Musk made the statement on Twitter while discussing his company’s ongoing efforts to improve Starlink, the company’s satellite internet network.
“Ping should improve dramatically in coming months. We’re aiming for tweet.
Currently, the latencies for SpaceX’s satellite internet network can
The company’s goal is to reduce the latencies to under 20ms later this year. To pull this off, Musk said SpaceX is working to establish more Starlink ground stations across the globe. These ground stations are connected to local fiber networks and beam the internet data to the Starlink satellites in orbit.
In addition, the company is working to streamline the internet
According to Musk, theoretically Starlink should only need 10 milliseconds to route the internet data, if all the impediments can be removed. “Looking at speed of light as ~300km per millisecond & satellite altitude of ~550km, average photon round-trip time is only ~10ms, so a lot of silly things have to happen to drive ping >20ms,” he added.
To further drive down the latency, SpaceX has been incorporating built-in lasers on the newest Starlink satellites to transmit data from one satellite to the next —all while in orbit. The company has previously said the lasers can “transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data” between the satellites.
On Wednesday, Musk
The lasers might also make it possible for Starlink satellites to serve the internet data to users without fetching the information from ground stations on Earth. “Some traffic could just go terminal -> satellite -> satellite -> terminal and never touch the regular Internet,” Musk
SpaceX’s other major
To sign up for Starlink, you can go to the company’s official