Quitting Starlink

tl;dr

Thanks to National broadband, I have a 4G modem hooked up to an exterior antenna pointing at a mast that's in our line of sight giving over 100 MB/s download and 40 MB/s upload. That download speed is half as good as I got with Starlink, but the upload speed is 5 times better. Best of all, we are no longer paying money to Elon Musk, surely one of the most reprehensible people on the planet.

The story

For many years after we moved to a semi-rural location near Ipswich we had to put up with very poor internet connectivity. On a good day we'd get just over 20 MB/s download and on a really good day, 1 MB/s upload. Neighbours said they always knew when I as on a call as their internet speed was made even worse. Upload speed is actually the critical one for anyone like me who works from home and spends large portions of every day in video calls. My colleagues were all fed up with my terrible connection. I couldn't share my screen to give a presentation and keep my camera on, and even then, I was often effectively absent from the call.

But what can you do? Unless you live in a built up area in the UK, the only wired connectivity available is provided by BT Openreach. Sure you can sign up with any number of providers but they all depend on that BT Openreach infrastructure so whatever I did, I wasn't going to improve on those terrible connectivity speeds.

Our house is actually midway between two villages. There are cabinets in both of those villages that are supplied by fibre connections. This means that the houses near them, even though they're connected to the cabinet by copper wire, actually do OK as the distance from cabinet to property is generally short. That's why there was never any hope of getting the village all hooked up with fibre to the property. You can get a grant but that grant is an individual one at around the level of each person's share if everyone conected to a given cabinet wants it. Most of the houses connected to those two cabinets have adequate connectivity and I'd never be able to persuade them all to go through the bother of joining me in pushing for fibre connections - most of them would see no real gain. What's doubly frustrating is that the fibre between those two cabinets goes more or less past our front door, but no, we can't tap into it.

The final straw came in summer 2023 when for reasons no one could explain, BT started calling me to say that someone else was taking over my line as had been requested. Who by? Not me and, apparently, not BT. After repeating the same conversation with call-centre operators explaining that, no, I didn't want to cancel the contract, on the third occasion I was so fed up I said, OK, disconnect me. I'm past caring. Actually, to my shame, I was rather rude, for which I apologise unreservedly.

By this time, a friend had signed up with Starlink and it looked like the ideal solution. So, I clicked the buttons to place the order and a few weeks later, with the help of our (highly recommended) window cleaner, we were up and running with excellent connectivity.

Wi-fi mesh

Our house is an L-shape and has evolved over many years. This means that many internal walls were previously external ones so they're thick. Bad news for wi-fi signals. One good thing about the BT system we used to have is their wi-fi repeaters. We had two in addition to the main router which picked up and boosted the signal without any difficulty. Not so the Starlink offer. At significant expense (£140 each), I paid for three additional wi-fi access points which are the same as the main router. Oh and if you pay another £35 each you can get an ethernet dongle for them but with only a single ethernet port, you can't create a wired string of these wi-fi repeaters (you can't wire them in series). I tried setting them up in parallel, i.e. with some wired connections from a central hub but that failed; it's not how mesh networks are meant to operate. After a few months of continued frustration and having to reboot the whole system approximately once a week I sold the wretched things on eBay for a fraction of the original cost and bought a set of Google Nest devices that I could then hard-wire properly. That meant more holes through walls, lots of Cat-6 cable, wall-mounted boxes, a nifty ethernet circuit tester and all the rest of it. Bit of a job but that aspect works well and Starlink allows you to by-pass its wi-fi completely. But should that be necessary? That's one technical aspect of the Starlink system that is truly terrible and worse than just about every alternative.

Timing and decision-making

This all began in August 2023. At that time, I didn't know what Musk was really like. Did you? Did you know then that he would be part of the state capture of the US? That he would gleefully send a bunch of twenty-something year-olds into government buildings and tell the staff they were all fired? That their expertise and experience in running the country was no longer needed? That he would send an email to hundreds of thousands of people demanding that they justify their position by listing what they had done the previous week? And did you know in August 2023 that he would show his true self by literally giving a Nazi salute after that inauguration? Twice. If you've only seen the still image, you might think this is over-played. Watch the video. It's a Nazi salute, pure and simple.

Following the inauguration of his orange co-president on 20 January 2025 it became increasingly vomit-inducing that we were paying £75 per month to that man. But what's the alternative when BT Openreach is so obviously useless?

Oh, good there's a rival system in development, great! Oh - it's run by tax-dodger Bezos. Nope. I looked at another company who could install something based on 4G signals for me at a cost of £2,500. Er... also no.

And so another month's payment to the Musk account was made, but it had to stop somehow, even if that meant going back to copper wire and 1 MB/s upload speed.

The solution came in the form of National Broadband. They have modems for 4G and 5G. There's a feint 5G signal where we are but a really good 4G one. We can see the relevant mast from our upstairs windows. So, more buttons were clicked and a new contract signed. The equipment arrived and they even came and installed it. Free. The proximity of the 4G mast is important as not everyone will be as lucky as us with the same equipment. The young chap who came and installed the antenna said that getting over 100 MB/s was very unusual, so don't take our experience as as baseline.

We're online now with more than adequate download speed, excellent upload speed. Cost? £41/month - not much more than half what we were paying and, absolutely best of all, we're no longer paying Musk. It was actually easy to cancel the Starlink contract. Oh they tried to offer a discount and all the rest of it - it took me seconds to click all the "no, I really do want to cancel" buttons. Of course it ended with a free-text box where I could enter my reason for cancelling. Rather than rant I just typed two words: Elon Musk. Very satisfying. They're even offering to buy-back the equipment and provided a return label.

One more thing to do... I've booked our ever-helpful window cleaner to come and take down the dish. Until it's gone, it feels like I imagine it would be to still be driving around in a Swasticar.