- Recon Analytics surveyed more than 1,300 Starlink customers, most of whom reside in rural areas
- Those Starlink customers reported fewer service outages than cable and DSL customers, but faced more outages than consumers on fiber broadband
- But Starlink’s predominantly rural base also presents some shortcomings for customer experience
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband offering touts an edge in service reliability over its cable counterparts, despite most of its customers residing in rural areas.
Recon Analytics found Starlink customers experience fewer service outages than cable customers, though they still face more outages than consumers on a fiber broadband connection.
The firm pooled data from more than 153,000 respondents between May 12, 2023 and July 5, 2024. More than 1,300 were Starlink customers – the “first large-scale customer satisfaction study” of Starlink subscribers, according to Recon Analytics.
“Starlink has been able to get 6,146 working satellites into orbit, providing significant capacity and reliability to its subscribers,” wrote Recon Analytics principal Roger Entner. “It has also been able to manage bandwidth, even during peak hours.”
“It is also clear that Starlink’s router is among the most stable in the market,” Entner said.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of Starlink customers (85%) reside in rural areas. Most customers either switched from a small rural provider or never had an internet service provider (ISP) before, Entner said, with 11% of subscribers reporting they are new to home internet.
Starlink is looking to further penetrate the rural market with federal broadband funding. SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell recently said Starlink is “very interested” in participating in the BEAD program and that it’s in talks with NTIA to determine if it can bid for BEAD-funded projects.
But not everybody is gung-ho about using BEAD money for satellite broadband. Gary Bolton, CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association, noted Starlink satellites have a short lifespan of about five years, which doesn’t really fit the long-term vision for BEAD.
Highs and lows of customer service
As for the technical aspects of customer experience, Starlink isn’t much different from fixed wireless access (FWA), Recon Analytics found.
“When it works, it works very well, and when it does not work, the service provider makes it easy to return the product within 30 days with either a total refund or only having to pay for services rendered,” said Entner.
However, Starlink’s predominantly rural subscriber base also presents a challenge for the provider in that “it is not cost-effective to open its own stores.” Having its own salespeople in third-party retail stores is one remedy.
Not just for rural residents
Despite satellite services like Starlink skewing toward rural locations, that doesn’t mean urban-based usage is nonexistent.
Ookla data from Q3 2023 recorded 16.1% of Starlink Speedtest samples in urban locations. Some of those samples may come from roaming, Ookla’s Mark Giles noted, as Starlink allows subscribers to take the service with them – both across the U.S. and abroad.
In some cases, roamers use Starlink as a “redundancy option” to their existing broadband subscription.
“It’s clear that LEO satellite internet is seen as a viable option in many urban U.S. locations,” Giles added.
