Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink demonstrates 3.3x traffic growth in 2024

The space technology firm SpaceX’s Starlink division is delivering 3.3 times more satellite internet traffic in 2024 compared to 2023, a Cloudflare report reveals.

Starlink is the leading satellite internet service provider, and the US Federal Communication Commission is already investigating it for operating a monopoly.

“Global traffic from Starlink grew 3.3x in 2024, in line with last year’s growth rate,” Cloudflare said in Radar, its annual review.

For comparison, global internet traffic as a whole grew by 17.2% in 2024.

“On a worldwide basis, steady, consistent growth was seen across the year, though it accelerates throughout November. This acceleration may have been driven by traffic associated with customer-specific large software updates.”

Starlink is being adopted quickly in areas where it was first introduced.

In Malawi, where Starlink was initiated in July 2023, the service’s traffic grew 38 times in 2024. In Georgia, where the service was introduced on November 1st, 2023, after a slow ramp, traffic began to take off, growing over 100x through 2024, according to Cloudflare’s report.

In Paraguay, Starlink became available on December 21st last year. Traffic began to grow at the beginning of January, registering an increase of over 900x across the year.

“As Starlink added new markets, we saw traffic grow rapidly in those locations,” Cloudflare says. “In many locations, there is pent-up demand for “alternative” connectivity providers such as Starlink, and in these countries/regions, we see rapid traffic growth when service becomes available, such as in Zimbabwe.”

Service availability in Zimbabwe was announced in September and the traffic from the country began to grow rapidly.

In 2024, Starlink also introduced in-flight connectivity to multiple airlines, cruise ships, and trains, and enabled subscribers to roam with their subscription using the Starlink Mini.

To estimate the growth in Starlink’s usage, Cloudflare analyzed aggregate traffic volumes associated with Starlink's primary autonomous system (AS14593).

According to the report, Google maintains its position as the most popular internet service overall. Googlebot, Google’s web crawler, was responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare in 2024, as it retrieved content from millions of Cloudflare customer sites for search indexing.

The web security company Cloudflare serves as the backbone of the modern internet. Its network spans more than 120 countries, serves over 63 million HTTP(S) requests per second, and handles 42 million DNS requests per second on average.