VMO2's £3 Starlink Service Lifts Coverage to 95% – at 4 Mbit/s

Virgin Media O2 is charging customers £3 (US$4) a month for satellite messaging and calls from parts of Wales that no UK terrestrial network reaches, using Starlink satellites to lift its landmass coverage from 89% to 95%.

Those six percentage points cover an area equal to about two thirds of Wales. But the demonstration VMO2 staged for analysts and reporters in Snowdonia last week also exposed what £3 currently buys: a 4G-grade data service running at roughly 4 Mbit/s, shared across a 50km-wide beam, with no native voice calling.

VMO2, one of the UK's three mobile operators, launched O2 Satellite earlier this year under an agreement struck with Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk's SpaceX, in late 2024. The service uses direct-to-device (D2D) technology: instead of a basestation, a Starlink satellite orbiting at about 350km and travelling at roughly 17,500mph beams a signal directly to standard smartphones.

What worked in the Welsh hills?

After a hike to Aber Falls near Caernarfon — chosen because not-spots are genuinely hard to find — Rob Joyce, VMO2's director of mobile access engineering, established a connection marked "SAT" on the device screen. Texts went through. An internet-based voice call worked.

That is no small feat. Early satellite phones were brick-sized with fencing-foil antennas. For the price of an ice cream, iPhone and Android users can now stay contactable in remote terrain.

The caveats emerged quickly. Orbital gaps meant a satellite was not always overhead in north Wales. And the economics of capacity are unforgiving.

"We estimate 4 Mbit/s per spot beam, and these satellites have about 50 spot beams," said Joyce. "It's 4 Mbit/s of capacity in a 50km diameter. So, depending on how many O2 Satellite subscribers we have, they share that value."

Were every subscriber in a beam to stream the World Cup simultaneously, Joyce acknowledged, there would be a problem. Native voice calls do not work at all. "It doesn't do native voice calling yet, so it's a pure data service," he said. "Obviously, it's not meant yet for doing high-bandwidth applications. It's there for reassurance of coverage beyond the current cellular footprint."

Why 650 satellites is not enough

Only about 650 Starlink satellites currently support D2D — a fraction of the constellation. VMO2 supports the service by sharing a 5MHz sliver of 1800MHz spectrum between cellular and satellite.

The roadmap points upward. Starlink recently acquired 14MHz of 800MHz spectrum in the US, and Joyce sees European knock-on effects: "If they are going to build satellites that do 800MHz, when they fly across Europe, we can use that 800MHz." VMO2 holds its own 10MHz allocation in that range.

A next-generation constellation of about 15,000 satellites would deliver "a lot more bandwidth," according to Joyce — "20 times or it's 100 times the capacity, depending on how much spectrum we deploy." He expects movie streaming and voice calls to become feasible for people outside the cellular footprint.

Is Starlink a threat to mobile operators?

Joyce's answer is blunt: no. Physics gets in the way. A signal from 10km struggles through windows and plasterboard; from 350km, through tile roofs, reflective foil and three storeys, indoor service is effectively impossible. Second-generation satellites will shrink spot beams to about 25km in diameter, but Joyce says that still falls short of deep-indoor coverage. "Is Elon going to challenge the cellular operators?" he asked. "No, he can't."

A likelier disruption is commercial: a Starlink-branded MVNO agreement piggybacking on existing terrestrial networks, which could make Musk a formidable competitor in the US.

For VMO2, the calculation is economic. With the Shared Rural Network already delivering 89% terrestrial availability, and 2G switch-off plus wider satellite-capable handset adoption due by the late 2020s, Joyce believes beaming next-generation satellite service to rural customers could prove cheaper than replacing 2G with new terrestrial 4G sites.

"It's one small text for man, it's one giant leap for the O2 network," Joyce messaged VMO2 CTO Jeanie York in November last year when testing began. Whether the leap reaches its full distance depends on Starlink's 15,000-satellite generation arriving on schedule — and on VMO2 finding enough spectrum to light it up.