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Starlink Has 42,000 UK Broadband Customers

Mark.J

Administrator
Staff member
ISPreview Team
Just a small, albeit useful, little detail that I missed in Ofcom's Connected Nations report last month - "more homes are taking up satellite broadband, with around 42,000 UK customers connected to Starlink’s satellite service (up from 13,000 last year) – the majority in rural areas."

This is from their total of 2.2 million+ customers around the world - of which more than 1.3 million are in the United States. But I've not seen the UK figure before, and it shows the impact they're having, despite the high service cost. Still, I'd hope those using Starlink in the UK will eventually be covered by FTTP, although some of their base will of course include motor homes, cruise ships and smaller boats.
 
Interesting number for sure, but Starlink can't be happy with that figure compared to the far more impressive stat that they have signed up nearly 3 times as many Australian users, according to May 2023 figures .. plus they were adding 20k users every three months back then.

Source: Australian Financial Review

 
Country to country comparisons are tedious beasts to do correctly, especially on Starlink where prices, products and purchasing power can differ. Plus an exceptionally high proportion of Australia could be considered extremely remote (simply saying "rural" doesn't quite do the difference justice) and then there's the wonky history of their NBN project. I can easily see why Starlink may be more attractive for a big portion of their geography.
 
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Country to country comparisons are tedious beasts to do correctly, especially on Starlink where prices, products and purchasing power can differ.
Fair point, but it's lack of alternate high speed internet options rather than than how rural/remote potential customers (of course rural/remote are very likely to have less options) are that is driving demand.

Early Starlink customer here (online 4 weeks after product was announced) and I wasn't in any way shape or form a rural customer. There were simply no alternate options, 3 years later there are still no alternate high speed options, and none on the horizon. Starlink service though has been seriously degraded to the point that its no longer interesting as a product, which is surprising given how few customers they have..

My point still stands regardless of cost, customer location or other factors only 42,000 customers in a market of >20 million properties is poor business. The other new internet from space players aren't going to be chasing the UK as a viable market to develop.
 
Fair point there, although the viable market will be a lot less than >20m in the UK, since 80% of the country are now within reach of a gigabit-capable network. So that's around 5-6 million premises left (very roughly).

We can probably cut that down even more by considering that many of those in the 5-6m range will be able to get 50-70Mbps+ via FTTC or possibly even wireless/mobile. This further reduces the need or demand for Starlink given its current real-world network performance.
 
My point still stands regardless of cost, customer location or other factors only 42,000 customers in a market of >20 million properties is poor business. The other new internet from space players aren't going to be chasing the UK as a viable market to develop.
Very true.

Australia, Canada and the USA for instance have much more land per person than we do, a larger proportion of the population that may be considered remote, more of the population that can't get a 'superfast' service, are used to paying considerably more for Internet access and, as big a deal, are wealthier per head than we are. Eliminating London where very few would be interested in Starlink they are a lot richer per head than we are.

I imagine Starlink aren't doing especially great in many other European nations either. Always going to be hard for them to compete with mature, cheap solutions that most find good enough to not want to more than double their monthly bill.
 
As a Starlink user I have to admit it has been rock solid. There was the one global outage a few months back, but aside from that, I cannot say I've had a single problem with it. It is expensive, yes, but comparing to fixed line broadband, they are two vastly different technologies. I am hoping to retire it shortly, £75 a month is a lot, however, tempted to leave the dish up for emergencies, switching to roam would mean I could pause/unpause if ever whatever fixed line services I had went down...

Ironically I think I am probably in a cell with very few other users to contend with because most of the area around where I am has not one, but two or even three FTTP options. I currently have zero available, so in order to go beyond FTTC speed (60Mbps for me) has been a revolution. Yes I do deal with a lot of big files (ISO's mostly as I test a lot of server technology), and I can't suffer downloading games at 60Mbps anymore. (Steam cache helps though!)
 
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Interesting number for sure, but Starlink can't be happy with that figure compared to the far more impressive stat that they have signed up nearly 3 times as many Australian users, according to May 2023 figures .. plus they were adding 20k users every three months back then.

Source: Australian Financial Review

Aussie internet is known to be absolutely awful though, worse than rural UK internet options
 
only 42,000 customers in a market of >20 million properties is poor business.
Starlink was *never* a mass market proposition for a densely populated region like the UK. It was always for places which have no other workable broadband options, and are prepared to pay a premium to get it.

The same satellites which fly over the US also fly over the UK, so these are additional customers for very little extra cost - a ground station or two.

2.2m home customers, if they are paying an average of £75 each, is £2bn per year. There may well be other services sold over this network that we don't know about. Plus it's a technology demonstrator for SpaceX.
 
Australia also has the additional factor in that the NBN, a government owned access network operator who wholesales to ISPs much like Openreach does, has fallen short of expectations essentially everywhere that FTTP was not deployed (which was going to be for the bulk of the population before politics changed that to include a lot more VDSL and HFC).

