Elon Musk's Starlink internet works great if hardly anyone uses it

Starlink satellite internet equipment outside a home in Eek, a village in Southwest Alaska, in 2023. (Marc Lester / ADN)

There’s an irony with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service beamed from space: The more popular it becomes, the worse its speeds and reliability tend to get.

Those limitations are known, but a new analysis estimates the tipping point at which Starlink connections could bog down: With as few as 419 Starlink customers in an area the size of Tacoma, Washington, service for all users in the area could become unusable.

The research, led by telecommunications technology expert Sascha Meinrath, is just a hypothetical scenario. But it supports some internet policy veterans who believe that Starlink is a technology marvel and an amazing internet lifeline, as long as hardly any Americans need to rely on it.

The analysis has implications for Starlink customers and for the New Deal-style government program to expand internet access to everyone:

- If Starlink works great for you, keep it a secret from your neighbors.

- The government is on the cusp of spending more than $40 billion to extend internet connections to every American home and business. Should Starlink get a fraction of that money, or potentially many billions of dollars?

What Starlink is good for and not

If you live in an urban or suburban area, satellite-delivered internet service isn’t for you.

Buildings, trees and poles can interrupt connections between homes and Starlink satellites. Internet delivered over fiber optic lines, cable TV wires or mobile networks can handle far more internet usage at lower costs in relatively populated areas.

(Those internet services might still stink or cost you a fortune. That’s a topic for another day.)

It’s in rural and remote areas, including ships and airplanes, where satellite internet can shine - or where it’s the only good option.

Other types of internet connections may be absent, unreliable or shockingly expensive to build in these areas. Starlink can theoretically reach almost anywhere in America, if households can afford the typical $349 equipment cost plus $120 a month for Starlink’s standard internet service.

Musk has repeatedly described Starlink’s ambition not to be a mass-market internet service but one for a fraction of people that are tricky to reach with other types of connections.

(Amazon’s Project Kuiper is a Starlink competitor. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

One wrinkle for Starlink and similar satellite technologies: When many people in one area use them, internet speeds tend to significantly slow.

All internet services experience those constraints, but internet experts say they’re more acute with Starlink, particularly for uses like sending images or video calls for which you send data out to the internet.

Internet experts say that Starlink offsets this clogging problem by constantly launching new satellites, improving its technology and imposing waiting lists and “congestion” charges to restrict new sign-ups. And Starlink has outlined major changes that it says will make its service far more capable.

Starlink’s tipping point: 7 customers per square mile

Most experts agree that satellite internet is the best option for some fraction of American homes and businesses where gold-standard fiber internet lines are impractical.

But there’s a feverish debate about exactly how many Americans are better off with satellite connections and how much of America’s mammoth government subsidies for internet plumbing should go to satellite services that aren’t reliably high quality and may never be.

Meinrath is worried about enthusiasm inside the Trump administration to potentially hand Starlink a larger portion of the $42 billion earmarked to connect every American to internet service. Meinrath and his collaborators dug into data to estimate what might happen if Starlink expands.

They believe that within the geographic coverage area of a single Starlink satellite – an estimated 62.9 square miles or roughly the area of Tacoma – hitting 419 Starlink customers could become a problem. That’s an average 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile.

At that level of usage, they estimated that internet speeds for Starlink customers in the area would fall below the government’s definition of modern, reliable internet service for sending data out from your device. Service could be unusable under some conditions, they said.

I shared a draft of the research with SpaceX, the Musk company that runs Starlink, to ask for its assessment. I didn’t hear back by my deadline.

You can read the report here. Meinrath acknowledged the analysis relies on educated assumptions and needs stress testing. It’s a hypothetical scenario and it’s not clear what areas of the United States, if any, might exceed this number of Starlink customers. Starlink is also on an expansion tear that could render the analysis moot.

Chris Quilty, founder of the consultancy Quilty Space, criticized U.S. policies that for years have steered government money away from satellite internet because of concerns it’s not good enough.

He believes that Starlink is improving so quickly that it may soon be on par with conventional internet lines in some parts of America at lower costs to taxpayers. (Like everything about Starlink, the ultimate cost of satellite internet is hotly debated.)

But Evan Feinman, who oversaw a government internet expansion project during the Biden administration, said that compared to satellite connections, fiber internet lines might have higher up-front costs but will last longer and can handle Americans’ exploding internet use well into the future.

He said that America shouldn’t compromise with taxpayer money. Satellite technology like Starlink’s is “a really useful technology,” Feinman said. “It’s just not the answer for a generational investment.”