Elon Musk is now openly sketching a future in which Starlink is not just a satellite service, but the network everyone else plugs into. After pointing to the 1,024 Gbit/s capacity of Starlink V3 per satellite – roughly 10.7 times more than V2’s 96 Gbit/s – he said the company will eventually launch more than 100,000 satellites across V3, V4, and V5 generations. That would give Starlink a shot at becoming the world’s internet backbone, at least in Musk’s vision.
That is a very Musk-sized number, but the direction is clear enough: Starlink is being built to serve both conventional broadband users and direct-to-phone connectivity through Direct-to-Cell. If the company keeps growing at its current pace, Musk’s bet is that it could stop being a side option and start acting like the main artery for global internet traffic. Ambitious? Absolutely. Outlandish? Maybe less so than it sounds, given how quickly satellite broadband has moved from niche backup to a serious alternative in remote and underserved areas.
Starlink already has scale on its side
The numbers behind the claim are already hard to ignore. Starlink now has more than 10 million subscribers and more than 10,000 satellites in orbit. That kind of installed base gives SpaceX a real advantage over smaller satellite rivals, even if terrestrial fiber and mobile networks are not going anywhere soon.
- Starlink V3 capacity: 1,024 Gbit/s per satellite
- Starlink V2 capacity: 96 Gbit/s per satellite
- Planned satellite generations: V3, V4, and V5
- Current subscriber count: more than 10 million
- Satellites in orbit: more than 10,000
Direct-to-Cell is the real target
Direct-to-Cell is the more interesting part of the story. Broadband is the obvious business, but phone connectivity is where Starlink can try to become infrastructure rather than just another ISP. That is also where the competitive pressure gets sharper: mobile operators may partner with satellite networks in the short term, but they will not love the idea of handing over too much of the sky to SpaceX.
If Musk’s forecast is right, the industry could end up with a strange hierarchy: fiber at the edge, mobile networks where they are strong, and Starlink carrying the big chunks of traffic in between. That would not kill the open internet, but it would put an enormous amount of routing power in one company’s hands. The next question is whether regulators and rivals let that happen quietly.