Confusion on the Falkland Islands Over Status of Starlink’s Broadband
Good news, SpaceX’s global Starlink broadband network is currently listed as finally coming to the poorly served Falkland Islands, which is a British Overseas Territory, sometime in 2025. Bad news, the service is already being used by hundreds of local customers and the company has just started to cut them off.
At present there are about 3,700 people living and working on the largely self-governing and self-sufficient Falkland Islands, where all of the fixed line (phone, broadband) services and mobile networks are still supplied by a limited Satellite data link from the dominant provider, Sure (Sure Falklands Islands).
The islands, which are a British Overseas Territory that resides nearly 500km off the South American coast (Argentina), have long suffered from poor digital connectivity and that’s partly due to the political fallout from the 1982 Falklands War. Running a link back through Argentina probably isn’t going to be considered particularly viable or wise any time soon.
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On top of that, the islands are incredibly remote, which even in an ideal political environment would still make running a subsea fibre optic line incredibly expensive. Suffice to say, internet access has never been particularly fast, with the top package from Sure offering 10Mbps (capped data usage of 364GB) and even that’ll cost you.. wait for it.. £467 per month! Sure did say they launched an “unlimited” 15Mbps plan last year, but we couldn’t find it.
Needless to say, residents have long been campaigning for the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) to work with SpaceX in order to approve the use of its Starlink based broadband service on the island, which reflects a mega constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This would be able to offer a significantly faster and more flexible service for a lot less money (note: we don’t know if Starlink will do a Falklands-specific plan, so the details may not match the UK).
The good news is that the FIG is currently expected to grant the necessary approval around April 2025 and a quick look at the map on Starlink’s website similarly shows that the Falklands is now listed with the tag – “Starting in 2025” (credits to Danny for spotting that one). This would be a blow to ‘Sure’, albeit good news for residents. But our story doesn’t end there.
Residents are already using Starlink
At present, hundreds of residents on the Falklands are in fact already using Starlink terminals via the roaming feature. But Sure currently holds the main (monopoly) telecommunications licence on the islands, which technically means that using Starlink there is still illegal (i.e. the terminals are unlicensed). Despite this, the FIG’s work to change this means that the local government hasn’t really clamped down on the practice.
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The above context is important because Starlink recently sent a notice to customers on the islands to inform them that they were “currently using Starlink in an unauthorized territory” and that “local telecommunication authorities” had instructed them to “disable your services“. Interestingly, both the FIG and the Communications Regulator (FICR) promptly denied any involvement with the action.
FICR Statement
Despite the wording of the communication from Starlink, FIG has not instructed Starlink to carry out this action. Further information will be sought from Starlink, but it is understood by FIG that Starlink may be enforcing its own policy on roaming packages that have remained fixed in place for 60 days or more, and which form part of the terms and conditions of use.
As stated in the press statement issued on 3rd February 2025, Starlink has not applied for regulatory approval, though some exploratory discussions have taken place.
The Starlink policy above refers to the fact that they allow users to access the internet in different locations around the world. But this is only allowable for a maximum of 60 days outside of their registered service address within a given year and, after that, they must return to their primary location.
Sadly, some Starlink users on the islands have since reported that they’ve begun to experience service interruptions as their 60-day “roaming period expired” – all of this is being well covered by the excellent Open Falklands blog. In response, the FICR has said they’ve engaged with Starlink who “will work to keep the service on“, but there are still some complexities to be addressed around how VSAT licensing is handled on the island.
Hopefully, a more permanent solution will surface sooner, rather than later. Legalising and normalising access to Starlink for all users could make the Falklands a much more attractive place to both visit and do business.
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Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Why would any rational person want to support the business of a fascist on the Falkland Islands (invaded by military Junta dictatorship) or anywhere else…
Media says sales of Tesla Swastikars are sharply down across Europe.
The main issue is that there’s no reasonable alternative, a 10Mb unlimited broadband supply is something like £230/pm or starlink for a third the price and 10X higher speeds?
Having principles is expensive. £467 p.m. expensive.
What’s fascist today? Cutting corrupt government waste!
