Category: Uncategorized

Ookla Research™ Articles
| June 30, 2025

Starlink Elevates In-Flight Wi-Fi Performance

Satellite

Airlines are using in-flight connectivity to differentiate their service and create brand value

Just as hotels have progressively integrated Wi-Fi connectivity as a standard amenity for their guests, in-flight Wi-Fi is transitioning from a novelty to a convenience to an expected service.

Reflecting this increasing expectation, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) this year incorporated “Quality of in-flight Wi-Fi” into its benchmarks for the airline industry. In-flight Wi-Fi placed 21st out of the 21 benchmarks, ranking lower than baggage handling, seat comfort, and even airline food.

To assess this performance, we analyzed our Speedtest data collected during Q1 2025. We examined performance for individual airlines and for in-flight connectivity service providers.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

  • In-flight Wi-Fi for the majority of users compares very poorly with their experience on terrestrial networks
  • Hawaiian Airlines and Qatar Airways stand out as the best performing airlines based on our data
  • Starlink’s low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation drives performance for leading airline Wi-Fi
  • Expect airlines to ramp up their efforts — in-flight connectivity can be a key point of differentiation for travelers, helps support the premium brand value that many international airlines aspire to create, and is an opportunity to monetize a literally captive audience

Airline In-Flight Wi-Fi Performance – Download / Upload / Latency

In-flight Wi-Fi Speed and Latency Performance by Airline
Speedtest data, Q1 2025, airlines sorted by median

Hawaiian Airlines and Qatar Airways use Starlink’s low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to deliver their inflight Wi-Fi, resulting in download speeds and upload speeds and latency that are better than the other airlines.

Many other airlines are also providing very usable speeds. Spirit Airlines, Air Canada, Delta Airlines, Breeze Airlines, American Airlines and Aeromexico all provide 10th percentile (where 90% of the results are faster) download speeds above 10 megabits per second (Mbps) and very respectable median download speeds. Furthermore, upload speeds on most of these airlines tend to support basic uplink connectivity needs like emailing. However, when the upload speed is observed alongside the many high-latency results, real-time uses like gaming or video calling are likely not possible (to the relief of all other passengers).

Lufthansa, at the other end of the download speed ranking, is limited by the Deutsche Telekom LTE ground-to-air network. While Lufthansa may offer other connectivity options, our data shows a significant number of its passengers are still connecting via this poorer-performing service.

Likewise, given the premium brand reputation of carriers like Japan Airlines, Turkish Airlines, and Cathay Pacific, they likely offer better-performing connectivity services on other aircraft. However, as with Lufthansa, our data reveals that a notable portion of their passengers are still encountering a substandard Wi-Fi experience.

Qatar Airways presents additional insight as, along with Starlink as one of its connectivity service providers, it also operates planes with geo-stationary orbit GEO connectivity. This is most evident in the multiserver latency results. While Qatar’s median latency is similar to Hawaiian Airlines, its 10th percentile (the laggiest experience) is much higher, keeping it in the company of other GEO-supported airlines.

Connectivity Service Providers

In our Speedtest samples of in-flight connectivity service providers we collect a mix of GEO, LEO, medium earth orbit (MEO), multi-orbit / hybrid network providers, and even ground-based LTE.  Furthermore, the category includes satellite service integrators. These integrators do not own or operate their own satellite constellations. Instead they partner with satellite operators for capacity while managing the business relationship with the airline, including installing and managing the in-flight connectivity system on the aircraft.

In-flight Connectivity Service Providers and Associated Airlines

Deutsche TelekomAir France, Cathay Pacific, Condor, Lufthansa
Hughes (SES)Spirit Airlines
Inmarsat (Viasat)Air New Zealand, Qatar Airways
IntelsatAir Canada, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, United Airlines
MTN Satellite CommunicationsSouthwest Airlines
Nelco (PAC/Intelsat)Air India
Panasonic Avionics CorporationAer Lingus, Air France, American Airlines, ANA, Asiana Airlines, British Airways, Etihad Airways, EVA Air, Fiji Airways, Finnair, Iberia Airlines, ITA Airways, Japan Airlines, KLM, Korean Air, Malaysian Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines, Singapore Airlines, SWISS Airlines, TAP Air Portugal, Thai Airlines, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, VoeAzul, WestJet, Zipair Tokyo
SITA SwitzerlandQatar Airways
SpaceX StarlinkHawaiian Airlines, Qatar Airways
Türk TelekomTurkish Airlines
ViasatAeromexico, American Airlines, Breeze Airlines, Delta Airlines, EL AL Airlines, Icelandair, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, Virgin Atlantic
* Based on Speedtest data samples, Q1 2025; not based on active or announced partnerships
  • Deutsche Telekom is in the European Aviation Network, a hybrid network that combines a GEO satellite from Viasat/Inmarsat with a ground-based LTE network across Europe. 
  • Hughes, an EchoStar company, provides GEO satellite internet for consumers and enterprises. In late 2022 it began offering “Hughes Fusion,” a multi-orbit in-flight connectivity solution that can simultaneously communicate with both GEO and LEO satellites. Hughes frequently collaborates with European satellite operator SES, a GEO and MEO provider.
  • Intelsat provides in-flight connectivity through its fleet of GEO satellites and offers a multi-orbit solution that combines its GEO network with access to a LEO constellation. Intelsat is in the process of being acquired by SES.
  • MTN Satellite Communications, primarily known for its services in the maritime and remote land-based sectors, also provides in-flight connectivity. The company leverages capacity from various satellite operators across different orbits, both GEO and LEO.
  • Nelco, a Tata Group enterprise, has partnered with Intelsat to offer its GEO-based connectivity services to airlines operating in Indian airspace. 
  • Panasonic Avionics Corporation (PAC) – a provider of in-flight entertainment and connectivity systems, does not operate its own satellite constellation. Instead, it partners with various satellite operators, including those with GEO and LEO networks (eg, Eutelsat OneWeb), to offer multi-orbit connectivity service to airline customers.
  • SITA Switzerland, a multinational information technology company, partners with satellite network operators, to deliver passenger broadband.
  • SpaceX Starlink is rapidly expanding its LEO satellite network, offering high-speed, low-latency internet service to airlines, and is being adopted by several carriers.
  • Türk Telekom has been providing in-flight connectivity through partnerships including Panasonic Avionics.
  • Viasat operates a constellation of high-capacity GEO satellites. Its services are used by numerous airlines globally. Viasat acquired Inmarsat, another GEO satellite network, in May 2023.

