Ookla Q2 2022 Study Sees Fall in UK Starlink Broadband Speeds

Ookla, which maintains the Speedtest.net service, has published their latest Q2 2022 report into the internet download, upload and latency speeds for UK customers – and those in other countries – on SpaceX’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites. The bad news is that speeds have fallen sharply over the past year.

At present Starlink has a constellation of around 3,075 LEOs in orbit and their plan is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024. Customers in the UK normally pay from £75 per month and £460 for the kit (standard dish, router etc.), but for that you can expect unlimited usage, good latency times of 20-40ms, downloads of c. 50-200Mbps and uploads of c.10-20Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).

However, it’s not unusual for the advertised performance claims of an ISP to differ from reality, which is a point that the latest data from Ookla helps to underline. This time last year it was still common to see Starlink’s performance rise as the network expanded with new satellites and ground stations, but the provider’s commercial launch and an influx of new customers is putting greater pressure on their capacity.

Ookla found that Starlink’s median (average) download speeds fell across Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the USA, dropping between 9% and 54% from Q2 2021 to Q2 2022. Nevertheless, the speeds you do get are nothing to sniff at, particularly if you live in a poorly served rural location (i.e. the target audience), where most fixed line and mobile (4G) alternatives will often be much slower.

We should add that web-based speed testing like this does have its limits, not least because it can easily be affected by all sorts of complex issues, such as slow home Wi-Fi, limitations of the tester itself and home network congestion. But that’s true for everybody, thus it’s still useful for identifying general trends.

Starlink’s UK Broadband Speeds – Q4 2021 to Q2 2022

Q2 2022

Download 85.07Mbps

Upload 10.72Mbps

Latency 39ms

Q4 2021

Download 121.94Mbps

Upload 13.96Mbps

Latency 36ms (lower figures are faster)

Q3 2021

Download 111.66Mbps

Upload 16.02Mbps

Latency 37ms

Q2 2021

Download 108.30Mbps

Upload 15.64Mbps

Latency 37ms

The outcome means that it’s now much more difficult to refer to Starlink as an “ultrafast broadband” (100Mbps+) service, since their median average download has collapsed to just 85.07Mbps. But that’s still better than the average for fixed broadband lines, which comes in at 63.16Mbps.

On the other hand, fixed lines delivered faster uploads (17.87Mbps) and latency times (15ms), although getting 39 milliseconds from a satellite link is still remarkable and not far off what you’d expect from terrestrial 4G mobile networks (these tend to hover around the 35ms – 55ms area, but they can be quite variable).

Having said all that, each time Starlink’s performance falls then its competitive advantage and value proposition takes a small hit, which may be part of the reason why they recently reduced their prices. But cheaper prices also tend to attract more customers and that may fuel further declines in performance. Starlink will need to be careful about where they draw the line here, which will be a difficult issue to tackle given the need to make a return on their huge deployment costs.