Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, said the company's Starlink satellite internet service would double the speed of its customers "later this year".

"later this year, the speed will double to ~ 300Mb/s, while the delay will drop to ~ 20ms," Musk said on social media on Monday.

Musk added that by the end of 2021, Starlink's service will reach most of the world's customers and is expected to cover the whole world next year.

He stressed that Starlink, like other satellite broadband services, is aimed at customers in "low and medium population density areas".

Starlink is a satellite Internet project of SpaceX. From 2019 to 2024, SpaceX plans to use five years to put thousands of satellites needed for networking into low-Earth orbit to form a "star chain" network to provide high-speed Internet services.

The SpaceX leadership had previously estimated that Starlink would cost about $10 billion or more to build, but thought the network service could generate $30 billion a year, more than 10 times the annual revenue of its existing rocket business.

SpaceX completed $850 million in equity financing two weeks ago, and the money is expected to be used for Starlink and Starship.

So far, SpaceX has launched more than 1000 satellites for Starlink. In October, SpaceX began offering early-stage services to customers in the US, Canada and the UK in the form of a public beta. The price of the service is $99 per month, plus the upfront hardware cost of connecting to the network is $499.

The company recently expanded the scope of the above public beta and allowed potential users to subscribe to the Starlink service. SpaceX disclosed in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this month that its Starlink satellite Internet service now has "more than 10000 users in the United States and outside the United States."