Connectivity Service Provider In-Flight Wi-Fi Performance – Download / Upload / Latency

In-flight Wi-Fi Speed and Latency Performance by Connectivity Service Provider
Speedtest data, Q1 2025, provider sorted by median

The advantages of its dense LEO constellation compared to the GEOs make SpaceX’s Starlink the clear standout in speeds and latency. Its medians are 152.37 Mbps download speed, 24.16 Mbps upload speed, and 44 milliseconds (ms) multi-server latency.

Hughes and Intelsat, with their multi-orbit offering, deliver solid median download speeds – 84.55 Mbps and 61.61 Mbps, respectively. Viasat performs well on download speed, too, at 50.38 Mbps, given it is a GEO provider. 

On the other end of the scale, the LTE ground network of Deutsche Telekom delivers a minimally usable median download speed of 4.14 Mbps. Passengers on these flights may have access to GEO services (which, for example, we see in our data with Air France, though not in sufficient sample size to include in this article), but, as stated above, given we record Speedtest samples on Deutsche Telekom means that passengers are connecting with very slow internet speeds.

Looking more closely at slower download speeds, the 10th percentile reveals a similar pattern to the median, with Starlink still performing well at 65.31 Mbps, and Hughes and Viasat still managing usable download speeds of 28.29 Mbps and 12.78 Mbps, respectively. The rest of the provider speeds tail off and down into the single-digit Mbps, and raises a question: is it the satellite constellation capacity or the onboard Wi-Fi technology (or both) that is the limiting factor? The question of onboard Wi-Fi technology is taken up in the conclusion to this research article.

Examining the uplink, besides Starlink at 24.16 Mbps, only Intelsat provides adequate median upload speeds at 9.96 Mbps. Next, Panasonic Avionics, Turk Telekom (also PAC) and Nelco (also PAC) neatly cluster – 3.65, 3.40 and 2.60 Mbps, respectively – followed by Deutsche Telekom at 2.53 Mbps.

Latency is the starkest separation between LEO and GEO, which is obvious given the orbital altitude differences in distance between them is roughly 60 times or more. Bearing this in mind, Starlink’s median multiserver latency of 44 ms would otherwise seem an outlier compared with all other providers, ranging from 667 ms to 839 ms.

Nowhere to go but up

In-flight connectivity isn’t seamless. Depending on airline routes or models of airplanes, different connectivity service providers may be used (or occasionally restricted by governments when crossing over certain territories). Moreover, old equipment on and in the airplanes takes time and expense to upgrade.

However, the upgrades are happening as many airlines see value and opportunity to provide extended services, along with better Wi-FI. For example, United Airlines is not just moving its entire fleet to Starlink for better performance, but also to deepen its customer loyalty relationships. “Access will be free for all MileagePlus customers and includes game-changing inflight entertainment experiences like streaming services, shopping, gaming and more.” SAS is also working with Starlink to enhance its “gate-to-gate” connectivity and offer free high-speed Wi-Fi by the end of this year.

Not all airlines are selecting Starlink. Also announced this year, American Airlines has aligned itself with Viasat and Intelsat, while Delta has gotten on board with Viasat and Hughes, deplaning Intelsat.

Another example of improvement, this time inside the airplane, is Panasonic Avionics offering Wi-Fi 6E. Wi-Fi 6E adds the 6 GHz frequency band to prior Wi-Fi generations (that offered 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), which has more channels and less interference than older Wi-Fi devices. 

Finally, competition is heating up. The likes of Project Kuiper and, perhaps, AST SpaceMobile will add new LEO options, where we see the leading LEO Starlink performing very well in our Speedtest data. Intention to provide “direct-to-device” connectivity to wireless customers from the mobile network operators, helps support the scale of the capital-intensive business case for launching rockets and orbiting satellites.

Watch this space

We will be revisiting this topic soon with updated information and insights. If you are an airline or an in-flight connectivity service provider, we’d like to hear from you to ensure we’re capturing and reflecting your passengers’ Wi-Fi connection experience.

Ookla assists ISPs, venue owners, and companies in designing Wi-Fi networks, monitoring their performance, and optimizing them. Please contact us to learn more about Speedtest Intelligence and Ekahau.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Satellite
Starlink
Wi-Fi
Airline

About the author

Kerry Baker

Kerry Baker leads Ookla's research and content efforts in North America. He has over 20 years experience in the telecom industry, primarily at T-Mobile studying network performance benchmarking and customer experience. Kerry also has founder’s experience with four technology-related startups. Kerry holds masters degrees from the University of Washington in Business and International Political Economics.

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Ookla Research™ Articles
| April 9, 2025

Speedtest Experience Ratings: A New Way to Understand Your Internet Performance

Consumer

We are excited to introduce Speedtest Experience Ratings, a new beta feature in the Speedtest app and website designed to help you better understand how your Speedtest results translate into real-world performance. These ratings provide insights on four key online activities: Web Browsing, Online Gaming, Video Streaming, and Video Conferencing. Each metric is given a score on a 1 to 5 scale (1 = Poor, 5 = Excellent) to indicate expected performance.

