How Does Starlink Work?

On a rural rooftop, a flat panel about the size of a pizza box tilts toward open sky and waits for a satellite to pass roughly 550 km overhead. That satellite is one of thousands flying low and fast, close enough that a web page loads without the long pause older satellite internet was known for. Sitting so near the planet is what lets Starlink carry video calls and games that the old geostationary services never handled well.

What Starlink is

Starlink is a satellite internet service built and run by SpaceX. Instead of one big satellite sitting still over the equator, it uses a growing fleet of small ones, more than 10,000 of them in orbit as of mid-2026, according to independent trackers cited by Space.com. They fly in a loose mesh around the whole planet, so at any moment several are crossing over your patch of sky.

The point is to reach the places that cable and fibre never got to: farms, boats, mountain cabins, campsites and whole regions where digging a trench for a line was never going to pay off. If you can see a clear stretch of sky, the service can reach you.

The satellites and their orbit

Every Starlink satellite orbits at roughly 550 km above the ground, in what engineers call low Earth orbit. For comparison, older satellite internet uses a single spacecraft parked in geostationary orbit at 35,786 km, about sixty times higher.

Down at 550 km, a satellite cannot hover over one spot. It laps the planet in roughly 90 minutes, so it is only overhead for a few minutes before the next one takes over. That is why Starlink needs so many: to keep at least one within reach of every customer at all times, the fleet has to blanket the sky. SpaceX flies them in stacked bands, or shells, at slightly different heights and angles so coverage stretches from the tropics to near the poles.

The dish on your roof

The part you own is the user terminal, which almost everyone calls the dish. It looks nothing like the curved TV dishes of old. It is a flat panel, often compared to a large pizza box, that you mount with a clear view of the sky. Inside sits a phased-array antenna, a grid of tiny transmitters that steer the beam electronically. No motors twist the dish around. It aims itself by shifting the signal across the array, locking on to a satellite and then handing off to the next one as they pass overhead, all without visibly moving.

Setup is meant to be plain: connect the dish to the router, point it at open sky, and let it find the fleet on its own. The dish also has a heater to melt snow, because anything blocking its view of the sky blocks the connection.

Ground stations and laser links

Getting your request up to a satellite is only half the trip. The satellite then has to reach the rest of the internet, and it does this in one of two ways. The first is a ground station, also called a gateway: a cluster of antennas on the ground, wired into the regular internet through fibre. SpaceX runs more than a hundred of these around the world. The satellite overhead beams your traffic down to the nearest gateway, which passes it on to whatever site or app you asked for.

Later Starlink satellites carry laser links that let them pass data straight to each other in space, at speeds reported around 200 Gbps. A message can hop from satellite to satellite over a laser beam until it reaches one that sits above a ground station. This is what lets Starlink work over the middle of an ocean or across polar regions, where there is no gateway for hundreds of miles.

The path your data takes

Put it together and a single click travels like this. Your device sends the request over Wi-Fi to the Starlink router, which passes it to the dish. The dish beams it up to whichever satellite is overhead. That satellite either drops it down to a nearby ground station, or, if none is close, relays it across laser links to one that can. From the ground station it joins the ordinary internet, fetches the page, and the whole path runs in reverse to bring the answer back to your screen.

It sounds like a long way to fetch a web page, but the entire round trip happens in a small fraction of a second.

Why flying low matters

The low orbit pays for itself in delay. Radio and laser signals travel at the speed of light, which is fast but not instant. The farther a signal has to go, the longer every round trip takes, and that delay is what makes a connection feel slow even when it is moving plenty of data. It shows up as the pause before a video call connects, or the gap between clicking in a game and the game responding.

Old geostationary satellites sit 35,786 km up, so a signal has to climb that distance and come back, twice, for every exchange. That alone adds well over half a second, often 600 ms or more. Starlink's satellites sit about sixty times closer, so the same round trip is far shorter. Measured figures land around 25 to 50 ms as of mid-2026, close to what cable broadband delivers. At that level the delay stops being something you notice. Typical downloads run from about 60 to 200 Mbps, with uploads usually in the single digits to low double digits, per Starlink's own network updates.

Starlink vs old-style satellite internet

The limits and trade-offs

Starlink has real limits. It needs a clear view of the sky. Tall trees, buildings or a hillside in the wrong spot will cut the signal every time a satellite passes behind them, causing brief dropouts. Heavy rain, wet snow or thick storm clouds can weaken the beam and slow things down, though the dish shrugs off light weather and melts snow off itself.

The other limit is sharing. Everyone in a given area draws on the same satellites passing overhead, so in crowded places speeds can dip at busy times as more people compete for the same capacity. SpaceX keeps launching satellites to widen that pipe, but a cell with lots of subscribers will feel busier than an empty one. And the whole thing runs on hardware you buy and a monthly fee, both of which shift over time, so the price is worth checking before you commit.

Starlink's low, crowded orbit is what lets a dish on a farm keep up with a video call, passing the signal from one satellite to the next fast enough that you rarely notice the switch. A very different everyday service gets the same treatment in How Afterpay works, and the How It Works hub has the rest.