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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted SpaceX permission to put a further 15,000 next generation satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in order to help feed Starlink’s Mobile service, which will harness radio spectrum recently acquired from T-Mobile and EchoStar.
At present Starlink has an overall total of c.11,160 satellites in orbit 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). But at present you can only buy their Direct to Cell (DtC) mobile service in the UK via O2 Satellite for £3 extra per month.
However, only around 650 of the aforementioned satellites currently supply their DtC mobile platform, which offers a fairly basic (c.5Mbps) and app-specific 4G remote roaming style service. But Starlink has long planned a V2 Mobile service (second generation), which is not be confused with their V2 broadband satellites that are already starting to be replaced by significantly larger V3 satellites.