Elon Musk's SpaceX low-orbit satellite Starlink entered the Japanese market in 2022 and is implementing various use cases, mainly in mountainous areas and ships.
Starlink satellites are low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites located 550 km above the Earth's surface. Unlike traditional satellites, they have a shorter distance between the Earth and the satellite, enabling them to provide users with satellite communication connections featuring broadband data communication speeds of up to 220 Mbps downstream and 25 Mbps upstream, as well as low latency of 25–50 ms.
Considering that existing geostationary satellites (GEO) are located 36,000 km above the ground and have a communication connection bandwidth of 1 Mbps, Starlink provides tens to hundreds of times more broadband connection. In the field of satellite communications, we have entered the era of low-Earth orbit satellites, and Starlink is dominating this market and will continue to do so in the future.
In Japan, the arrival of Starlink services—which offer unprecedented broadband and low latency as a satellite communication network—has led to an increase in cases where Starlink is being utilized to build independent communication networks at construction sites or factories in mountainous areas where fiber-optic cables have not been laid or connected.
In this One-Shot, we will examine examples of Starlink utilization in Japan.
