Starlink isn’t officially available for moving cars yet. But in Ukraine, the government is already testing SpaceX’s satellite internet system on vehicles traveling at high speed.
On Monday, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov posted a video of his team installing a standard Starlink dish on top of a car.
The dish itself was placed over a tire, which acted as a shock absorber. The vehicle then proceeds to travel as fast as 130 kilometers per hour (80mph) on a highway, but the Starlink dish never loses much access to the internet.
“Based on previous results, the loss of (data) packages is around 7%,” said Andriy Nabok, the head of the fixed broadband unit in Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. “So we can say that the Starlink internet at high speed works with the 93% connection stability.”
The Ukrainian team also ran a speed test during the car ride, which showed the Starlink dish receiving median download rates at 102Mbps, although the latency was relatively high at 87 milliseconds. Still, the internet quality was good enough that the team could watch YouTube videos comfortably inside the car.
The test occurred as SpaceX has been delivering thousands of Starlink dishes to the country since Russia’s invasion in an effort to keep Ukraine online. In the video, Nabok said Ukraine now has more than 12,000 Starlink dishes or what's the “highest number in Europe.”
"We are facing huge challenges in the war, so we need Starlink to work both on the railway and while driving a car," Nabok said. His team plans on sending the results to SpaceX.
In the US, SpaceX doesn’t officially support using Starlink on moving cars. Users who do so risk voiding the product's warranty. Nevertheless, the company did activate the “mobile roaming” feature back in March so that Ukrainian users could maintain a Starlink signal even while traveling.
Since then, a few YouTubers in North America have also tried running Starlink on top of their cars while driving, and shown the technology does work, even at high speeds. Last month, the FCC also granted SpaceX a license to operate Starlink on moving vehicles, including boats and planes.
So it should only be a matter of time before the satellite internet service officially comes to cars. In the meantime, Starlink Maritime is already available for moving boats.