Metrics Impacting Your Ratings

While Speedtest primarily displays download speed, upload speed, and ping, our Experience Ratings account for additional factors like jitter, loaded latency, and packet loss. All of these metrics can impact real-world performance, even if your speed results look strong.

  • Download Speed: How quickly you can pull data from a server on the internet to your device
  • Upload Speed: How quickly you can send data from your device to the internet
  • Latency (or Ping): The reaction time of your connection — how quickly your device gets a response after you’ve sent out a request
  • Jitter: Also called Packet Delay Variation (PDV), jitter is a measure of the variability in ping over time
  • Loaded Latency Increase: Calculates the excess latency by finding the higher value between download and upload latency and subtracting a baseline latency
  • Packet Loss: Packet loss occurs when a packet of data being sent over the internet is not received or is incomplete

Understanding Experience Ratings

Web Browsing

Web browsing includes activities like visiting websites, scrolling social media, and checking emails. This is one of the least demanding activities in terms of speed and latency, but stability is key.

  • Relevant Metrics: Download speed, Ping, Packet Loss, Jitter, and Loaded Latency Increase
  • Recommended Speeds:
    • Download: At least 1-5 Mbps
  • Latency Considerations: Latency is not typically an issue for basic browsing
  • Estimated Data Usage:
    • General browsing & social media: ~60 MB per hour
    • Email (without large attachments): ~1 MB per email
    • Email (with attachments): Varies based on file size

Online Gaming

A smooth gaming experience requires a combination of sufficient download and upload speeds as well as low latency. High latency can cause lag, delays in player actions, and an overall poor experience.

  • Relevant Metrics: Ping, Packet Loss, and Loaded Latency Increase
  • Recommended Speeds:
    • Download: 3-10 Mbps per player (higher for modern, high-resolution games)
    • Upload: 1-3 Mbps
  • Latency Considerations:
    • Ideal Ping: Below 50ms
    • Moderate Ping: 50-100ms (may experience minor lag)
    • High Ping: Over 100ms (noticeable lag and delay in gameplay)
  • Estimated Data Usage:
    • Casual gaming: ~40 MB per hour
    • Competitive online gaming: ~100 MB per hour
    • Game downloads/updates: Varies significantly (e.g., AAA games can be 50-150 GB)

Video Streaming

The quality of your video streaming experience depends primarily on high download speeds and low latency. If latency is too high or speeds fluctuate, you may experience buffering, interruptions, or a reduction in video resolution.

  • Relevant Metrics: Download, Ping, Packet Loss, and Loaded Latency Increase
  • Recommended Speed:
    • Standard Definition (SD, 480p): 3-4 Mbps
    • High Definition (HD, 720p-1080p): 5-10 Mbps
    • 4K Ultra HD: 25 Mbps or higher
  • Latency Considerations:
    • Low latency helps ensure smooth playback without buffering.
  • Estimated Data Usage:
    • SD (480p): ~700 MB per hour
    • HD (1080p): ~1.5-3 GB per hour
    • 4K UHD: ~7-10 GB per hour

Video Conferencing

For smooth video calls, both high download and upload speeds are important. Low latency is crucial for keeping video and audio in sync, whereas excessive latency can lead to delays, choppy video, and distorted or out-of-sync audio.

  • Relevant Metrics: Ping, Packet Loss, Jitter, and Loaded Latency Increase
  • Recommended Speeds:
    • Standard Definition (480p): 1 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload
    • High Definition (720p-1080p): 3-6 Mbps download / 2-3 Mbps upload
    • 4K Video Conferencing: 10-15 Mbps download / 5-10 Mbps upload
  • Latency Considerations:
    • Low latency helps ensure smooth playback without buffering.
  • Estimated Data Usage:
    • SD (480p): ~700 MB per hour
    • HD (1080p): ~1.5-3 GB per hour
    • 4K UHD: ~7-10 GB per hour

Speedtest Experience Ratings in Action

Here’s a look at Experience Ratings during a Speedtest:

Want to know your Experience Ratings? Take a Speedtest!

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Consumer
Ookla News

About the author

Ookla

Ookla® is a global leader in connectivity intelligence that provides consumers, businesses, and other organizations with data-driven insights to improve networks and connected experiences.

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Ookla Research™ Articles
| October 16, 2025

There's Growing Interest in T-Mobile's Starlink Satellite Service

Satellite

Speedtest data highlights the early usage of T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service, which works on most new iOS and Android smartphones released in the past 2-4 years. The service is available to T-Mobile customers as well as customers of AT&T, Verizon and other providers.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on October 17 to include information about devices connecting to Starlink that also registered as having active service.

T-Mobile first announced its satellite plans with partner SpaceX in August 2022, just before Apple unveiled its own satellite partnership with Globalstar. Fast forward to 2025 and T-Mobile officially launched its satellite texting service with SpaceX on July 23.

Now, Ookla Speedtest® data provides a look at the early usage of T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service across T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and FirstNet users. (FirstNet is for public-safety customers and runs over AT&T’s network.) The below data is derived from Android smartphones that registered with SpaceX Starlink satellites at some point between December 2024 and September 2025.

Key Takeaways:

  • T-Mobile customers accounted for roughly 60% of all connections. When only counting devices that reported having active service at the time of their Starlink connection, that figure rose to 70.8%.
  • Los Angeles County, California, was the country’s most popular location for T-Satellite activity. This massive county contains both the city of Los Angeles and Angeles National Forest, an area known for its rugged mountains, steep canyons and extensive trail systems. It’s also where T-Mobile deployed free T-Satellite text messaging services in the early days of 2025, amid multiple wildfires.
  • The median download and upload speeds of Starlink’s fixed internet service showed no signs of degradation amid the testing and launch of T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service this year. That’s likely due to the fact that Starlink’s smartphone-capable satellites are different from those supporting its fixed internet service.

