Starlink is no longer the internet option you recommend only when a cabin, a ranch, or bad luck are involved. In the U.S., the satellite service’s median download speed reached 132 Mbps in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Speedtest, putting it much closer to mainstream broadband than its old reputation would suggest.
That is a sharp jump from about 100 Mbps in the previous quarter and 64 Mbps a year earlier. Just as telling, nearly 45% of users are now getting what regulators would call ”normal internet” – 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up – compared with 17% at the start of 2025. For a service once dismissed as a rural fallback, that is a pretty awkward plot twist for traditional ISPs.
Image: Starlink
Starlink speeds improved in 2025
The biggest reason is scale. SpaceX carried out more than 120 Falcon 9 launches in 2025 and pushed its orbital constellation to almost 10,000 satellites, which is what you do when you want to treat congestion like a software bug and not a destiny. The company has spent years building a network that can absorb more users without immediately collapsing under its own popularity.
- Median U.S. download speed in Q4 2025: 132 Mbps
- Previous quarter: about 100 Mbps
- A year earlier: 64 Mbps
- Users meeting the 100/20 Mbps threshold: nearly 45%
- Users meeting that threshold at the start of 2025: 17%
FCC’s 2023 decision looks more questionable now
The speed gains also cast fresh light on the Federal Communications Commission’s decision in 2023 to deny Starlink nearly $886 million in subsidies. At the time, the agency argued the service did not meet the required performance levels, and given the roughly 64 Mbps figure then in circulation, that was hard to dispute. Two years later, the decision looks less like prudent caution and more like a bet placed before the track was open.
That does not make Starlink a perfect substitute for fiber or cable. It does, however, make the service a far more serious competitor than the ”internet for places with no internet” stereotype allows. And that shift matters, because once satellite broadband starts meeting ordinary household expectations, price and availability stop being the whole story.
Starlink’s next targets are even bigger
SpaceX is not easing off. The company wants to keep speeding up the network with new satellites and launches on Starship, and it is also talking about eventual gigabit speeds and direct connections to smartphones. Gigabit Starlink sounds ambitious for now, but so did today’s numbers not that long ago.
The real question is whether the rest of the broadband industry treats this as a niche satellite success story or as a warning shot. If Starlink keeps improving at this pace, a lot more providers may need to explain why a network in space is starting to look less exotic than the one under the street.