What does the Starlink project mean for remote workers?

Elon Musk has been busy creating a prospect of the future we all imagine. It all seems so distant from our way of living that we don’t even realize how close we are to this so-called future. But Musk is there to fill that gap with a project that will provide high-speed internet for everyone. Though this is a promising project, we have to ask ourselves what it would mean for an increasing population of remote workers around the world.

In 2015, Starlink began the production development of its satellite prototypes for their revolutionary project, but it wasn’t until 2019 that they launched their first set of operational satellites hoping to create a constellation of 1,440 satellites, according to Jonathan Hofeller, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink and commercial sales, to provide faster and cheaper internet for everyone. 

But what is Starlink’s promise?

Starlink is a division of SpaceX, and it aims to provide affordable, accessible, and high-speed internet to all regions that don’t count on the infrastructure necessary for a reliable internet connection. 

To do this, Starlink is building and launching thousands of small flat-panel satellites to orbit close to Earth and, thus, reduce latency. Latency, also called pig time, is the time it takes data to go from our devices to the satellite and back, so, to put it simply, lower latency translates into higher internet speed. Starlink also relies on smaller, easy to assemble infrastructure, which they hope will make the service available to rural regions as well.

However, Starlink isn’t the only company interested in satellite internet. Since their first announcement back in 2015, other companies such as Amazon and Samsung have also made public their own projects to launch low Earth orbit satellites, and competitors such as HughesNet already have a long time in the market of satellite internet. 

What can remote workers expect from Starlink?

Five years ago, remote work wasn’t something people were used to nor something they actively looked for when applying for a job. However, the increasing awareness of freelance business models, and most recently, the pandemic that forced the world into lockdown, has changed this perception into one more open and understanding of remote jobs and the digital market. 

This change has given developing countries more opportunities to thrive by creating a wider market to compete with more or less the same advantages, except maybe a reliable internet connection. This, along with data collected and published by Statista that shows that companies will maintain at least 10 to 20% of their current employees under a remote model post-pandemic, has built up a population even more dependent on the internet, a resource that isn’t widely available to everyone. 

As Starlink promises, their service could provide the world with faster and more accessible internet, helping an already big digital market to grow even bigger. At the same time, Latin America has been a source of low-cost high-quality workers for the last couple of years and, at least in Venezuela, the biggest disadvantage they face is a poor internet connection. 

Starlink’s project could mean a revolution in the way we work now and the way we connect to the rest of the world, making another step into globalization, but also increasing competition in the digital market. 

However, Elon Musk has said Starlink’s test had run in low-density areas, but It probably won’t be enough for high-density areas. Some experts speculate that, as the need for faster internet increases, Starlink will fall behind when it comes to catching up with it. So it’s a solution for part of the rural population in the US, but not a long-term solution to a problem at a national (even global) scale.

As the pandemic crisis is controlled, and more workers and companies are faced with the decision of maintaining remote job models, the demand for high-speed internet will increase, and Starlink is taking the advantage at the moment, but we have yet to see if this ambitious solution will, in fact, be viable for everyone.