T-Satellite Rockets into the Commercial Marketplace

Direct to device (D2D) technology connects smartphones directly to satellites for text messaging and other services, primarily in outdoor, rural areas where no other connections exist. Those satellites are hundreds of miles above the Earth, traveling thousands of miles an hour. Thus, such phone-to-satellite connections represent an impressive technological feat considering standard, terrestrial cellular networks connect smartphones to stationary cell towers that are on the ground, usually just a few miles away.

Apple, via Globalstar’s satellites and spectrum holdings, pioneered the D2D market. Every iPhone since the iPhone 14, introduced in 2022, can send and receive text messages through these satellites. In September, Apple expanded D2D into its lineup of smartwatches.

But Apple isn’t the only D2D player to achieve liftoff.

T-Mobile first unveiled its satellite ambitions in 2022, via a public press conference featuring outgoing T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert and SpaceX’s Elon Musk. The companies promised a service that could connect smartphones directly to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites via a sliver of T-Mobile’s licensed spectrum holdings. Unlike Apple and Globalstar’s offering, this setup doesn’t require users to purchase a new phone.

SpaceX began launching satellites in support of its D2D service starting in early 2024.

Then, in February of 2025, T-Mobile launched a beta test of its SpaceX-powered T-Satellite text messaging service, complete with a high-profile Super Bowl advertisement. Importantly, T-Mobile offered the beta service for free, for three months, to its own customers as well as customers of its rivals, AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile said it gradually added users to the service as part of its testing efforts, eventually gaining 2 million signups for the beta and 30,000 daily users, including “hundreds of thousands” of customers from AT&T and Verizon.

Finally, T-Mobile commercially launched its T-Satellite messaging service in July 2025, with around 650 Starlink satellites. The offering is now available at no extra cost to T-Mobile customers on the operator’s Experience Beyond plan (which starts at $100 per month). For other customers – including T-Mobile customers on other plans, as well as those of AT&T and Verizon – it’s available for an extra $10 per month. Non-T-Mobile customers can access the service via an eSIM.

Ookla Speedtest data captured throughout 2025 shows growing interest in T-Satellite:

Weekly Count of Devices Connected to Starlink D2D
From Speedtest data, December 2024 – September 2025
This is a chart that shows the growth of T-Mobile's T-Satellite.

As of September 2025, T-Mobile customers remained the biggest group of users connecting to SpaceX’s D2D satellites. But AT&T customers also show links to those satellites:

Percent share of Starlink D2D Device Connections, Active and Non Active Devices
From Speedtest data, December 2024 – September 2025
This is a chart that shows Starlink D2D Device connections. AT&T: 34%. T-Mobile: 60.9%

However, when only counting the Android devices that reported having active service (rather than counting both devices with active service as well as devices without) the figures are a bit different:

Percent share of Starlink D2D Connections on Devices with Active Service
From Speedtest data, December 2024 – October 2025

This fluctuation may simply be due to the fact that D2D is a relatively new technology and therefore device settings may vary depending on the gadget’s make, model, and operator settings.

Also, it’s possible that Verizon customers aren’t showing as much interest in T-Satellite because of Verizon’s 2024 agreement with Skylo. Skylo doesn’t operate its own satellites, but it does purchase connectivity from those that do, including Viasat, Ligado Networks, TerreStar and EchoStar.

Verizon began offering Skylo-powered text messaging in emergency situations in January 2025 on Samsung Galaxy S25 series smartphones. Since then it has added support for newer Google Pixel phones, and it expanded the service into regular, nonemergency situations.

AT&T, meanwhile, has an agreement with satellite operator AST SpaceMobile. That company hopes to begin offering intermittent satellite connections to AT&T and Verizon customers starting later this year. AST SpaceMobile has promised more continuous service in 2026 as it adds more satellites to its planned constellation.

National Forests and National Parks are Top Locations for D2D Users

This interactive map displays the locations where Speedtest data showed a Starlink D2D connection over the course of 2025:

And here is a list of the top five U.S. counties by total D2D device connections over the course of 2025:

  1. Los Angeles County, California
  2. Larimer County, Colorado
  3. Teton County, Wyoming
  4. Mohave County, Arizona
  5. Mineral County, Montana

That Los Angeles County is the most popular location for T-Satellite D2D connections is interesting. Although the city of Los Angeles sits in the southern portion of Los Angeles County, California, the Angeles National Forest sits in the northern part. This remote area contains several wilderness zones, including the Cucamonga Wilderness, Magic Mountain Wilderness, and Pleasant View Ridge Wilderness, as well as a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Cellular coverage throughout the northern portion of Los Angeles County is poor or nonexistant:

Map of Los Angeles County 5G Median Signal Strength: Pool and No Signals, All Providers, where dBm is -107 or worse), Speedtest Insights® | Q3 2025
Map of Los Angeles County 4G Median Signal Strength: Pool and No Signals, All Providers, where dBm is -107 or worse), Speedtest Insights® | Q3 2025

Los Angeles County has also been the scene of several major wildfires this year, including the Palisades and Eaton Fires in January 2025. In one of its first public D2D forays, T-Mobile delivered free Starlink D2D messaging to 198,000 users in areas affected by those January wildfires.

Other top D2D locations in the U.S. feature geographic characteristics similar to that of Los Angeles County. For example, Larimer County, Colorado, is located in the northern part of the state and contains parts of Rocky Mountain National Park and Roosevelt National Forest. Similarly, Teton County, Wyoming, is the home of Grand Teton National Park and a significant portion of Yellowstone National Park. And Mohave County, Arizona, includes parts of Grand Canyon National Park, Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the Mojave Desert. All of these areas sport at least some cellular dead zones.

