hundred euros. Around 100 euros are then due monthly for use. Federal Minister Scheuer is therefore considering issuing Starlink vouchers to those households that have a very poor internet connection and for which no expansion is planned for the time being. With the planned 500 euros, these households could then at least buy the necessary hardware. “Nationwide, we could supply around 200,000 households with high-speed internet overnight in this way and enable them to participate digitally,” Scheuer told Focus Online.
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