- Starlink's urban users grew faster than rural users in every state but Alaska and Hawaii in the first half of 2026, said a new Speedtest report from Ookla
- The provider's U.S. median upload speeds surged 42% year-over-year
- Latency also improved to under 40 ms in 49 states and D.C.
Starlink broadband speeds are up across the board and so are customers in urban areas, according to the latest Ookla Speedtest results published today.
In what could be a harbinger of things to come for legacy broadband providers, Ookla said that Starlink’s customers are moving beyond rural America. In fact, Ookla said the number of Starlink Speedtest users testing in urban areas grew 73% year-over-year, more than double the 33% growth seen in rural areas.
This shift is one of the main takeaways that Ookla Editorial Director Sue Marek said was most interesting. “Urban users grew faster than rural users in every state but Alaska and Hawaii in the first half of 2026,” she told Fierce Network. “Perhaps some of this was because of Starlink’s promotional offers. Many people think Starlink is only for rural users - but we are showing that isn’t the case.”
On the performance front, “U.S. median upload speeds surged 42% year-over-year (from 14.63 Mbps to 20.73 Mbps) and improved in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.,” Marek noted in the report. She said the improvement can likely be attributed to SpaceX's new V2 Mini satellites, which can handle significantly more capacity than earlier models.
As of early October, SpaceX had launched about 7,550 V2 Mini satellites for broadband services, the report noted, attributing the data to Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink tracker. McDowell’s site says V2 Minis make up roughly two-thirds of Starlink’s working satellites.
Latency also improved in 49 states and D.C., with the number of states experiencing latency under 40 ms more than doubling.
Cable, DSL and FWA are losing out
Starlink launched a number of promotions in 2026 which, as Marek noted above, likely attributed to the increase in customers. The company offered prices between $29 and $39 per month in certain regions of the country.
But the growth in urban users is also coming from customers switching from non-fiber connections, such as cable, DSL and fixed-wireless access (FWA). More specifically, approximately nine in 10 new users switched from those access technologies to Starlink.
“This means that legacy broadband providers are losing customers to Starlink,” said Marek.
However, despite the improvements in satellites and beamforming technologies, Starlink’s median download speed is still slower trails all three major U.S. 5G FWA providers. (See chart below)
The gap may be explained by geography because “Starlink’s satellites orbit at angles that concentrate coverage over the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, so users farther south typically have fewer satellites overhead at any given moment, and less capacity to share,” wrote Marek in her report.
SpaceX Q3 earnings report
SpaceX reported that Starlink had gained 1.6 million global broadband consumer subscribers in Q3 on its quarterly earnings call in late October. In total, Starlink has 13.6 million broadband consumer subscribers in 174 markets. Ookla Speedtest data shows that approximately 22% of Starlink customers are in the U.S., which makes the U.S. the company’s largest market.
On the earnings call, SpaceX said it plans to keep adding capacity to its Starlink fleet of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites via its new V3 constellation. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said, “We are in an inflection moment for SpaceX across launch connectivity. Starship Flight 14 was a critical milestone. Starship made it to orbit for the first time and deployed operational Starlink V3 satellites.”
Flight 14 deployed 26 terabits per second of Starlink bandwidth, the equivalent to 10 Falcon 9 launches. “So, a single Starship launch —which wasn't even fully loaded, it was about maybe half loaded — and it did the equivalent of 10 Falcon 9 launches. What I expect over time is, not in the distant future, probably within three years, is that we will have about 100x the bandwidth of the current Starlink constellation,” said Musk.
Read more about Starlink on Fierce Network:
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