D2D Connections are Relatively Rare

National forests and national parks are vacation destinations, visited occasionally. Based on Ookla Speedtest data, U.S. users are in reach of a cellular network the vast majority of the time.

Percent Time Spent Without Service
From Speedtest data, Full-Year 2024
This is a chart that shows percewnt time spent without service. AT&T T-Mobile and Verizon it's about 62% on Verizon for 4G, 27% for T-Mobile. For 5G it's 34% for Verizon and 69% for T-Mobile and 60% for AT&T. And it's like 2% for time spent with no service.

This data reflects the fact that homes, offices, coffee shops, schools and other familiar locations – in cities and towns with cellular coverage – are where most users spend the bulk of their time. It also highlights the impressive coverage provided by the 651,000 cell sites around the U.S. These sites – from massive cell towers to small cells atop light posts – cover most populated areas (while Wi-Fi covers most indoor locations).

The 2.79% of the time when the average U.S. user isn’t connected to a cellular network is where the D2D market can play. Clearly, 2.79% is a relatively small slice of time, but it may also represent the hours when an internet connection might be the most useful. Whether it’s a flat tire in the middle of nowhere or a broken ankle on a mountainside, users may place a value on a D2D satellite connection far in excess of the time they actually spend on it.

For example, in a recent survey of around 1,000 smartphone users, the financial analysts at TD Cowen found that more than 60% would pay at least $5 per month for some kind of satellite D2D service. That’s worth an additional $3 billion in additional annualized revenue for the U.S. wireless industry.

This is why so many companies are investing into the D2D industry. Lynk Global, AST SpaceMobile, Viasat and Iridium are among the companies planning or building satellite constellations for D2D services. Others, like Amazon’s Kuiper, may add D2D capabilities to their satellites at a later date.

That said, D2D market leaders aren’t standing still. SpaceX recently inked a $17 billion deal to acquire spectrum from EchoStar to help expand its D2D service beyond text messaging. And Apple is plowing $1.7 billion into its satellite partner Globalstar for the construction of a new satellite constellation with as-yet-unannounced capabilities.

SpaceX may have Big Plans for Starlink and D2D

SpaceX has been using its rocket-launching business to build out its Starlink satellite internet constellation, which now stretches across 8,000 satellites and roughly 7 million global fixed internet customers. SpaceX’s rockets add satellites to Starlink’s constellation on an almost daily basis.

However, Starlink’s D2D satellites are separate and apart from those dedicated to the company’s fixed internet business (although both types of satellites share the same backhaul links). This is why Starlink’s fixed internet speeds in the U.S. haven’t been affected by the testing and launch of T-Mobile’s T-Satellite service.

Starlink's U.S. Fixed Internet Monthly Performance
Speedtest Intelligence, January 2024 – August 2025
This is a chart that shows the growth in speeds of Starlink fixed internet. It was like 129 Mbps in August 2025.

This is important because SpaceX has so far received $478 million in grants from the U.S. government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program. That money is intended to bring fixed internet connections to almost 300,000 rural locations across the U.S.

Starlink’s D2D business currently runs over about 650 satellites. When those satellites orbit beyond the borders of the U.S., they’re used by other cellular operators in Starlink’s Direct to Cell program including Rogers (Canada), Optus (Australia), Telstra (Australia), KDDI (Japan), Entel (Chile & Peru) and Kyivstar (Ukraine). The service has proven so popular that New Zealand mobile operator One has reportedly expanded the amount of licensed spectrum it will run through Starlink’s satellites from 5 MHz to 15 MHz. And Starlink recently claimed 7 million D2D users globally.

But satellite-powered text messaging isn’t the end of Starlink’s D2D ambitions. Already T-Mobile and other Starlink partners are beginning to deploy some early data services. For T-Satellite users, those data services are restricted to select smartphone apps including AccuWeather, AllTrails, Google Maps, Google Messages, onX Backcountry, WhatsApp, X and Apple apps like Maps, Messages and Music. And T-Mobile is working to temper early users’ expectations.

“Satellite connections aren’t always instant – because satellites move overhead, your phone may need a moment to find one,” T-Mobile warns. “If you don’t see signal right away, just give it a little time and try again. This isn’t high speed data, but it’s built for what matters most off grid.”

SpaceX is working to speed things up. With the $17 billion in spectrum it purchased from EchoStar, SpaceX says it expects to ultimately provide D2D data speeds generally comparable to those on 4G LTE networks. According to Ookla Speedtest Intelligence, 4G operators in the U.S. provided 33 Mbps median download speeds and 4 Mbps median upload speeds in 2024.

SpaceX has already asked the FCC for permission to launch as many as 15,000 D2D satellites in pursuit of this objective. The company must also work with phone vendors to ensure its new spectrum licenses are supported in future phones.

Should existing cellular operators worry about all this? Maybe, according to SpaceX’s Elon Musk. When asked whether Starlink could become a global phone carrier in the future, “that would be one of the options,” Musk replied. But he added that “we’re not going to put the other carriers out of business. They’re still going to be around because they own a lot of spectrum. But yes, you should be able to have Starlink like you have an AT&T, or T-Mobile, or Verizon or whatever.”

When asked the same question in a different venue, SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell was a little more circumspect: “We will be initiating discussions with telcos in a different way now,” she said. “It’s our spectrum, but we want to work with them, almost providing wholesale capacity to their customers. We have to work with the device manufacturers, the chip companies, and working with telcos on the end game. It’s really exciting, but it’s a huge amount of work.”

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Satellite
Starlink
AT&T
D2D
T-Mobile

About the author

Mike Dano

Mike Dano is a Lead Industry Analyst in Ookla’s research and content team. He covers the North and South American markets, and global technology trends. Previously, Mike was a journalist covering the global telecom industry for 25 years at publications including RCR Wireless News, Fierce Network and Light Reading.

