While the great space race heats back up and Elon Musk sets his sights on Mars, it's not just the colonization of planets that various countries are battling over.
Starlink hopes to usher in a new era of internet speeds with satellite-based capabilities, but now, it looks like Mr. Musk has some stiff competition.
China has now achieved breakthrough speeds in satellite-to-ground laser communications and is galloping toward 6G.
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Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. owns Jilin-1, which has the honor of being the the world’s largest sub-metre commercial remote sensing satellite constellation.
Among its credentials, it has set a new country record by reaching a 100 gigabit per second ultra-high-speed image data transmission rate.
As reported by the South China Morning Post, Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co. recorded these speeds between a truck-mounted ground station and one satellite that currently makes up the 117 that are part of the Jilin-1 constellation.
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Wang Hanghang, Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co.'s head of laser communication ground station technology, explains how this puts the company far ahead of SpaceX's Starlink: "Musk’s Starlink has revealed its laser inter-satellite communication system but hasn’t deployed laser satellite-to-ground communication yet.
“We think they might have the technology, but we’ve already started large-scale deployment."
Hanghang hopes that laser communication units will be deployed across all satellites in the Jilin-1 constellation, and hopes to improve efficiency, with the constellation aiming to reach a network of 300 by 2027.
Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co has been focusing on laser communication since 2020 due to satellites being better at capturing information.
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Unfortunately, sending data back to Earth with traditional methods has reportedly become a 'bottleneck'. Not only are lasers more efficient, but they're actually more affordable.
The company created a mobile laser communication terminal roughly the size of a backpack, and because it can be mounted on a truck, it can be moved around to avoid adverse weather conditions and interruption.
Chang Guang previously hit a 10Gbps data transfer rate in October 2023, but thanks to the new 100Gbps speeds, 10 full-length movies can be transferred in less than a second.
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Other countries including the USA and France are working on similar technology, and in 2023, NASA’s TBIRD system hit a record-breaking 200Gbps transmission rate.
Hanghan reiterates that Chang Guang's 20 kg weight and mobility make it more impressive than TBIRD's record-breaking speed. With China snapping at NASA's heels, we'll have to see which record gets broken next.