Satellite internet used to be universally slow and unreliable, but SpaceX showed that does not need to be the case. Starlink has launched thousands of satellites, added millions of customers, and even kept Ukrainian forces connected in the war with Russia. In order to keep Starlink speedy, the company recently added laser communication. According to a SpaceX engineer, the network's space lasers are becoming an integral part of delivering speedy service.
Starlink subscribers and relays on the ground connect to the network via radio frequencies in the Ku and Ka bands. However, radio frequencies bottleneck data transmission in a way the lasers do not. SpaceX deployed the first space lasers in 2021, and engineer Travis Brashears says they're already beaming an unfathomable amount of data between nodes.
Brashears provided an update on Starlink's capabilities at the SPIE Photonics West optics conference. "We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers," he said. Most data in the Starlink network is transmitted to and from ground stations, but there are places where satellites may not be able to see the surface installations, like over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In those cases, beaming data directly from one satellite to another could massively speed up communication.
The satellites in Starlink's laser web have essentially formed a mesh network with light. Brashears says the nodes are constantly pinging for new acquisitions, some 266,141 of them per day. Although, some laser links can be maintained for weeks at a time. Across those 9,000 lasers, Starlink can transmit 5.6 terabytes per second. In a single day, Starlink lasers beam more than 42 petabytes between satellites. That's the equivalent of 28 million hours of 1080p HD video.
The sheer speed of laser communication is a major advantage for SpaceX or any spacecraft that needs to transmit a large amount of data. NASA is also looking into ways to leverage laser communication. The Psyche spacecraft is en route to an asteroid of the same name, but NASA also used the mission to test laser communication. The laser was able to beam data back to Earth at 267Mbps, paving the way for future missions to rely on lasers for primary communication.