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Ookla Research™ Articles
| December 15, 2025

Largest Outages of 2025: A Downdetector Analysis

Downdetector

In 2025, digital services proved both indispensable and fragile. This year’s largest outages were defined by platform-level disruptions, particularly across video, gaming, and communication platforms, that impacted millions of users. However, given how many individual platforms rely on the same few cloud providers and core systems, the role of centralized infrastructure also played a key role, demonstrating how a single point of failure can still cause disruption to cascade across multiple services simultaneously.

We used Downdetector® data from 2025 to analyze millions of user reports and identify the largest website and service outages of the year.

The World’s Biggest Outages of 2025

2025 saw a combination of major outages across gaming, streaming, and social media services, but none were more impactful than the cloud services outages that affected companies across the globe. These large-scale incidents underscored how failures in core infrastructure can ripple outward to millions of users. Here is a look at the largest global outages of 2025, according to Downdetector data.

  • AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The largest global incident of 2025 was the result of an AWS outage that received over 17 million Downdetector reports across Amazon and all other impacted services. This outage lasted over 15 hours and was traced to an issue with the automated DNS management system for DynamoDB in the US-EAST-1 region. This single point of failure caused widespread disruption across dependent platforms like Snapchat, Netflix, and various e-commerce sites.
  • PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): The second largest global outage stemmed from the gaming sector, with over 3.9 million reports to the PlayStation Network Downdetector page. This network-wide disruption affected users for over 24 hours, locking out players from major titles like Call of Duty and Fortnite. Downdetector’s Incident Attribution analysis concluded the cause was internal to PSN, with no major cloud or ISP involvement.
  • Cloudflare (Nov 18, 2025): The world’s third-largest outage, registering over 3.3 million reports across all impacted services, was due to a global disruption within the core cloud infrastructure that lasted for nearly five hours. This massive incident affected countless websites, applications, and APIs that rely on Cloudflare’s services. The sheer scale and duration of user-reported issues highlighted the global dependence on centralized cloud infrastructure.

Biggest Outages in Each Region

Note: Global outage data is based on total reports across all impacted services while regional outage data is based on data for individual services.

United States and Canada

United States and Canada experienced the highest concentration of high-impact outages, with the top three all surpassing over 1 million reports.

  • PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): Topped the chart with 1.6 million reports.
  • YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): Recorded 1.5 million reports during its global streaming issue.
  • AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud outage drove 1.2 million reports to the status page.
  • Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): With 944,675 reports, the social media app was a major casualty of the AWS incident.
  • Starlink (Jul 24, 2025): The satellite internet service saw a significant spike with 583,989 reports.
  • Verizon (Aug 30, 2025): A major telecommunications disruption at Verizon registered 515,923 reports, highlighting the continued vulnerability of connectivity services.

Europe (EU)

Europe’s outages were a mix of gaming, social, and major telecommunications disruptions.

  • PlayStation Network (Feb 7, 2025): The gaming platform’s global issue topped the EU list with 1.7 million reports.
  • Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): This social media service saw the second-highest outage activity in the region with 989,559 reports submitted by users.
  • Vodafone (Oct 13, 2025): A UK-wide internet outage for this major telecommunications company generated 833,211 reports. The problem, attributed to a non-malicious software issue with a vendor partner, affected broadband, 4G, and 5G services.
  • WhatsApp (Feb 28, 2025): The messaging platform caused significant disruption for its users with 621,763 reports.
  • Spotify (Apr 16, 2025): The music streaming service’s outage recorded 468,334 reports, making it a major non-video streaming event.
  • Odido (June 15 + June 25, 2025): Within 10 days, the Netherlands telecommunications provider experienced two separate outages that totaled 357,685 reports (June 15th) and 382,003 reports (June 25th).

Asia Pacific (APAC)

Social media and cloud services dominated the largest outages in the Asia Pacific region.

  • X (Twitter) (Mar 10, 2025): X topped the list with 645,395 reports, demonstrating the service’s critical role in the region.
  • Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): The social media app had the second-largest outage, with 399,108 reports.
  • YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): The global streaming issue that hit YouTube was felt acutely in the APAC region, registering 245,087 reports.
  • AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud service failure drove 175,380 reports, with another AWS-related incident on April 15 adding 106,667 reports.

Latin America (LATAM)

Latin America’s largest outages featured global streaming and cloud failures, alongside significant regional financial and telecom disruptions.

  • YouTube (Oct 15, 2025): The streaming platform’s outage in October led the region with 183,672 reports.
  • AWS (Oct 20, 2025): The cloud services outage was the second largest in the region, recording 164,011 reports.
  • WhatsApp (Feb 28, 2025): The messaging platform saw 87,265 reports during a disruption in late February and then just two months later it experienced another outage that generated 57,095 reports.
  • Banco Itaú (Oct 6, 2025): This major banking platform’s outage registered 73,745 reports, highlighting a serious disruption in the banking and finance vertical.

Middle East and Africa (MEA)

The largest outages in the Middle East and Africa featured significant disruptions from key regional telecommunications providers alongside major global cloud and social media services.

  • Du (Feb 8, 2025): This telecommunications provider experienced a major disruption in February, recording 28,444 reports.
  • Cloudflare (Nov 18, 2025): The cloud service provider saw 28,016 reports in MEA during the global outage.
  • Snapchat (Oct 20, 2025): The social media platform registered 26,392 reports during a service disruption in October.

