Customers in the South East of England who may be looking to sign-up with SpaceX’s popular Starlink service, which offers ultrafast broadband connectivity via a global mega constellation of satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), may have to wait a bit longer as the network in that area is now “at capacity“.
At present Starlink’s network has a staggering 6,906 satellites (c.2,800 are v2 Mini / GEN 2A) in orbit – 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 c. 25-100Mbps and uploads of c. 5-10Mbps.
However, from time-to-time parts of their network may reach a capacity limit, which means that Starlink’s standard fixed residential service is full and new activations are not possible unless more data capacity is introduced. This is done to avoid the impact of excess subscriptions causing a bigger detriment to service quality (performance / speeds) for existing customers.
The issue of capacity isn’t just a matter of how many satellites Starlink has in orbit and their capabilities (inc. any limitations of the chosen radio spectrum bands), but also of how many ground stations you have active in the same area and whether they have enough capacity to effectively feed current demand. Localised capacity issues often tend to reflect more of an issue with ground stations, which can take a little bit of time to rectify (usually a few weeks or months).
In this case, a large swathe of South East England, mostly reflecting the Greater London area and parts of several surrounding counties (see picture – top), has reached capacity (credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this). This means that anybody putting in an order for the standard fixed residential service will be placed on a waiting list until the issue is resolved.
So far as we can recall, this is the first time that any significant part of the UK has reached one of Starlink’s capacity limits, although it’s perhaps not too surprising given that the service’s broadband speeds seem to have declined across the UK over the past six months (details here). Nevertheless, this should still be considered as a fairly routine part of how the service works, with various other patches of the world also dipping into and out of the company’s capacity limits over time.