Ookla Finds Starlink’s UK Broadband Speeds are Poor vs Europe

Internet benchmarking firm Ookla, which operates the popular Speedtest.net broadband and mobile connection testing service, has published a new study that examines the performance of Starlink’s (SpaceX) LEO satellite broadband service across Europe. Overall, the UK delivers the best latency of all the countries tested, but we’re poor for download and upload speeds.

At present Starlink has almost 7,000 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (c.2,800 are v2 Mini / GEN 2A) – mostly at altitudes of c.500-600km – and they’re in the process of adding thousands more by the end of 2027. Customers in the UK typically pay from £75 a month for a 30-day term, plus £299 for hardware on the ‘Standard’ unlimited data plan (inc. £19 postage), which promises latency times of 25-60ms, downloads of 25-100Mbps and uploads of 5-10Mbps.

NOTE: By the end of 2024 Starlink’s global network had 4.6 million customers (up from 2.3m in 2023) and 87,000 of those were in the UK (up from 42,000 in 2023) – mostly in rural areas.

However, over the past couple of years we have observed a bit of a decline in Starlink’s performance, which reflects the changeable balance between rising customer demand and SpaceX’s ability to launch new satellites in order to keep up with that demand. This is also influenced by differences in access to data capacity at local ground stations and regulatory access to the necessary radio spectrum bands, among other things, which can vary between countries.

Ookla’s new report, which uses data collected during Q4 2024, digs a bit deeper into all this and gives us a useful overview of how Starlink performs across the UK and Europe. For example, the UK delivered the fastest latency (server response times) across Europe with a score of 41ms (milliseconds), which places us at the top of the performance table for this specific metric. By comparison, Cyprus was the slowest on 144ms.

Ookla-Starlink-Q4-2024-Latency-Times-UK-vs-Europe

The report also noted that latency is one area where Starlink has generally continued to improve. Speedtest Intelligence® data shows a consistent trend of double-digit declines in median latency across over a dozen European countries between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024, with the UK falling from around 50ms to 41ms and other countries seeing similar improvements.

In terms of the average median download speeds, the United Kingdom scored 87.06Mbps, while uploads came in at 12.78Mbps. In both cases, this placed the UK in the bottom half of the performance table, while the likes of Hungary delivered the fastest Starlink downloads of 135.11Mbps and Romania topped the table for uploads on 23.52Mbps.

Ookla-Starlink-Q4-2024-Download-Speeds-UK-vs-Europe

Back to those speed declines. Between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023, Ookla stated that Central European countries saw some of the steepest declines in median download speeds. In Germany, speeds fell by 31% — from 94.37Mbps to 65.44Mbps — while Switzerland recorded a 24% drop, going from 136.03Mbps to 103.88Mbps. But it’s not all bad news.

For the first time in Q4 2024, there were signs that the successive speed declines observed in previous quarters may have stabilized, with early indications of a potential recovery. However, given quarter-to-quarter variability, it remains to be seen whether this trend will hold in the coming year,” said the study. You can see what they mean below, where we’ve highlighted the UK’s performance line over time.

Ookla-Starlink-Q4-2024-Download-Speeds-Over-Time-UK-vs-Europe

Starlink’s performance also stands a good chance of continuing to improve once SpaceX starts using their new Starship rocket to launch significantly larger quantities of satellites, as well as their next generation of bigger V3 (GEN3) satellites that can handle 1Tbps (Terabits per second) of capacity (here).

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