Conclusion

Downdetector is your source for information about service disruptions, monitoring real-time performance for thousands of popular web services globally. Businesses looking for early alerting on service issues, deeper competitive intelligence, and the ability to correlate an issue to an upstream or downstream provider may find Downdetector Explorer™, the enterprise version of Downdetector, a key resource.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Downdetector

About the author

Perry Haghighi

Perry Haghighi is a Product Marketing Specialist supporting Ookla’s product lines, with a primary focus on Downdetector. With a degree in Business from UC San Diego and experience in both the telecommunication and entertainment industries, Perry’s expertise lies in understanding the nuances of strategic decisions and their impact on the end user.

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| November 26, 2025

Major Cloudflare Outage Sparks Global Service Disruptions

Downdetector

A major service disruption involving Cloudflare last week underscored the systemic concentration risk present in today’s internet ecosystem, where so much of the world’s internet traffic depends on a small number of core providers. With over 3.3 million Downdetector user reports across all impacted services globally, the event demonstrated the wide-ranging and cascading impact that foundational infrastructure failures have on countless dependent online services.

To see how the recent Cloudflare outage compares to other outages this year, register for our upcoming webinar: Lessons Learned from the Biggest Service Outages of 2025.

Downdetector Reports Highlight Global Impact of Cloudflare Outage

The Cloudflare disruption on November 18, 2025, was not a simple capacity overload, but a systemic failure of the global control plane. Preliminary analysis indicates that a configuration update intended to optimize routing across the Cloudflare backbone inadvertently triggered a “thundering herd” scenario, causing edge locations to reject valid traffic.

As shown in the timeline below, the issue began at 11:00 AM UTC when the erroneous config propagated to the Europe and North America regions simultaneously. Because Cloudflare acts as the “immune system” and content delivery layer for a significant portion of the modern web, this single point of failure instantly decoupled backend infrastructure (AWS/Google) from end-users, affecting services ranging from low-latency gaming (League of Legends) to real-time AI inference (OpenAI).

The significant blast radius meant that the incident triggered a massive surge in user-reported problems. Downdetector amassed over 3.3 million global user reports across impacted services over the course of the outage. The graphic below offers a timeline of how the reports started to appear on Downdetector:

Downstream Impact: Services Most Affected by Cloudflare Outage

The primary impact was felt by services that rely on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. Besides just Cloudflare, we saw a surge in reports for a number of impacted services. Here is a look at the services that received the most reports during this time:

The impact spanned multiple critical verticals, including Streaming, Gaming, and Cloud/SaaS providers.

Global Outage Volume by Region

In addition to impacting individual services, we were able to track the global footprint of the outage by monitoring reports by country. The United States received the most reports during this time with over 150K reports on Cloudflare alone. 

The ability to quickly see a geographic heatmap of problem reports is a key feature in the Downdetector Explorer dashboard, helping teams quickly see if an issue is regional or global.

A Succession of Major Outages is Stimulating Deeper Policymaker Oversight

This outage lands in the middle of a wider policy shift that treats large cloud and internet infrastructure providers as potential sources of systemic risk rather than ordinary vendors. In the EU, regulators have just published the first list of critical ICT third-party providers under the new Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), bringing hyperscale cloud, data centre and network providers into a dedicated oversight regime that explicitly targets concentration risk, while the UK is rolling out a parallel Critical Third Parties framework for services whose disruption could threaten financial stability.

Coming so soon after a major AWS outage and other large-scale incidents, the Cloudflare event is likely to be used as further evidence that dependence on a small number of core cloud and edge platforms is now a live concern for boards, regulators and policymakers, and that organizations need much better mapping, monitoring and stress-testing of their third-party digital dependencies. 

For companies operating in these complex environments, understanding the true scope and source of a disruption is vital. Downdetector Explorer allows companies to quickly monitor both their own services and the third-party dependencies (like cloud hosting providers) to understand when external issues affect their customer experience.

Ready to turn user reports into actionable intelligence? Learn how you can leverage Downdetector to be better prepared for outages by visiting downdetector.com/for-business.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

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Global

About the author

Ookla

Ookla® is a global leader in connectivity intelligence that provides consumers, businesses, and other organizations with data-driven insights to improve networks and connected experiences.

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| November 3, 2025

Cruise Ship Wi-Fi Steams Ahead

Wi-Fi

Staying connected at sea can enhance the voyage, for a price.

Wi-Fi connectivity is a consumer expectation throughout the travel industry. From airports and hotels to airplanes and trains, Ookla has examined all of these just this year alone. Now we walk the gangway to the cruise ship industry to see what type of connectivity is offered on the seas.

There are any number of reasons for needing to be connected online on the cruise ship. Staying in touch with people back home directly (messaging, video calls) and sharing the experience via social media are a given. Staying up on things – sports, news – seemingly antithetical to the spirit of taking a cruise, is certainly welcome as well, including access to one’s on-shore streaming habits. 

On the cruise itself, the logistics and planning for on-board classes (Vinyasa Yoga) and on-shore activities (Top things to do in Cozumel in 6 hours) are managed online, and keeping in touch with travel companions on the same ship (wru). Of course, put-upon business professionals who are “working from helm” (shout out Virgin Voyages) appreciate a high-speed, stable connection to project their hopefully-convincing Zoom background images.

Key Takeaways

  • iPhones prevail. Over 60% of cruise passengers carry iPhones compared to 25% with Samsung Galaxy, based on Speedtest samples. This iPhone share, similar to that in the United States, reflects a relative mass-market, financially comfortable cruise line customer.
  • Older Wi-Fi limits customer experience. With 12.6% of access points on Wi-Fi 4, there is an instant opportunity to improve the quality of connectivity for passengers and crew by upgrading to a newer Wi-Fi generation.
  • Starlink is the provider of choice. Most cruise lines have equipped their ships’ connectivity with Starlink to take advantage of the speed and latency performance of low-Earth orbit satellites.

