Could Starlink solve the broadband woes of rural Britain?

Mouthy Money editor Edmund Greaves looks at whether Starlink could replace broadband (or the lack of it) in UK homes.

Broadband is one of those quiet issues that bubbles away in the background.

Unlike other sectors where hefty state intervention has created a Potemkin village of a market (hello, energy), broadband is largely footloose.

But there is something of an exception to this rule – how the internet physically arrives in our homes.

This is done through a bit of meddling back in the 2000s, when post-privatisation BT was compelled by the communications regulator Ofcom to provide internet infrastructure into people’s homes, which could then be used by competitor business to provide broadband services.

Openreach was born.

Openreach is wholly owned by BT, but any broadband business can effectively use the network to sell internet provision.

This works nicely, in theory. In practice it comes with a couple of significant issues.

The first is that updating the infrastructure is expensive and difficult. This means many homes in the UK suffer from low-quality internet speeds, despite the existence of enormous theoretical modern download and upload speeds.

Data from Ofcom in 2023 showed only half (52%) of UK homes actually use faster full-fibre broadband (i.e. have high speed connections).

While three quarters (75%) of homes now have the option to receive such high speeds (but just under a quarter haven’t adopted), the other 25% of homes are not even able to access to such high-speed services.

This equates to nearly 7.5 MILLION homes in the UK with no access to the best quality broadband modernity can provide.

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Living in rural areas

The truth here is that rural areas are the ones that lose out on high-speed internet.

Here’s a handy map of the UK from thinkbroadband.com to illustrate that:

This shows full fibre broadband coverage by parliamentary constituency. You can see the colour key on the top left.

The long and short of this is, once you leave the main urban conurbations thing start to get quite patchy. It’s worth having a look at the tool yourself as I was unable to easily show a more detailed picture for the purposes of this article.

You can also use Ofcom’s phone and broadband coverage checker to see what your area has in terms of coverage, but that doesn’t come with a spiffy map unfortunately.

We have our own experiences with this living in North Devon. Although we’re in a town, when we first moved into our home we were using an Openreach connection. But without painting too much of a picture, it was crap.

Rural areas are increasingly served now by rural and regional broadband infrastructure providers. Without offering up an exhaustive list, the two we have around here are Jurassic Fibre and Airband.

We actually switched to Airband and now enjoy speeds of 300mbps+ download speeds as a matter of routine – speeds which simply weren’t on offer from an Openreach-based provider where we live.

The reason for this lack of speedy options in many rural locations is simply put, its not worth it to the operator.

Think of it like this: if you have a town with 10,000 houses in it and no high-speed internet, then if you build a line into all those houses you notionally unlock 10,000 new customers.

But what if that location doesn’t have 10,000 houses, maybe it only has 100. You still have to put the same sort of infrastructure in place to get the high-speed line to the location, but once you do, it only unlocks a tiny amount of potential new business. It doesn’t make economic sense.

Now, much pressure has been applied to improve this situation. Indeed in 2021 big changes were announced to improve the rollout of rurl fibre by Ofcom. Great.

Starlink arrives

Here’s a question though: what if all this new, expensive and time-consuming infrastructure was totally unnecessary? What if a solution already exists that means even the most rural of rural homes can have fast, reliable internet.

Enter: Starlink.

Starlink is the brainchild of controversial billionaire Elon Musk. Wholly owned by his space-tech business SpaceX, it is essentially a global network of satellites that provide fast internet to anywhere in the world, with no need for old-fashioned underground cables.

You buy an antenna (roughly £300), pay the monthly no-contract subscription (£75 a month) and away you go. £75 compared with typical broadband deals is high, but that is sort of irrelevant if the £30 a month line you pay for delivers a totally crap service.

This was what I spoke to Debbie Greenfield, head of production at adviser network Octo Members. Debbie lives in a rural (although tbh, not crazily rural) area of Southern England, works remotely in a job that requires fast and reliable internet, and has a horrible broadband connection. So she turned to Starlink (as have a number of her similarly-frustrated neighbours).

You can hear my full chat with her on the Mouthy Money Podcast page.

To cut a long story short, getting Starlink totally fixed her internet issues. Now, it came with some setup costs that she details in the podcast, but as a solution it sounds remarkably more efficient than what the broadband firms seem to be trying to do.

The applications of the technology are intriguing too – you can get a mobile receiver for travelling, or even one to mount on a campervan (if you’re lucky enough to own one!). It has commercial applications in hard-to-reach places such as on boats or for businesses that operate in remote areas.

Let’s not forget too that this tech notionally does away with the need for mobile signal provision and infrastructure too, no more 4G and 5G masts (and good luck getting a decent 5G connection outside of major towns and cities).

The reasons for creating new technologies and infrastructure (no matter if they come from controversial billionaires) are pretty good ones.

Time and again we’re tethered to the idea that providing more of the same, more and more, and piling money into it, is the way to fix the world.

While most homes do now have good broadband, many do not. Should we put more money toward that, or try something else instead?

This article, and the associated podcast, is in no way commercially affiliated with Starlink. We have not been paid to promote the brand or its products.

Photo credits: Pexels