Page 91 - SAMENA Trends - January-February 2023

SATELLITE UPDATES SAMENA TRENDS

SpaceX Launches Heaviest Starlink Payload

Yet - 56 Satellites

SpaceX launched 56 Starlink satellites Falcon 9 -- 17,400 kg. The mission was
to low-Earth orbit on January 26th SpaceX's 205th overall launch. The
from Cape Canaveral Space Force Starlink service is currently available in
Station, Florida. The launch was the 44 countries.
heaviest payload yet carried by a

Starlink’s LEO Satellite Broadband Gets Energy Saving Sleep Mode

Customers of SpaceX’s popular Starlink ultrafast broadband like to know that it’s slowly adding a new ‘Sleep Schedule‘ feature
service, which harnesses a mega constellation of satellites in Low to help save electricity. As the name suggests, this feature simply
Earth Orbit (LEO) and is already home to 1 million subscribers, may allows customers to define a time period for when the system will
go into a sleep (i.e. pausing its internet service and disabling other
features, such as heating to melt snow). In effect, this is a kind of
standby feature, although anybody expecting snowfall will need to
make sure they clean off the accumulation first when re-enabling
(i.e. using the heater to do this could take several hours). The
new feature doesn’t appear to be available for everybody yet, and
initially it may only be intended for those on their Starlink for RVs
(motorhomes) service, where energy saving is most important.
But it’s a useful feature for everybody to have – especially given
UK electricity prices – since the Starlink service does tend to
consume a fair bit of power (up to around 100 Watts). Customers
in the UK typically pay from £75 per month, plus £460 for the
regular home kit (standard dish, router etc.) and £40 for shipping
on the Standard Starlink package, which gets you unlimited usage,
fast latency times of 25-50ms, advertised downloads of c. 50-
200Mbps and uploads of c.5-15Mbps (speeds may change as the
network grows). The latest launch means that Starlink now has
around 3,480 LEO satellites in orbit around the Earth (altitude of c.
500km+) and their initial plan is to deploy a total of roughly 4,400
by 2024, with approval already granted to add around 7,500 more
to this by the end of 2027.

Starlink Enters the African Market with First Launch in Nigeria

Nigeria has become the first country in Africa to see a commercial
launch of satellite broadband services by Starlink, the satellite
internet business of SpaceX. The firm’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
satellites are designed to offer high speed, low latency broadband
internet in remote and rural locations across the globe. The service
is currently priced at NGN19,260 (USD41.8) per month, while
hardware costs NGN268,584. Starlink received licenses to operate
in Nigeria and Mozambique in May last year, marking the start of
the company’s expansion to Africa. The Nigerian Communications
Commission (NCC) confirmed that Starlink received two licenses –
a ten-year international gateway license and a five-year ISP license
– and would trade as Starlink Internet Services Nigeria.

91 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023