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A new study from Opensignal has compared the performance of 5G and 4G powered Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) broadband to that of Starlink’s LEO satellite network across 14 European markets, including the United Kingdom. In the UK, Starlink comes out top for rural broadband, but it’s a much more mixed picture in urban areas, where Three UK is strongest for 5G FWA.
The study, which is based on crowdsourced data collected via users of Opensignal’s App, focused on two key measures – Download Speed and Consistent Quality (CQ) – to capture different sides of the experience. “Speed shows the network capacity of the service, while Consistent Quality shows how often it is good enough during everyday use,” said Opensignal.
Starlink ultimately came out as the fastest rural broadband option in all 14 markets analysed – users on Starlink measure twice the speed (82Mbps) of the average FWA provider. In half of these markets, Starlink also matches or beats urban FWA speeds, where mobile operators normally have good coverage and plenty of spectrum. The leading FWA providers do, however, outperform Starlink on Consistent Quality throughout urban and rural areas of most markets.