News

A tale of telecoms journalists chasing satellites in wet Snowdonia

In Disney’s 1940 film Pinocchio, top hat-wearing conscience-incarnate Jiminy Cricket famously sang: “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are”. As we discovered on a recent Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) trip to Wales, however, when you wish upon a Starlink satellite, it seems it does matter where you are – at least a little.

VMO2 launched its commercial O2 Satellite offering February, offering customers the chance to access direct-to-device (D2D) satellite connectivity for £3 per month via a partnership with SpaceX’s Starlink.

Roughly eight months later, VMO2’s Director of Mobile Access Engineering, Rob Joyce, led a group of journalists on a wet trek into the hills of Snowdonia to test the service for ourselves.

Rain stops play?

Our first mission – which proved trickier than anticipated – was finding a ‘not-spot’.

Unsurprisingly, given its geography, Snowdonia is littered with not-spots, ranging from small sections of remote road to large swaths of the mountains (check out O2’s coverage checker for a closer look).

However, for our outing to the beautiful Aber Falls (pictured), terrestrial coverage remained robust for longer than expected. Only after a few kilometres off the beaten track were we finally seemingly out of range of O2’s mobile network.

At this point the O2 handsets provided for us should have automatically switched to the satellite network, but no. As we stood in the rain under a heavily overcast sky, we wondered whether the weather was impacting the service.

Water absorbs microwave radiation at different levels at various frequencies; a microwave oven, for example, typically operates at a frequency of around 2.45 GHz, a frequency chosen specifically to dump most of its energy into the water molecules within food.

O2 Satellite uses spectrum in the 1,800 MHz band. In heavy rain, could this cause enough disruption to stop us connecting?

“Rain should cause very little attenuation at 1,800 MHz,” explained Joyce, noting that this band is already widely used for terrestrial 4G LTE services. If rain were to interfere with spectrum at this frequency, terrestrial services would have felt it even more intensely than satellite connections.

“After all, a signal coming from a mobile tower a kilometre away would pass through much more water than the satellite signal coming down from above,” added Joyce.

The most likely explanation for the connection failure, Joyce explained, was that the devices were still attempting to connect to the terrestrial network they had so recently had access to.

A short while later, at a well-known not-spot at Pen-y-Pass – the starting point for various climbs up Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon) – our phones began to display the SAT symbol indicating satellite connection.

SAT connection (credit: Paul Lipscombe)

The service itself was intermittent but effective. Using the Satellite Tracker app from Star Walk, we watched Starlink satellites hurtle across the sky above us at 17,000 mph, our connection blinking in and out at regular intervals. This was more than enough to send texts, use various apps, and conduct Internet-based voice calls.

For now, Starlink’s service is limited to just basic data services, with each satellite capable of delivering around 50 spot beams, each covering a diameter of roughly 50km and delivering roughly 4Mbps across its user base.

Nonetheless, in an area where there would previously have been no connection at all, this is transformative for users. While O2 Satellite subscribers will not be downloading Netflix shows or cloud gaming over the service any time soon, they will certainly be able to message loved ones from some of the UK’s most remote locations.

“Obviously, it’s not meant yet for doing high-bandwidth applications. It’s there for reassurance of coverage beyond the current cellular footprint,” said Joyce, noting that satellite has increased O2’s overall network coverage from 89% of the UK to 95%. “That’s why we’re not selling it as a replacement cellular service. It’s sold as a service that reassures you that you have coverage when you need it for those moments that matter.”

Big plans for the future

Joyce’s ‘yet’ is important here.

Starlink’s D2D service is currently reliant on around 650 satellites, but this will not be the case for long. SpaceX is expected to begin launching its V2 satellites next year, with roughly 20x the throughput capability of their V1 predecessors. The Starlink website promises ‘full 5G cellular connectivity with a comparable experience to current terrestrial service’.

“In version two of the satellites […] we’re going to have a lot more bandwidth. I think the figure is 20-times or 100-times the capacity, depending on how much spectrum you deploy,” explained Joyce. “Service could then be comparable to terrestrial.”

SpaceX has also recently bought 14MHz of 800MHz spectrum in the US. If the new Starlink satellites can use this spectrum, then O2 will likely be able to make use of the 10MHz of spectrum it owns in the same band, too.

Taken together, this could mean that O2 soon has even more reliable coverage and a huge boost in capacity.

Despite this, Joyce remains highly sceptical that satellite could ever truly replace mobile services.

“You’re not going to have the coverage deep indoors […] and you’re not going to have the capacity to deliver a service to the amount of traffic that’s now offered to a cellular network,” said Joyce. “The laws of physics say that because of the spectrum and because of the propagation, the satellite can’t replace cellular […] I think it will always be a complementary technology.”

For now, O2’s fledgling satellite services remain limited in scope, if not in coverage. But perhaps it will not be long before they can serenade their customers with the promise that when you wish upon a Starlink your dreams will come true.

How is the UK’s satellite landscape evolving? Join the discussion at Satellite Live 2027, co-located with Connected Britain 2027

Also in the news
Shared Rural Network rollout extends to UK national parks with over 150 4G masts live
Vodafone touts latest attempt to bridge the UK’s digital divide
Virgin Media O2 cuts 5,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions