White House Connected to Starlink Satellite Internet to ‘Improve Wi-Fi’

White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt said work is underway to “improve Wi-Fi” at the Washington, D.C., government campus. This work appears to involve opening up SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service to the White House and other government buildings to address “unstable cellular service” and “overloaded Wi-Fi infrastructure.”

According to the source, a SpaceX representative was exploring the possibility of placing a Starlink terminal on the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex. However, the White House does not receive the signal from the Starlink system directly, as the information is routed through a data center located several miles away. Starlink is typically used to provide internet access in remote and hard-to-reach areas, but this is not the case in this case, since the White House is located in densely populated Washington, D.C.

Journalists and some Americans were not only unhappy with the fact that the company of Elon Musk, one of the close associates of US President Donald Trump, became the Internet provider for the White House. An information security specialist also noted that the Starlink system could become an additional channel of attack on the carefully controlled infrastructure of the government complex. According to experts, there is no apparent reason to use Starlink in the White House, since the most obvious way to solve the problem of overloaded Wi-Fi networks is to lay additional network cables and install more access points.

White House officials said Starlink had “gifted” them access to satellite internet. That might help convince some Americans that Starlink is a legitimate option for the White House, especially since the signals from space don’t come directly but instead pass through a data center.