Chang Guang Satellite from China Surpasses Elon Musk’s Starlink

Chang Guang Satellite Technology from China surpasses the data transmission speed from a satellite to Earth, leaving Elon Musk’s Starlink behind.

By Bruno Sommer

This news comes on the heels of the DeepSeek story, the Chinese artificial intelligence that caused a drop in the stock prices of U.S. tech companies by presenting a similar, but improved technology at a lower cost.

Chang Guang Satellite Technology, the company behind Jilin-1, China’s impressive commercial satellite constellation, announced it has achieved an ultrafast image data transmission speed of 100 Gb/s.

The speed reached in the tests is 10 times greater than the previous test, conducted between a truck-mounted ground station and one of the 117 satellites in the Jilin-1 constellation.

The results were obtained at the end of December 2024 and have not yet been disclosed by the Western press, until this latest news release from El Ciudadano.

Starlink, the U.S. company, currently offers connections of 50 Mbps and 500 Mbps for Starlink Business, and it has been reported that they plan to soon offer connections of up to 2 Gb/s, and even 10 Gb/s. These are far from the incredible results achieved by the Chinese commercial company.

Who is Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd.?

Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. was founded in 2014 and is primarily engaged in the research and development of satellite detection systems and equipment, among other services. It is defined as China’s first commercial remote sensing satellite company.

Its establishment was made possible through the cooperation of funds from the Jilin Provincial Government, the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with social capital and technical support, with a registered capital of 1.97 billion yuan in its early stages.

The legal representative of the company is Xuan Ming, a prominent Chinese scientist, PhD, Communist Party member, winner of several prestigious science awards, and leader of a series of R&D projects.

Meanwhile, Professor Wang Xingxing has stated that “the rapid implementation of remote sensing data will not only better serve fields like disaster monitoring, national defense and security, smart cities, and environmental protection, but it will also provide strong technical support for the expansion of remote sensing data and serve mass service applications for users.”

Chang Guang Satellite Technology Could Surpass Elon Musk’s Starlink

Wang Xingxing told the South China Morning Post that this progress will place Chang Guang Satellite ahead of Musk’s commercial satellite, the Starlink satellite service.

“Achieving a data transmission speed of 100 Gbps from the satellite to Earth is equivalent to transmitting 10 full movies in one second, the same as upgrading a single-lane highway to thousands of lanes,” he said proudly.

One of the central reasons why China has managed to surpass the United States in this field is the high-level education and training of its scientists, as well as the laser data transmission that it handles with an advantage.

It’s important to note that, in the past two years, Chang Guang’s development and technology have surpassed many key technologies, such as atmospheric channel compensation technology, solving issues like signal distortion caused by atmospheric turbulence, and finally opening up a high-sensitivity, long-distance coherent laser communication link between a satellite and Earth.

El Ciudadano