Key Takeaways from Starlink’s 2025 Progress Report

Jan. 6, 2026 by Kimberly Siversen Burke

Starlink growth went full hockey stick. The subscriber base doubled about every 12–15 months post-2022, with the curve snapping upward in 2023 as global coverage, mobility, and government adoption kicked in.

SpaceX just published its third annual Starlink Progress Report, cataloging another year of expansion across customers, coverage, and network performance. The update leans on usual markers of progress – subscriber growth, satellite deployments, capacity additions, and improving speeds across land, air, and sea.

Zooming out – the 2025 wrap-up is less about subscriber uptake or incremental performance gains than it is about how Starlink is threading itself through everyday connectivity pretty much everywhere. Manufacturing throughput, launch cadence, network architecture, and selectively deployed use cases show a system that now underpins transportation, emergency response, education, healthcare, agriculture, and core communications infrastructure rather than just sitting at the edge of them.

SpaceX (and even more so Starshield, which is not mentioned in the report at all – likely to put distance between the two systems) is competing on industrial tempo and institutional embeddedness as much as on performance. SpaceX is building out a system designed to absorb attrition, regulatory friction, and public scrutiny as it scales. At this stage, Starlink’s advantage is not just its massive size, but also its structure – one that competitors with sufficient capital and time won’t come close to approaching without first solving the same manufacturing, launch, and operational coordination challenges SpaceX has already mastered.

Below, we highlight some key takeaways from the report along with the Quilty QuickTake on each major metric, so you can skip the alpacas and sunsets.

Market Expansion

• 35+ new markets activated in 2025

• 4.6M+ new “active” customers added in 2025

• 9.2M total customers across land, air, and sea

• 155+ countries and markets served

Quilty QuickTake: Starlink has crossed into utility-scale adoption. Customer counts obscure the ARPU mix, with no visibility into churn, pricing tiers, or the mix of residential, enterprise, government, and subsidized emergency users. By aggregating these segments and omitting ARPU and churn, the report emphasizes scale and indispensability while leaving the underlying economics opaque.

Starlink v3 & Starship Coupling

• 1 Tbps downlink; 200 Gbps uplink per satellite

• Thousands of spatial beams

• 100× capacity; >20× throughput

• ~60 Tbps added per Starship launch (20× increase)

Quilty QuickTake: Starlink v3 is less a satellite roadmap than a wager on Starship’s operational cadence. If Starship becomes routine, competitive parity collapses; if it does not, Starlink still dominates on V2.

Community Gateways: Starlink’s Middle Mile

• 13 community gateways added in 2025

• 20 total deployed globally

Quilty QuickTake: Community gateways mark Starlink’s move upstream into the middle mile. In some regions, Starlink is no longer just the last-mile ISP but the backhaul itself, a shift that nudges the system toward infrastructure-style regulation that SpaceX appears intent on normalizing before it is contested.

Maritime & Aviation

• 1,400¹ aircraft added in 2025 (up from 450 in 2024)

• 1,000 BizJets across 36 airframes and 5 OEMs

• 21M passengers; 30 PB of data

• 150,000+ vessels

• 20M cruise passengers

Quilty QuickTake: Mobility is not just a revenue vertical; it subsidizes network density over high-value corridors. Airlines pay for coverage Starlink needs regardless, while certifications entrench incumbency. Maritime users, in particular, exhibit low churn and high tolerance for pricing, providing durability and margin stability that residential broadband cannot.

Direct-to-Cell (DTC)

• 27 MNO partners

• 650+ satellites deployed in 18 months

• 12M people connected

• 22 countries across 6 continents

• 100+ compatible devices

• 30 supported apps

• “Largest 4G coverage provider on Earth”

• 65 MHz of spectrum acquired from EchoStar

Quilty QuickTake: DTC is advancing faster than regulators can coordinate. SpaceX appears to be betting that once millions of users experience the service, it becomes politically harder for governments to block or unwind it.

The Soft Power Stack

• 100,000+ disaster-response kits deployed

• Healthcare: 400+ clinics; 1,000+ doctors; 100,000+ telemedicine sessions annually

• Education: 5M+ students connected

Quilty QuickTake: These deployments are framed as humanitarian, but they also function as market positioning. By embedding Starlink into public services, SpaceX strengthens its case for subsidies, shapes regulatory outcomes, and makes it politically difficult for governments to favor competing networks. What begins as emergency connectivity often ends as long-term dependence, with rivals forced to compete not just on price or performance, but against a narrative of public good.

Manufacturing & Vertical Integration

• 70 satellites/week production rate

• Bastrop facility expanded by 1M ft²

• Bastrop PCB volume up 4×

• 170,000 user terminals/week (~8.5M annually)

• Washington state facility ~700,000 ft²

• Starlink v3 entering production in ‘26

Quilty QuickTake: Starlink’s moat is industrial. The constellation assumes constant replacement, rapid iteration, and tolerable attrition, a model that only works because SpaceX manufactures satellites and terminals at near consumer-electronics cadence.

Network Architecture & Performance

• Operating altitude: ~360 km

• Typical service: ~200/30 Mbps

• Median peak-hour global speeds up 50%

• Latency: ~26 ms

• Optical crosslinks: 2–3× reduction in packet loss; 30–40 ms latency improvement in Asia and Africa; 400 Gbps links beginning in 2026

Quilty QuickTake: Lower altitude improves latency but shortens satellite life, favoring replenishment over durability. Starlink is optimized for turnover rather than permanence, a design choice only viable because manufacturing and launch are tightly coupled. Mini lasers optimized for third-party integration debuted in 2025 with Muon Space, a model likely to expand into government programs in 2026.

Scale, Capacity &Deployment Pace

• 3,000+ (3,600 per Jonathan McDowell’s 2025 report) satellites launched in 2025

• 270 Tbps of capacity added in 2025

• 9,000+ active satellites globally

Quilty QuickTake: Starlink can add capacity faster than most competitors can raise capital or secure spectrum. Its scale is inseparable from SpaceX’s launch and manufacturing flywheel, leaving rivals behind not just in satellites, but in industrial systems that cannot be replicated quickly

Agriculture

• Added Stara and CNH in 2025 to the John Deere collaboration

Quilty QuickTake: This is enterprise SaaS presented as rural broadband. Once farm operations depend on connectivity for equipment, logistics, and inputs, Starlink ceases to be optional.

Starlink’s recent willingness to share more detailed supply-chain partnerships and user metrics reads like IPO hygiene ahead of a potential listing window. If a public offering is truly in play, we expect disclosure to continue leveling up into 2026.

1. In our 1H2025 Starlink Financial Analysis, I forecasted 1,295 new tails for Starlink in 2025. Missing that estimate by just 7.5% was a small modeling win that I maintain should partially offset how spectacularly wrong I was on our 2025 Amazon Leo launch office wager.