How Starlink Works
Traditional satellite internet is slow because the satellites are so far away. Starlink flies thousands of small satellites close to Earth to deliver low-latency broadband almost anywhere.
In short
- Latency is low because the satellites orbit ~100x closer than traditional geostationary ones.
- Thousands of satellites are needed so one is always overhead; a flat phased-array dish tracks them electronically.
- Laser links between satellites extend coverage to oceans, poles and remote areas without local ground stations.
Low orbit is the whole trick
Conventional satellite internet uses a handful of satellites in geostationary orbit, about 35,786 km up. At that distance, even at the speed of light a signal takes a long round trip, which is why old satellite internet felt sluggish. Starlink instead uses a constellation of thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), only a few hundred kilometres up. Being roughly a hundred times closer cuts the latency dramatically — into the range that makes video calls and gaming usable — at the cost of needing many satellites, because each one is only overhead briefly and covers a small area.
The constellation and the dish
Because any single low satellite is in view for only minutes, you need a large, coordinated fleet so that one is always overhead. The user terminal — the "dish" — is a flat phased-array antenna that electronically steers its beam to track satellites across the sky with no moving parts, handing off from one satellite to the next as they pass. The dish talks to the satellite overhead, which relays traffic to a ground station connected to the internet backbone.
Laser links between satellites
Newer Starlink satellites carry laser inter-satellite links, letting them pass data directly to neighbouring satellites in space rather than always needing a ground station in view. That lets Starlink serve oceans, poles and remote regions with no nearby ground infrastructure, and can even shorten long-distance routes, since light travels faster through the vacuum of space than through fibre-optic glass. The result is broadband that can reach ships, aircraft, disaster zones and rural areas that fixed networks never economically served.