Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an alien invasion? Nope… it’s Elon Musk’s Starlink, and the satellite service is bringing the internet to low-coverage areas in Africa.
Johannesburg, South Africa (30 August 2022) – South African social media is lighting up with “WTF is that” after Elon Musk’s Starlink was spotted flying over Johannesburg’s skies last night.
The satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX (called Starlink) currently provides satellite Internet access to 500,000 subscribers in 39 countries. The project aims for global coverage by 2023. Launched in 2019, Starlink consists of over 3,000 mass-produced small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which communicate with designated ground transceivers.
“It’s an entirely different world… before Starlink, we had to ration data, and we couldn’t stream. Now we have files downloading, Pandora playing, Zoom going, and there’s no latency whatsoever.” – William D, a new Starlink subscriber.
The satellite service is focusing on low-coverage areas first, giving many people across the globe access to the internet for the first time in their lives. Starlink wants to connect “the unconnected”. According to reports, Starlink plans to go live in Mozambique and Nigeria – its first African countries – by September this year.
With Starlink internet, data is continuously being sent between a ground dish and a Starlink satellite orbiting 550km above. Furthermore, the Starlink satellite zooms across the sky at 27,000km/hr!
How can the dish and satellite maintain a continuous connection? And how is data sent back and forth? Watch this incredibly informative video below on how the technology works:
From Internet to Cheap Cellphone Coverage
In August 2022, T-Mobile US and SpaceX announced a partnership to add cellular satellite service to Starlink Gen2 satellites and provide dead-zone cell phone coverage across the US using the existing mid-band PCS spectrum that T-Mobile owns. Cell coverage will begin with messaging and expand to include voice and limited data services later, with testing to begin in 2023.
With Starlink Gen2 sats in low-Earth orbit using the existing PCS spectrum, T-Mobile plans to connect by satellite to ordinary mobile devices, unlike previous generations of satellite phones which used specialized Earth-bound radios to communicate to geosynchronous satellites with characteristic long communications lag time.
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This will not only be a game-changer for interment connectivity and satellite calls but will soon offer one of the cheapest ways to connect cell phones around the globe (hopefully in South Africa too).
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