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SpaceX has this afternoon successfully launched their new Starship rocket into a proper orbit around the Earth (Flight 14) and deployed 26 fully operational commercial Starlink V3 broadband satellites (these are not temporary test samples like last time), which marks a significant achievement after several years of intense development.
Starlink now has c.11,160 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for both broadband and mobile services – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential users in the UK pay from £40 a month for the 100Mbps unlimited data plan, which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity (c.20ms). Faster packages exist at greater cost, while data capped options are also available for roaming (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
The new third generation (GEN3 or V3) satellites are much bigger and significantly more powerful than previous GEN 1 and 2 models, which means they are only commercially viable when launched on top of a massive rocket like Starship (Falcon 9 isn’t powerful enough to handle the necessary quantities). Once refined, Starship should be able to put c.60 of these into orbit per launch (here).