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The Government announced it was looking at trial deployments of Starlink in parts of the UK in an effort to get people access to something that provides decent broadband speeds.

Starlink is mostly in the headlines currently due to the company owner being Elon Musk and the big difference having a low latency relatively high bandwidth service has made to Ukraine forces as they battle Russia who invaded in Ukraine originally in 2014 and again in February 2022 attempted a much wider invasion which is slowly being repelled by the Ukrainians.

The Starlink low earth orbit solution surfaces on our speed tests and looking at just the UK landing station speed tests download speeds averaged out at 138.6 Mbps median and mean was 118.6 Mbps, upload averaages were 11.8 Mbps median and 10.8 Mbps mean. Latency is not as impressive as we are showing an 80ms median in our October data. The November results are still on the to-do list.

The key think with Starlink is that you need no infrastructure where you deploy the dish other than a power supply big enough to supply 45W to 100W, which is possibly via a 12V battery and inverter if you are extremely off grid. Installing Starlink is as simple as placing the antenna in a location where it has as much visibility of the sky as possible, so with limited instructions people can ground mount it in a suitable part of the garden or a flat roof.

So for those who did not know about Starlink and its capabilities they have some idea, and the low earth orbits solutions are a significant step change compared to old geo-stationary satellite services.

Lesson over and back to the headline Starlink apparently a distraction in race for better rural broadband.

National Broadband has sent out the following comment 

The UK government’s decision to trial Starlink is a time-consuming and unnecessary distraction as there is already a viable solution in place for those waiting on fibre connectivity – 4G broadband.

This technology is available immediately and for less than half the price of Starlink, from both a set-up and ongoing monthly cost point of view. And crucially, 4G broadband is a solution that can be used right now to enable those ‘notspots’, the 500,000+ primarily rural UK homes and businesses that currently have under 10Mbps.

What’s more, there is already another solution on the horizon - low-band 5G, which will offer rural ‘notspots’ broadband speeds of between 60 and 70Mbps. This service should again be markedly cheaper than Starlink.

If the government is serious about closing the digital divide for all as rapidly as possible, as part of the connectivity mix it must focus on leveraging existing technologies which already offer effective and affordable solutions today.

National Broadband specializes in 4G fixed wireless installs and with £299 install costs and £29/m for an unlimited 4G service at least the ongoing costs are not bad, many people will probably be able to make use of a voucher to pay the install cost.

External antenna for 4G have been around for a few years and voucher schemes led to the commercialisation of what was something of a hobbyist circle previously.

Now while it is possible that some of the locations DCMS is considering for Starlink might have access to a 4G signal given a high enough 4G antenna a great many will not, or as some have found the service can vary according to the weather, foilage cover and perhaps the biggest that the mobile towers are often located near a population centre and the activity of those closer can create contention.

The most interesting part is the idea that 5G using the spectrum around the 700 MHz band will mean people could start to see 60 to 70 Mbps speeds over a much wider area when 5G antenna are deployed in a fixed scenario. We asked National Broadband and they quoted some US deployments in the 600 MHz bands, but there was generally more spectrum allocated i.e. 2 x 15 MHz rather than the 2 x 10 MHz which was the result of the UK 700 MHz band spectrum action. Marginally higher frequency will mean more capacity but the loss of 5 MHz in each direction is likely to wipe that out. 

One of the examples supplied shows people getting much higher than 60 to 70 Mbps but this also helped by carrier aggregation that means handsets can use a much wider range of frequencies. In the deployment scenarios for 700MHz 5G in rural areas of the UK there is not going to be these mid-band frequencies to piggy back onto and like so many other mobile products launches influential journalists get to enjoy a network before hundreds or thousands of others are using it. Of course in the Scottish Highlands you will not have a stadium sized crowd appearing but cars and other IoT devices will be doing low bandwidth activity that could add up if a single mast is covering a wide area.

We've not had any offers of 5G handsets or visits to locations with 5G to test this out ourselves and maybe once its warmer we can do some of that in 2023, but for now based on what we saw with 4G and expectation that while 5G is more efficient at spectrum use when just low frequencies are available we expect speeds in the range 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps which means based on evidence from actual Starlink customers seen so far means Starlink wins.

In the meantime if you are out and about want to test your mobile speeds you can use our web app that will ask to access your mobile browsers location and then detect the nearest postcode. The web app also asks to be added to your Home Screen which means no need to remember the long URL.

So provider of one technology for fixing an issue rubbishes a competing technology for fixing that issue.

I’ve never used starling but surely the whole point is if you had a decent mobile signal you’d not be looking at it anyway.

If you can’t get the government to fund FTTP then they’re not going to fund 4G so as a customer starlink is probably the best option even if means giving money to Musk.

I've removed the type of router and antenna combination this company installs and replaced it with much better high-gain 4G antennas and see the speed do from 30-40Mbps up to 210Mbps.

http://b4rk.co.uk/lte

We have Starlink in Devon and love it.

We are surrounded by trees and in a valley, we have no mobile phone signal and unreliable at times VDSL (30Mb/6Mb).

Thankfully we have enough of a clear view of the sky to provide a reliable service.

Ofcom has already defined an "affordable" broadband connection as one costing the end-user a maximum of £45 inc VAT per month.

However, Starlink's monthly charge is £75 inc VAT?

There seems to be the usual lack of joined-up thinking here from the UK government. What's the point of trialling a service if it's going to cost the recipient such a high amount per month?

I think Elon can claim that his approach is broadly bomb proof .... I'll get my coat okay?

Starlink has the great advantage that you can run it off a 12 volt battery or an inverter when, not just if, the mains goes down.

It is therefore an ideal standby for the rural business (or remote monitoring site) that is critically dependent on an on-line connection after the digital switch off.

I still find it unbelievable that 60 years ago the GPO managed to provide our house with a telephone service via copper cable, but replacing that copper cable with fibre remains undoable. Like many in rural locations we are surrounded by trees and hills that make 4G and satellite unreliable or non-existent. 5G isn't coming any time soon either, if ever. We do have a cabinet some 300 metres down the road so enjoy broadband speeds of mostly 40Mbps but we'll likely never see higher speeds as the will to replace that 60 year old copper cable on its wooden poles just isn't there.

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