Starlink will soon be able to support competitive online gaming, thanks to upcoming latency enhancements, according to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Musk made the statement on Twitter while discussing his company’s ongoing efforts to improve Starlink, the company’s satellite internet network.
“Ping should improve dramatically in coming months. We’re aiming for <20ms. Basically, you should be able to play competitive FPS (first-person shooter) games through Starlink,” he wrote in the tweet.
Currently, the latencies for SpaceX’s satellite internet network can range from over 20 milliseconds to as high as 88ms. As a result, you can already game over Starlink, but you may encounter significant lag during an online first-person shooter session, depending on the connection quality.
The company’s goal is to reduce the latencies to under 20ms later this year. To pull this off, Musk said SpaceX is working to establish more Starlink ground stations across the globe. These ground stations are connected to local fiber networks and beam the internet data to the Starlink satellites in orbit.
In addition, the company is working to streamline the internet packet routing across the network. “More ground stations & less foolish packet routing will make the biggest differences,” Musk wrote in a follow-up tweet.
According to Musk, theoretically Starlink should only need 10 milliseconds to route the internet data, if all the impediments can be removed. “Looking at speed of light as ~300km per millisecond & satellite altitude of ~550km, average photon round-trip time is only ~10ms, so a lot of silly things have to happen to drive ping >20ms,” he added.
To further drive down the latency, SpaceX has been incorporating built-in lasers on the newest Starlink satellites to transmit data from one satellite to the next —all while in orbit. The company has previously said the lasers can “transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data” between the satellites.
On Wednesday, Musk added: “Laser links in orbit can reduce long-distance latency by as much as 50%, due to higher speed of light in vacuum and shorter path than undersea fiber.”
The lasers might also make it possible for Starlink satellites to serve the internet data to users without fetching the information from ground stations on Earth. “Some traffic could just go terminal -> satellite -> satellite -> terminal and never touch the regular Internet,” Musk said.
SpaceX’s other major goal for this year is to double the download speeds for Starlink to 300Mbps. To achieve the faster speeds, the company has been launching new batches of Starlink satellites in orbit usually every few weeks.
To sign up for Starlink, you can go to the company’s official website. The service costs $99 a month, along with a $499 one-time fee for the equipment. However, it’s mainly targeting users based in rural and remote regions.
