SpaceX Filed to Launch 100k New Starlink Satellites to Boost Speed 100x

SpaceX has officially requested permission from the FCC to launch an absolute army of third-generation satellites to massively upgrade their network. The filing reveals plans to deploy these massive 2-ton Gen 3 birds into a very low Earth orbit, which means they cannot just use their trusty old Falcon 9 rocket. Instead, the company is betting the entire farm on their giant Starship mega-rocket, equipped with those newly minted Raptor 3 engines that sound like a heavy metal concert.

Currently, average residential speeds hover around a modest 145 to 170 Mbps, which looks painfully slow compared to ground-based fiber giants like AT&T that easily pump out over 2 Gbps. The upgrades promise to drop latency below 20 milliseconds and push speeds into the gigabit club, though users will naturally have to throw away their old dishes and buy expensive new hardware to actually experience this space-age magic.

These new satellites are designed to feed not just doom-scrolling humans, but billions of AI-enabled devices and government clients. To make this happen, the company is asking the regulator to bypass several standard rules so they can hog massive, contiguous chunks of frequency bands ranging from Ku and Ka all the way to experimental D-band frequencies.

Competitors are already sweating over potential signal interference, even though SpaceX promises they will engage in good-faith coordination with everyone else. Meanwhile, the European Southern Observatory released a study warning that these massive constellations will completely ruin ground-based astronomy.

In the end, humanity faces a very modern choice: having the ability to stream 4K cat videos in the middle of the Sahara desert, or actually being able to look up and see the stars. If history has taught us anything, the cat videos will win every single time.

Source: ZDNet