Feature Image Credit: Teslarati
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is now vying to conquer the telecom industry with his new venture, Starlink Internet. After conquering the roads with Tesla and the bounds of outer space with SpaceX, Musk told investors that Starlink is angling for a piece of a $1 trillion market made up of in-flight internet, maritime services, demand in China and India and rural customers.
Starlink is a low-Earth satellite constellation that aims to provide broadband internet to the remotest of places in the world. To date, SpaceX has launched around 1,000 satellites for the service and is now signing up early customers in the US, UK and Canada, as reported by Bloomberg.
Starlink will face plenty of competition. While fiber optic cable is widely considered too expensive to lay down in remote regions and many rural locations, cellular connectivity is expected to make big advances with 5G and then 6G.
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, is primarily known for launching rockets for global satellite operators, the U.S. military, and NASA. Last year, SpaceX made history by becoming the first private company to fly astronauts to the International Space Station. SpaceX marked the new year by launching the first Falcon 9 rocket to a new communications satellite to space for Turkey on January 7.