Elon Musk’s Starlink broadband-by-satellite service has revealed that it now has 7 million global customers. This number is up from 6 million confirmed just a few weeks ago in June, and 5 million as of February.

The works out at an average of 12,650 additional new clients a day since the 6 million mark and represents a growth rate that’s 23 per cent higher than it was just 2.5 months ago. Indeed, it is 1 million new customers in just 79 days. However, churn numbers were not revealed.

Starlink says it is now connecting clients across about 150 countries and territories. SpaceX’s Starlink production lines are turning out 15,000 terminals per day.

As one observer – and user – commented: “From a systems engineering perspective, Starlink’s milestone of connecting over 7 million users across ~150 countries and territories is not merely a matter of service adoption—it reflects an extraordinary feat of orbital deployment, network topology optimisation, and latency management. The scaling challenges—spectrum allocation, orbital slot management, and signal handoff between rapidly moving nodes—cannot be overstated.”

And these numbers are without many key target markets, including: India, Turkey, the Balkan states of Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the whole of North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and Mali). Some Middle East nations are still officially unavailable (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) and there are plenty of East and south African countries where service is officially unobtainable (Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa). China and Russia also do not offer the service.

Meanwhile, SpaceX’s engineering teams managed their 400th rocket landing on one of its drone ships on August 27th, and used a Falcon 9 booster to launch and then land for the 30th time, a world record for reusability for an orbital class rocket and an engineering milestone in ultra-reliability. The cost-savings for SpaceX are considerable and shows that a rocket is no longer a piece of disposable hardware, but similar in use to an airliner which is used, lands and is reused time and time again such is the core reliability of the hardware.

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Categories: Articles, Broadband, Satellite

Tags: spacex, starlink