The Starlink satellite Internet solution is growing at a relatively rapid pace, and the catchment area has grown significantly since its inception. A major milestone has now been reached, reports SpaceX.

In one Twitter post it is stated that Starlink has now crossed the magic limit of one million active users in a global context.

eat performance

Last year’s mighty ramp-up of terminal production So paid off, with SpaceX struggling to fulfill customer orders for a while due to a major production backlog. End of August last year 100,000 Starlink terminals had been sold.

However, the sharp increase in the number of users also has its drawbacks. As Digi.no reported in September this year, Starlink’s popularity has recently begun to seriously eat away at its performance.

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest.net service, obtained performance data from the second quarter of the current year – and they indicated that Starlink’s average performance has dropped significantly.

– Speedtest Intelligence reveals median download speeds for Starlink dropped in Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, UK and US by 9% to 54% between Q2 2021 and Q2 2022 as more users start using the service, Ookla wrote.

Norway included for the first time

In the third trimester performance dropped again, but not as much. Interesting news in the third quarter was that Norway was included in Ookla’s performance report for Starlink for the first time, after the service became available in parts of the country earlier this year.

According to Ookla metrics, Starlink’s median download speed in Norway is 113.86 Mbit/second, while upload speed is measured at 16.67 Mbit/second. The response time is 73 milliseconds.

That’s a bit higher than the median download speed of normal terrestrial internet, which Ookla says runs with a performance of 102.71 Mbit/second. The download speed is 86.13 Mbit/second.

The major milestone comes around the same time that an important new phase of Starlink’s development has begun. In early December, SpaceX obtained approval by the US agency FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to launch a new batch of second-generation satellites.

The new approval gives SpaceX the option to expand the existing constellation with 7,500 additional satellites. The company’s request was for a total of 29,988, so initially the request was only partially approved.