SpaceX Puts Starlink Broadband Live on the British Ascension Island
Good news if you’re one of the few who live on the remote Ascension Island, which is a British Overseas Territory that sits in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean and is home to almost 900 people (many of them visitors and rotating military personnel). Starlink’s ultrafast satellite broadband service has just gone live.
Starlink currently has around 10,840 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – mostly at altitudes of between c.340-550km. Residential customers in the UK currently pay from £40 a month for the Residential 100Mbps unlimited data plan, which also promises uploads of c.15-35Mbps and low latency connectivity (c.20ms). Faster packages exist at greater cost, while more restrictive (data capped) options also exist for roaming users (e.g. £55 per month for 100GB of data).
ISPreview has previously mentioned that the local government on the extremely remote Ascension Island had already approved the use of Starlink, which was facilitating somewhat of a shakeup in the local mobile and satellite broadband connectivity market (here). But as usual it’s taken a bit longer for all their ducks to get in line before the Starlink service itself could actually go live.
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“Starlink’s high-speed, low-latency internet is now available on Ascension Island!,” said the service earlier this morning on X (here). The monthly pricing closely mirrors that of their normal UK packages, which start at £40 for their 100Mbps residential service. But unlike in the UK you’ll need to shell out the full £299 for their hardware (Standard 4 X) and there’s also a £20 shipping fee.
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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In neighbouring St Helena, Starlink is banned, you have to use Sure, the government owned telephone and tv service provider, phone numbers include a London(UK) number.
Sure was also the provider on Ascension Island, until a recent change, I don’t know if the international dialling code has changed for Ascension Island!
Sure isn’t owned by the St Helena government (SHG). It does however enjoy a monopoly over providing telecoms services on the island, which is not entirely unreasonable given the ongoing investment required versus the very small size of the market. That has the potential to change now with the passage of the Communications Ordinance 2025. The last I read SHG and Sure were still negotiating over the terms of a new telecoms licence and presumably SHG would like to avoid them just pulling out abruptly like they did on Ascension Island.
Is there no escape from the madness of Musk, and the contemptible Far right ideology that suffuses him, and his Trillion dollar corporations even in the most geographicaly isolated regions of the world. He is like, a bad skunk spray, with an appalling stink that never goes away…