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Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service Starlink will be available worldwide except the North and South Poles starting in August, the billionaire entrepreneur said on Tuesday during a talk at the virtual Mobile World Congress 2021.

Starlink is currently “operational now in about 12 countries, and more are being added every month,” Musk said.

The high-speed broadband service has more than 1,800 low-orbit satellites that have been launched into space by Musk’s SpaceX venture. Musk said that Starlink already has more than 69,000 active customers, and the service is growing rapidly.

“We are on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months,” Musk said.

Starlink had about 10,000 as of February, but this month Musk said the company passed “the strategically notable number of 69,420 active users.”

Musk estimates the capital intensive project could cost the company $5 billion to $10 billion to deploy the internet service, which is designed to reach the hardest to reach places with high speed internet. Compared to other broadband offerings, the service is not cheap. It costs $99 a month and subscribers must buy the necessary satellite dish equipment for $499.

But Musk said the service isn’t meant for everyone. He said the service is intended for the 3% to 5% of people in the world without access to the internet.

“It’s really about getting to parts of the world that are the hardest to reach, the most difficult to reach,” he said. “It’s really a nice complement to fiber and 5G.”

The low altitude satellites have an advantage over other satellite internet systems, because the latency or the time it takes for signals to travel back and forth between earth and satellites is much shorter. Latency and download speeds are important for delivering internet service. Musk said the latency and speed of Starlink rivals that of fiber and 5G connections, which makes it a good subsitite for these services when they’re unavailable.

“The latency for the Starlink system is similar to latency for ground-based fiber and 5G, so we’re expecting to get latency down under 20 milliseconds,” Musk said.

Because of this advancement in technology, the company is already beginning to partner with wireless carriers around the world to provide backhaul or the connection that cellular providers need to aggregate traffic from their base stations to the internet.

“We have two quite significant partnerships with major country [carries], that I’d like to be able to announce now but obviously we defer to our partners to make any announcement,” Musk said. “And we are in discussions with a number of other [carriers] to provide Starlink access.”

Musk also noted that the company is “losing money” on the hardware it sells to access the service. The hardware costs nearly $1,300 each, but SpaceX charges users $499. Musk said the company is working on technology that would bring the customer device down to $250 or $300.

“Now we are working on next generation terminals that will provide the same level of capability, but it costs a lot less,” he said. “Because obviously, selling terminals for half price is not super compelling at scale.”