Elon Musk’s SpaceX-led Starlink broadband-beaming satellites now offer coverage across most of the US, Mexico, and significant coverage of Canada and Europe, as well as Australia and New Zealand.
All in all, SpaceX claims Starlink is available in 32 countries as shown in an updated map. People who’ve ordered the service from areas on map marked as “available” will have their Starlink terminals shipped “immediately”, the company said in a tweet.
The coverage map indicates Starlink is available in most of the US, the southern part of Canada, all of Mexico, most of Europe except Scandinavia, parts of South America, Australia’s most densely populated regions and New Zealand.
Musk flagged the new Starlink availability map in a tweet just ahead of tweeting that his $44bn takeover of Twitter was on hold as he vetted Twitter’s disclosure that 5% of Twitter accounts are spam or fake.
In the past two years SpaceX has launched over 2,500 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit. Notably in Europe, Ukraine is marked as “coming soon” even though SpaceX expedited the delivery of antennas to the nation after its communications infrastructure was targeted by the Russian military.
Musk this week said SpaceX had, so far, successfully blocked Russian military attempts to jam Starlink satellite communications. He was responding to the US and European Union blaming Russian military for a cyberattack on Visat’s KA-SAT terminals in February.
Via the Verge, SpaceX in January claimed to have Starlink coverage in 25 countries.
Starlink in February introduced a premium antenna and service with better speed and latency. The fixed hardware costs $2,500, plus $50 shipping and handling costs, with a broadband subscription fee of $500 per month. The standard Starlink subscription costs $99 per month, but in March the price rose to $110 per month while the price of the terminal rose from $499 to $549.
The Starkink availability map also details where and when the service will be available in the coming year. It will be available in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Iceland and Greenland in Q1 2023.
Coverage is not planned for Russia, China, Iran and Afghanistan, but will be coming to many former Soviet Union nations in 2023 as well as Iraq and African nations.
Starlink is also scheduled to arrive across South East Asia and Japan in 2023, along with less densely populated areas in the northern half of Australia. In South America, Starlink is available in Chile and most of Brazil, and is slated for release to the rest of the continent in 2023.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper rival to Starlink is gearing up to launch 3,000 broadband satellites. In April, it announced it had signed deals with three commercial space companies for 83 Kuiper satellite launches.
Starlink and Kuiper are both winners of NASA’s new project to appoint commercially operated satellite replacements for its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS), which will soon be decommissioned.
