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Orbit is not your average Wi‑Fi
Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht is basically saying: the internet’s old traffic cops were built for a world where connections stay put. Starlink’s satellites, meanwhile, are zipping around like caffeinated Roombas, which makes congestion control a whole different beast.
Why this matters
The pitch is simple but kind of huge: if Cloudflare and Starlink can tailor networking software for low-Earth-orbit conditions, they could improve throughput and latency without relying only on more hardware. In other words, smarter software could unlock more juice from the same cosmic plumbing.
The Starlink scale-up problem
Starlink is growing fast — SpaceX said it had 12 million subscribers at the end of Q2, roughly double last year’s level. Cloudflare also said Starlink traffic through its network was up 2.3x in 2025, so this isn’t some nerdy side quest; it’s a real scaling headache.
Big picture
If this idea turns into an actual collaboration, it could help Starlink deliver better service as it expands and give Cloudflare a front-row seat to the next generation of internet plumbing. Sometimes the biggest tech gains aren’t flashy rockets — they’re the boring software tweaks that stop the whole thing from falling over.