Starlink Vice President of Engineering Michael Nicolls made aggressive speed performance claims in a tweet on the social media platform X:
“Significant improvements in @starlink network performance in 2025, with median peak-hour network-wide speeds increasing by over 50%. Typical download speeds are over 200 Mbps, typical upload speeds are over 30 Mbps, and median global latency is around 26 ms.”
PCMag noted the tweet, suggesting that a recent Starlink outage may have been due to network speed upgrades.
The low Earth orbit (LEO) provider’s increasing speeds were referenced twice recently by Ookla.
Its speed test for the first quarter of 2025, which was released in June, found median download speeds of 104.71 Mbps, which was almost double the 53.95 Mbps speed reported in the third quarter of 2022. Starlink upload speeds almost doubled as well, with increases from 7.50 Mbps in the third quarter of 2022 and to 14.84 Mbps in the first quarter of 2025, according to Ookla.
This week, Ookla reported that in 26 out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, rural users receive better broadband speeds than their urban counterparts using the Starlink technology. It’s arguable that the unique dynamics of Starlink’s growth — its strength in rural areas compared to urban areas — could make Starlink and perhaps other LEO providers effective tools as the nation tries to finally eliminate the digital divide.
At this point, the LEO category seems to be an operational and growing Starlink on one hand and a group of companies that are working to get off the ground, literally and figuratively, on the other.
In June, Telecompetitor’s Randy Sukow reported on a satellite launch weeks earlier by Amazon’s Project Kuiper in a broader analysis of the sector. At that point, it seemed that other nascent providers were playing catch up. “Elon Musk’s Starlink has had the field itself for years and continues to expand its constellation, which currently stands at 6,750 satellites,” Sukow wrote.
