Report: Starlink May Only Meet Federal Standards in Most Rural Areas
Starlink may flunk federal test above 6 users per square mile
WASHINGTON, July 21, 2025 – Starlink may only meet federal broadband speed requirements in areas with extremely low population density, according to a new technical analysis.
The report, authored by telecom policy expert Sascha Meinrath of Penn State University, along with researchers Karl Grindal, Glenn Fishbine, and Nancy DeGidio, concludes Starlink may not be able to meet the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s required 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 20 Mbps upload speed threshold “whenever the number of locations subscribing to the service is greater than 6 households per square mile within a beam’s coverage area.”
If true, that would preclude Starlink from receiving funding for all but the most rural of locations through the NTIA’s $42.45 billion broadband expansion initiative, the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program.
The study is based on publicly available data and a series of assumptions, as SpaceX has not released complete technical specifications for its satellite network. The authors assume that each satellite beam operates at 550 kilometers above Earth with a beamwidth of 1.5 degrees, covering a circular area of roughly 62.9 square miles.
Each beam, the authors estimate, provides roughly 6 Gigabits per second (Gbps) of download and 0.4 Gbps of upload capacity. Given the federal upload speed threshold of 20 Mbps per user, and assuming a typical 20:1 oversubscription ratio, each beam could support up to 419 users across its 62.9-square-mile footprint — a density of just 6.66 users per square mile.
Meinrath expressed confidence in the analysis’s estimate.
“We think that this number is probably very close to the maximum sustainable density, given that we were pretty liberal in several of our viable estimates,” Meinrath told Broadband Breakfast. He noted that the study didn’t take into account self-interference or attenuation effects from poor weather that would make Starlink’s speeds worse.
There are different ways to solve this problem, though each comes with its own tradeoffs. One solution would be to shrink the coverage area of each Starlink beam by launching the satellites into very low-earth orbit rather than just low-earth orbit.
As the report itself notes, Starlink has deployed VLEO satellites as low as 340 km above the Earth’s surface. However, this would mean deploying far more satellites and making hand-offs between those satellites faster.
“VLEO is a trade-off -- with the spot beams covering less area, and therefore being able to sustain higher user densities,” Meinrath told Broadband Breakfast.
“However, one then needs more spot beams within a particular covered region (and there's all sorts of addition limitations in terms of having to make faster inter-satellite hand-offs – which, themselves, cause latency spikes)...while we were looking at the critical density *within* a spot beam, there's also a massive bottleneck in terms of the sheer number of spot beams needed if you had widespread Starlink uptake.”
The analysis also notes that though it is possible for two beams to cover the same area, doing so comes with its own limitations. For one, self-interference between satellites could greatly slow their speeds. However, Starlink has yet to release a functional network capacity analysis of its satellite system, making any estimate of the effects of self-interference on its satellites almost entirely speculative.
The authors’ analysis concludes by calling for more transparency about Starlink’s capabilities. Meinrath reiterated that call in communications with Broadband Breakfast Monday.
“The overarching take-home message is the absolute necessity for conducting real-world capacity analysis and mapping that onto real-world implementation tactics,” he said. “Without that, we're blindly deploying infrastructure that may or may not actually be capable of sustaining ‘broadband’ service levels and, even worse, may degrade existing customers' services so that they cease receiving ‘broadband.’”
A request for comment from SpaceX, which owns Starlink, was not returned in time for publication.
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