Ookla Q4 2022 Study Sees Rise in UK Starlink Broadband Speeds

Ookla, which runs the popular Speedtest.net service, has published their latest Q4 2022 report into the internet download, upload and latency performance for UK customers – and other countries – on SpaceX’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) based Starlink ultrafast broadband satellites. The good news is that speeds seems to be rising again.

At present Starlink has a constellation of around 3,680 LEOs in orbit and their plan is to deploy a total of 4,425 by 2024, then 7,500 more by the end of 2027. Customers in the UK normally pay from £75 per month, plus £460 for the regular home kit (standard dish, router etc.) and £40 for shipping on their “Standard” plan, which promises unlimited usage, fast latency times of 25-50ms, downloads of c. 50-200Mbps and uploads of c.5-15Mbps (speeds may change as the network grows).

However, it’s not unusual for real-world speeds to differ from an ISP’s advertised performance claims, which was underlined after our last update on Q2 2022 showed 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.

The latest data from Ookla continues to show that, year-over-year, median download speeds were still slower for Q4 2022 than Q4 2021, when there were fewer users on each network, but also fewer satellites and ground stations (adding the latter two tends to improve performance). Most countries showed between 10-20% slower speeds in Q4 2022 than what users experienced in Q4 2021 (19% slower in the UK).

The good news is that Starlink’s performance in the UK has started to pick up again in Q4 2022, albeit only very gradually. The exception is latency, which has declined from consistently hovering around 36-39ms to averaging 53ms.

Starlink’s UK Broadband Speeds Q4 2021 to Q4 2022

Q4 2022

Download 96.79Mbps

Upload 12.40Mbps

Latency 53ms

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

Nevertheless, the speeds consumers get from the service are nothing to sniff at, particularly if you live in a poorly served rural area (i.e. the target audience), where most fixed line and mobile (4G / 5G) 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.

A similar performance improvement has also been witnessed across other countries in Europe, although some did report flat or negative performance trends (e.g. Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Sweden).