Leftists really have no worthy cause these days
As opposed to what? Sure, owned by Batelco, the state-owned telco of Bahrain, that well known liberal democracy, which milks millions out of the Falkland Islands (and St Helena) and funnels them through Guernsey? The old Cable & Wireless, in which the shares were held by the UK Government, wasn’t perfect, but at least there was a degree of accountability.
OneWeb, which Boris saved from bankruptcy, has been a flop – it cost us £400 million to bail out before it was sold to Eutelsat at a loss for £200 million, and when it was deployed in the Falklands, it offered no improvement in service at all, probably because traffic took a detour through Chile and California, before making its way to the UK.
There have been concerns by some people in the Falklands that Elon Musk’s bromance with Javier Milei, the new President of Argentina, might lead to him switching off Starlink terminals in the Islands, but Milei is far less obsessed with them than his predecessors, who only bring them up as a means of deflecting from their mismanagement of the economy.
Ignoring the dumb fascism sheep claims, what exactly makes you believe Javier Milei, arguably the most capitalist politician of all time, would want to shut off Starlink?
The free market and ending government overreach are literally his main 2 goals and achievements, cutting internet does not benefit anyone. If anything quite the opposite. People there are much more exposed to how much growth and freedom Argentina is getting as opposed to the depressive political climate in Britain where the solution to everything is to tax everything and steal more money from the people
Regardless of the Elon Musk derangement syndrome that so many have developed, repeating far-left propaganda and opinions has nothing to do with people in Faroe Islands wanting a decent internet and communication service.
Starlink is an excellent service that would provide the people of the Faroe Islands with much faster speeds at a more competitive price.
@Jack
I never suggested that Javier Milei wanted Starlink to be cut off anywhere – the claims that he might want it to be cut off in the Falklands were put forward by people in the Legislative Assembly and the Chamber of Commerce, expressing concerns about security.
https://openfalklands.com/part-10-starlink-in-the-falklands-20th-sep-select-committee/
I appreciate the sentiment but the near term reasonable alternative is going to be Amazon’s Kuiper network and I don’t know if that is much better as a choice. A OneWeb central link for the island would probably be better.
The better question is why there is still no undersea cable from Puerto Williams in Chile? ~500km is not that far and looking at their economy should not be a problem to reach 21st century.
The cost of doing that would be huge vs the annual GDP of the Falklands, and of course we’re assuming certain things about the seabed here and ease of deployment that may be incorrect. Not to mention that the cost of simply deploying the cable is one thing, but you also have to consider landing sites, data centres, maintenance/repairs, the state of connectivity in Chile itself etc.
On that distance this should not exceed $15-20m according to data I’ve seen somewhere saying that per mile cost could be between 40-60k. Puerto Williams has already ground station for another undersea cable. We are not talking here about rocket science. I bet it is like Falklands wants mainland govt to pay…
Google’s AI answered this one in a way that, based on previous projects and costs in the UK, doesn’t seem unrealistic. But I think it would be toward the higher end of the estimate:
“Deploying a subsea fiber optic cable to the Falkland Islands would likely cost between $20 million and $100 million depending on the cable length, terrain, and required infrastructure, with the cost per kilometer ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 for the submarine cable itself.”
I would caveat that the $30k-$50k is based on figures from a few years ago and today that will be about 30%+ more expensive. Figures for the Falkland Islands GDP, in nominal terms, for 2021 was £276.7 million:
https://penguin-news.com/headlines/fishing/2024/falkland-islands-national-accounts-published-fishing-industry-dominates/
So that’s quite a big project for a small community to afford.
the Isles of Scilly, pop ~2000, only got a fibre connection because BT decided it could re-route a disused one at a fraction of the cost of laying new (I wonder how many “innovative” altnets would have done that?). That’s a group of islands that is close enough to the mainland to be in microwave range.
I doubt the Falklands will get one unless/until the oil revenues start pouring in and London won’t need to fund it.
The problem with Puerto Williams is that Argentina will find a way to stick its oar in, just as it has with the weekly flights from Punta Arenas, which have to make a stopover in Argentina once a month, just as the ones from São Paulo did before Covid broke out. Perhaps OneWeb should have established a PoP there before Sure promising great things, as it has none at all in South America – https://www.openfalklands.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2024/06/Falkland-LEO-Latency-768×423.jpg
*Falkland not Faroe, my mistake lol.