Elon Musk announces the end of the beta phase for October 2021
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet, will roll out of beta in October 2021. Elon Musk confirmed the news on Twitter. It remains to be seen whether the billionaire has once again exaggerated these deadlines or not.
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, will exit its beta phase in October 2021. This is what CEO Elon Musk just announced on Twitter in response to a question from a user. In France, Starlink has been available in beta since May 2021 from € 99 per month. Of course, we must add to this the kit offered at 499 € which contains the Wi-Fi router, power supply, cables, satellite dish and mounting tripod.
Note that this is not the first time that the billionaire and current boss of Tesla has given a date regarding the global launch of Starlink. Indeed, the service was already to come out of its beta phase in August 2021. Finally, technical problems proved Elon Musk wrong, the beta continuing for an indefinite period. The CEO had spoken again to announce the launch of Starlink in September 2021, but that was not the case.
Read also: Starlink promises to double speed to 300 Mbps in 2021
A promising start to his career for Starlink
Despite these successive postponements, the service has a promising start to its career. According to SpaceX statements, Starlink currently serves more than 100,000 users in a dozen countries through 1,700 satellites located in low orbit. The aerospace company has already taken pre-orders for the post-beta service, specifying that 500,000 people have placed an order or paid a deposit to access Starlink later.
Indeed, it is always possible to give a deposit of 99 dollars on the Starlink site to hope to be able to benefit from the service in preview. Nevertheless, the deadlines are rather long and it will be necessary to be patient as the company specifies: “Depending on where you are, some orders can take six months or more to be fulfilled ”. Nevertheless, SpaceX announced that the first 500,000 orders will be “probably served ”.
As a reminder, SpaceX assured that it intended to accelerate the production of dishes to meet the strong demand for Starlink. For the time being, the American company produces 5,000 satellite dishes per week. However, the global semiconductor shortage unsurprisingly affects SpaceX’s production capacities, like many companies around the world.
Source: ArsTechnica
