Elon Musk invited users to try satellite Internet

Elon Musk's SpaceX company is looking for people to try out its Starlink broadband satellite Internet service.

Starlink's website has allowed you to subscribe to project updates. People who want to experiment need to provide an email address and postal code. Starlink will then send an email notifying when the test will take place in the subscriber's area based on the postal code. 

According to the content Elon Musk wrote on Twitter, the first test will be conducted in high latitude areas, such as Seattle (USA) and Germany.

Elon Musk's company seeks users to join the beta phase of the Starlink satellite system. (Photo: Reuters) .

There are currently about 500 SpaceX satellites orbiting Earth. SpaceX wants to use its satellites as a bridge to eliminate disparities in access to information technology and communications between regions. Half of the world today - mostly rural areas and the poor - still cannot access the Internet, or suffer from poor connectivity and expensive service costs.    

The company plans to begin testing broadband satellite Internet services this summer and commercially in North America later this year. Musk's ultimate goal is to provide Internet service to the world by 2021.

The original purpose of Starlink was to provide services to areas with poor Internet connectivity. But Musk also plans to provide low-cost Internet services in urban areas. According to him, the satellite Internet will have a speed of 1 Gb / s with a delay of about 30 ms. This speed is enough to play video games that require a high response speed and can compete with traditional Internet platforms. For comparison, the average broadband Internet speed in the UK is 64 Mbps.

However, SpaceX's ambition also met the criticism of astronomers. They believe that super-large satellite systems will pollute the light, because when they move they will leave light trails in the night sky. SpaceX promised to set "sunshades" for satellites to solve this problem.

Many SpaceX rivals are also planning to launch low-orbiting satellite systems, such as OneWeb, Amazon, Facebook, Space Norway and Telesat. Musk even offered to launch a space launch service for his rivals.