Elsewhere I’ve written about my extensive experiences with rural broadband in Northumberland, UK and Galera, Southern Spain – and today I just watched an interesting video by a another Brit – Joshua De Lisle – who finally gave up with copper in his area and moved to Starlink. In his video – Joshua explains that on copper broadband, he could obtain no more than 17Mbps download and a mind-numbingly slow 0.87Mbps upload speed and has taken the plunge and bought Starlink, not directly from Stalink but from Toolstation!!
Interesting after my experiences in Spain of researching Starlink which can be had there for as low as 29 Euros + 9 Euros tax, to find that back in the UK (where I’m writing this rather than making a video precisely because of poor upload speed – the same issue that Joshua has been suffering with copper Internet) he had to pay £300 for equipment and £75 a month to use the service.
Don’t get me wrong, his potential top speed will be higher than that of the “deprioritised” service available in Spain (though Spanish can also pay a higher price and I know some that do) but the general idea is the same… if you can’t get fibre and you need the speed, Starlink could well be an option.
Anyone in the UK considering Starlink might like to look at Joshua’s video as he also mentions a “congestion charge” which the Starlink site wanted. He thought he’d avoided it – but it seems not. Joshua could not register on the APP but had to go to the Starlink website where he found “due to network conjection in your area there is an additional one-time charge to purchase Starlink” – suggesting that Starlink has been more successful in the UK than they expected and the capacity is still limited despite having around 7,000 satellites up there at the beginning of 2025. Friends back in Spain who chose the “deprioritised” Starlink service had none of this to contend with.
I’m in the UK for only a short time before returning to Spain and given that we only spend a few weeks a year here in rural Northumberland, I simply could not justify £75+ a month for Starlink and have been battling with other options. Where we live in Northumberland is on the edge of town and the fibre companies are just as bad as those in our home in rural Spain – “edge of town? sorry mate, out of luck, we’re not planning to fit fibre where you live” – I’ve covered this elsewhere so I won’t labour the point…
Joshua makes no mention of 4G/5G mobile – over Christmas 2024 here I tackled various companies for broadband and having reached the same conclusion about fibre (no chance) I looked at 4G. But firstly let me say that the UK goverment is SUPPOSEDLY updating all copper lines to fibre in the near future – do I really believe that’ll be ALL as in 100% – no I don’t. With Starlink out of the running for me, I’ve been using O2 4G LTS with a suitable router for over a year at up to 30Mbps download and up to 20Mbps upload, far from ideal for YouTube uploads but “do-able” for holidays. In the end I could achieve no better speeds with O2 (Sky or GiffGaff) and my TP-Link router mentions in my article above – also lack of truly unlimited 4G data with any of the operators proved to be an insurmountable problem for me in the end – but let me quickly tell you about my experience in the lead up to the new year…
Ok, so back in Spain I’ ended up’ve no for 18 months had truly unlimited 4G LTE at up to 100Mbps download, up to 60Mbps upload – and that works – for a total of 15 euros a month with DigiMobil and no catches – I can’t justify Starlink 39 Euros a month all-in, in Spain, though I may at a later date.
Back in the UK at the prices Joshua discussed, Starlink is definitely a no-go for me. currently I’m using a UK company called OneStream who offer a connection to the Openreach box (we have no BT and pay no line rental – the box was just sitting there in the corner of the living room. doing nothing) for £17.95 a month plus a modem. They offered 3 options and could actually deliver none of them so I went off to eBay and bought Onestream’s preferred router – the TP-Link Archer VR400. for £25 second-hand. Works perfectly but delivers no more than I expected from seeing what our neighbour gets on a copper-based Internet connection, i.e. 30Mbps down, 3Mbps upload. That’s it, not going to get better no matter how much I could spend on a modem and so we come back to the UK government’s promise of 100% fibre for sometime “real soon”.
Having committed to Onestream, I then discovered one of the 4G suppliers who announced “unlimited” 4G – I’m stuck with the Openreach box for now but after a year I will look again at Silux Mobile – who ASSURED me that THEIR 4G offering would give much better speed than I’d seen and was “unlimited”. Not true of course but I DID get the guy’s assurance that THEIR version of “unlimited” means 1.2TB a month – no, I don’t create YouTube videos for a living but I have been putting up 4K drone videos and there is definitely a niche for 1.2TB/month maximum for most of us (I say from experience) – all the TV you can eat, lots of 4K video uploads – sure – then there’s just a matter of speed. So, 4G limits solved, what about upload speed?
I ran out of time to use Silux Mobile’s free test period – but I suggest this might be an option for those of you who can get a half-decent 4G signal on your phones. Silux use only ZTE routers which I refer to at the end of my blog entry here – and which I now use in Spain. I don’t know WHICH ZTE router Silux use (I’ll try to find out) but I believe the fellow at Silux when he says the router they supply will increase the 4G LTE signal to way faster than I’ve achieved with TP-Link and as he said, 5G WILL come “eventually”. I look forward to developing this option in a year (of course, Starlink could always dramatically drop their UK pricing and the currently broke UK goverment COULD some up “trumps” on converting everywhere to fibre – who knows – my money’s on the 4G/5G option).