So they would have see significant migration from LTE (NBN operates their own network) and geo sat (NBN also owns satellites) to starlink, and I'm sure some people who had VDSL probably did the same. There is some investment in installing 5G in the LTE areas, and migrating some LTE areas to FTTP alongside VDSL > FTTP, so maybe it'll swing back a bit.

Not an issue Openreach has or is ever likely to have. Any half decent VDSL line is at least considerably cheaper and rock solid in consistency, let alone being able to get gigabit+ FTTP for about the same price.
 
Starlink was *never* a mass market proposition
You missed the story about Musk promising his investors 20 million customers by the end of 2022 and falling a long way short. These numbers are further confirmation of the fact that it was oversold/too expensive/too congested/too slow/Musk aversion syndrome - delete as appropriate..


The same satellites which fly over the US also fly over the UK
Some what analogous to the often opined upon on this forum <number or premises passed/number of customers connected metric> touted by Openreach & the Altnet's. Except Starlink passes every single building in the country and only turned 42,000 of them into paying customers..

The various Altnets are going gangbusters compared to Starlink..

2.2m home customers, if they are paying an average of £75 each, is £2bn per year.
You also missed this story that Starlink lost 250 million dollars worth of satellites in one three month period last summer, which of course all need replacing to maintain a level of service. They are still falling out of the sky as we speak..


There appear to be plenty of customers willing to pay Starlink's prices for 3 or 8Gbe services or a VM bundle without the luxury of a one month rolling contract.
 
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As a Starlink user I have to admit it has been rock solid. There was the one global outage a few months back, but aside from that, I cannot say I've had a single problem with it. It is expensive, yes, but comparing to fixed line broadband, they are two vastly different technologies. I am hoping to retire it shortly, £75 a month is a lot, however, tempted to leave the dish up for emergencies, switching to roam would mean I could pause/unpause if ever whatever fixed line services I had went down...

Ironically I think I am probably in a cell with very few other users to contend with because most of the area around where I am has not one, but two or even three FTTP options. I currently have zero available, so in order to go beyond FTTC speed (60Mbps for me) has been a revolution. Yes I do deal with a lot of big files (ISO's mostly as I test a lot of server technology), and I can't suffer downloading games at 60Mbps anymore. (Steam cache helps though!)
Same here. Best decision we made was dumping Virgin and going for Starlink. Yes its more expensive and a little slower at times but its been rock solid.
 
I am hoping to retire it shortly, £75 a month is a lot, however, tempted to leave the dish up for emergencies, switching to roam would mean I could pause/unpause if ever whatever fixed line services I had went down...
Well my fixed lines - all of them went down in Suffolk, due to a rather large tree and some nasty winds recently. Reported Thursday and Openreach to be fair were out with a picker on Monday and fixed it all up in a few hours.

However Starlink support? Still no response from then to 'reactivate' the standard service I had sitting on ice for just this sort of eventuality.

Been waiting for a response (of any sort) since Friday....<,,,tumbleweed,,,>

Not great Elon.
 
Blimey their ears must’ve been burning, because I just got this…

Thank you for providing that information. I went ahead and reactivated your account, may you please attempt the following below.

Please reboot router via Starlink App (Located: App home page > Settings > Router > Slide to reboot router).

Reboot Starlink dish via App

Located: App home page > Settings > Starlink > Slide to reboot Starlink dish

Please allow 30 minutes after the reboot to get back online.

Please feel free to reach back out if you have any further questions or concerns.


So that only took 4 days to get sorted!

Oh and they closed the ticket. How efficient of them 🤣
 
Well my fixed lines - all of them went down in Suffolk, due to a rather large tree and some nasty winds recently. Reported Thursday and Openreach to be fair were out with a picker on Monday and fixed it all up in a few hours.

However Starlink support? Still no response from then to 'reactivate' the standard service I had sitting on ice for just this sort of eventuality.

Been waiting for a response (of any sort) since Friday....<,,,tumbleweed,,,>

Not great Elon.
Jesus.. horrible service. What's the point of it as a backup then?..
 
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I'm kind of surprised they don't just have a "reactivate account" button for just such an occasion, since it seems likely to be an automatable process.
 
I'm kind of surprised they don't just have a "reactivate account" button for just such an occasion, since it seems likely to be an automatable process.
They've deigned to send me a customer support feedback form. I will be suggesting this and also slightly better response times than 96 hours.
 
Unless they can get automated reactivation - and working within 2 hours - there's zero point having Starlink (Standard service) as a cold standby backup option.

As it stands their customer response times are beyond woeful. Especially for the cha ching ££££ they charge. I get it, I do, but they can do better.
 
I'm kind of surprised they don't just have a "reactivate account" button for just such an occasion, since it seems likely to be an automatable process.

Actually, they do but you have to log into 'your account' area via their website.
For whatever reason they don't allow you to do it from their phone app.

You then have a choice to go back to your old subscription package (residential) or move to their more expensive ones.
 
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