Starlink Satellite Broadband Now Live on the Falkland Islands
Good news for residents of the remote Falkland Islands, which are a British Overseas Territory off the South American coast. After a long and complex battle, SpaceX’s ultrafast Starlink broadband service has recently gone live and its final pricing appears to closely mirror the standard packages that are available to UK consumers.
The Starlink constellation currently has around 9,000 satellites in orbit (c.5,500 are GEN2) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km (Low Earth Orbit). Residential customers in the UK usually pay from £75 a month, plus £299 for hardware (currently free for many areas) on the ‘Standard’ unlimited data plan (kit price may vary due to different offers) directly from Starlink, which promises UK latency times of 26-33ms, downloads of 116-277Mbps and uploads of 17-32Mbps. Cheaper, albeit more restrictive (data capped), options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £50 per month for 50 GigaBytes of data).
The situation in the Falkland Islands is, however, a little bit different due to the history of local satellite connectivity – the main means of local communication and one that was previously dominated by a slow and expensive solution from Sure (Sure Falklands Islands). But we’d suggest reading the prior article for a history lesson on that and the battle to overturn it (here).
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Consumers on the Falkland Islands can now legally sign-up to Starlink and the Standard no-contract Residential package will set you back 75 FKP per month (1FKP is almost identical to £1), plus 300 FKP for the hardware (terminal, router etc.) – or 160 FKP for the Mini kit – and 20 FKP for shipping (postage). In addition, customers will also need to secure a VSAT licence from the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) – get one here – and provide the related code to Starlink (this costs £180 per year).
Some hidden data selectors on Starlink’s Coverage Map also allow you to see what kind of performance the network can currently deliver across the Falklands. The data suggests that download speeds of between 208-358Mbps, uploads of between 29-45Mbps and latency times of 37-42ms (milliseconds) should be possible. But officially, Starlink’s advertised speeds propose downloads of 135-305Mbps and uploads of 20-40Mbps.
Credits to one of our readers (Danny) for spotting the update on the Open Falklands blog.
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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