Ookla Q2 2023 Study Sees UK Starlink Broadband Speeds Improve

Internet benchmarking firm Ookla, which operates the popular broadband and mobile speed testing service – Speedtest.net, has published their latest Q2 2023 report into the UK internet download, upload and latency performance of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite network. Overall, it’s a story of small improvements.

The Starlink service currently has around 4,700 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) around the Earth (altitude of c. 500km+) and they have approval to add roughly 7,500 more by the end of 2027. Customers in the UK pay from £75 a month, plus £449 for the home kit (dish, router etc.) and £20 for shipping on the “Standard” package, which promises fast latency times of 25-50ms, downloads of c. 25-100Mbps and uploads of c. 5-10Mbps.

The latest report from Ookla includes a new Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric for the satellite service. NPS scores are designed to measure the willingness of customers to recommend a particular company’s products or services to others.

In this case, the NPS is based on Speedtest.net’s user responses after being asked how likely they are to recommend their provider to friends or family on a 0 to 10 scale. NPS ratings are categorized into Detractors (score 0-6), Passives (score 7-8), and Promoters (score 9-10), and is calculated as (% Promoters – % Detractors) x 100. Any NPS score above 0 indicates that a provider’s audience is more loyal than not.

Starlink users in France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom had an NPS score much higher than the aggregate score for all fixed broadband providers combined during Q2 2023. In the United Kingdom, Starlink’s NPS was 47.18 vs -26.88 for the aggregate of all fixed broadband providers combined, with the median download speeds a little closer, 100.11Mbps vs 77.38Mbps, respectively. Pretty good.

Among the 27 European countries surveyed, Starlink had median download speeds greater than 100Mbps in 14 countries, greater than 90Mbps in 20 countries, and greater than 80Mbps in 24 countries, with only three countries failing to reach 70Mbps. But the year-over-year median download speeds are about the same (-5% to 5%) or better (greater than 5%) from Q2 2022 to Q2 2023 in 15 countries and slower (decreasing more than 5%) in 8 countries.

However, Starlink in Switzerland had one of the fastest median download speeds, at 122.47Mbps. As for upload speeds, performance mostly decreased, with only the UK showing an improved median upload speed in Q2 2023.

Starlink’s UK Broadband Speeds Q4 2021 to Q2 2023

Q2 2023

Download 100.11Mbps

Upload 12.31Mbps

Latency 51.26ms (a lower figure is faster)

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

At the end of the day, Starlink’s performance seems to have settled into a degree of maturity, but the speeds consumers get from this service are still nothing to sniff at. This is particularly true if you happen to 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 this study is still useful for identifying general trends.