Phones and Tablets On Board

While the global market share of iPhones hovers around 20%, in the United States the Apple logo adorns just over half of the smartphones shipped in 2024 and 1H 2025, per Counterpoint Research. On cruise lines, the iPhone share of mobile device SpeedtestⓇ samples is a few ticks higher than that of its U.S. share. This makes sense, with iPhones and cruises being both simultaneously mass market and higher end.

Mobile Devices – iCruise
Speedtest sample shares on select cruise lines, 1H 2025

With over 500 different device models in this data set, a fair number of Chinese manufacturers make an appearance – Honor, Huawei, OnePlus, Oppo, realme, Vivo, Xiaomi, ZTE – though small in numbers. Farther out in the long tail is the Galaxy S8+ (0.03% of devices). Launched in 2017, it is a pre-5G hold over. 

However, there are no surprises among the most popular devices being the iPhones and Galaxies released in the past couple of years.

Top 10 Devices Taking Cruises, 1H 2025 Speedtest data share of samples

DeviceShare
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max10.2%
Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max9.7%
Apple iPhone 16 Pro5.5%
Apple iPhone 15 Pro5.3%
Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max5.1%
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra4.7%
Apple iPhone 14 Pro3.5%
Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra3.4%
Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max3.1%
Apple iPhone 132.5%

Wi-Fi Doldrums

The eight-year old Samsung Galaxy S8+ from the 4G era illustrates a point about performance. Simply, old technology restricts the customer experience. The S8+ is not only on an older cellular technology, it is also an older Wi-Fi technology – Wi-Fi 5. In the meantime, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E and, last year, Wi-Fi 7 added new capabilities that enhance the speed and reliability of the Wi-Fi connectivity.

Among the cruise lines the mix of Wi-Fi generations is quite varied. Royal Caribbean has deployed the most Wi-Fi 6 with half (49.7%) of its Speedtest user samples on this standard. MSC and Princess are entrenched in Wi-Fi 5 (76.1% and 72.0%), while P&O has the most on older Wi-Fi.  

802.11 Standard Bearers
Speedtest sample shares by Wi-Fi Generation, 2H 2024 – 1H 2025

There were no signs of the latest generation of Wi-Fi 7, which is gaining momentum in some countries like the United States. While there are significant technological advances that would improve the Wi-Fi customer experience of the passengers with this latest technology, when we consider the immense cost of adding thousands of access points and miles of cabling to upgrade the ship , the absence of Wi-Fi 7 is understandable.  

However, swapping a Wi-Fi 4 access point for a Wi-Fi 6 access point can be done. Wi-Fi 6 median download speed was around twice as fast Wi-Fi 4 in Speedtest data. Newer technologies often bring faster speeds, and also the overall user experience is enhanced with more efficient spectrum utilization and traffic management, and an increased number of connected devices per access point. The complex infrastructure of a cruise ship and user density present a tall challenge for getting the most out of the Wi-Fi signal. (Expertise from Ookla can help with solutions found under our Ekahau business.)

Starlink Performance Floats the Boat

As mentioned, most cruise lines have moved to Starlink over the past few years for their internet connectivity. Indeed, the 1H 2025 Speedtest data results for Carnival, Costa, Holland America, P&O (all under the Carnival company), and MSC performed in such a similar range that it is clearest to present their results as a group average. This also allows us to easily compare to prior published research on in-flight Wi-Fi performance where Starlink is also the internet provider.

The Starlink cruise line Wi-Fi download speeds perform well, even though it doesn’t keep up with the Starlink in-flight Wi-Fi. Putting aside plans and policies, we can imagine that higher user density loads the cruise ship’s Wi-Fi network more than an airplane’s. Even the cruise line’s 10th percentile at 21.14 Mbps is a serviceable speed for most any application.

The upload speed story is more nuanced. While the median upload is proportional to the download comparison between the cruise lines and the airplanes, the story changes at the opposite ends. The 10th percentile at 1.74 Mbps on the cruise lines is not usable for video calling or posting the day’s images to social media. It is likely that this slow 10th percentile speed is reflecting time-of-day congestion, when heavy usage is occurring on the ships. (A topic for possible follow up investigation.) The 90th percentile for the cruise lines slightly outperforms the airplanes (42.55, 38.07 Mbps).

Latency is always interesting when it comes to satellite internet connectivity. Airplanes outperform cruise lines on the median (44, 87 ms) – literally being closer to the satellite may offer some advantage here. The 90th percentile is far worse on cruise lines, again possibly as a consequence of time-of-day congestion as well as more hops from the access point in the ship to the radio on the ship than with an airplane.

The cruise ship passenger’s Wi-Fi experience can be affected by the service package they select. There are a variety of prices and models (prepay or pay-as-you-go; for the day or for the trip) that offer increasing capabilities, such as basic, value and premium choice set. Many of these packages can cost more than a monthly mobile phone service. For example, for one of the leading cruise lines based on total passengers, the least expensive “Social” package is $18.70 per day. However, in hotels and, increasingly on airlines, the trend is toward offering free internet connectivity as an enhancement of the customer experience or loyalty perk. Norwegian Cruise Line even touts free Wi-Fi in one of its commercials, though, overall, the “free” Wi-Fi may have limited usage or it is only included only in the most expensive VIP packages. 

There Once was a Princess… 

…with a medallion. That is to say, Princess Cruise Lines offers MedallionNet® which it touts as “Unmatched Wi-Fi Experience at Sea – Fast. Reliable. Unlimited. Affordable. Now on all ships.” As we’ve noted and is stated on its site, the internet service is provided by Starlink. 

And yet, links on the site connect to a press release from 2018 about another satellite provider, SES, and an explainer video about mid-earth and geo-stationary orbits (which has a major impact on performance) of which Starlink is neither. SES has been the long-time provider, and a more recent press release from August 2024 explains that the two satellite partners support tiered service offerings. 

Noting this isn’t an attempt to call out Princess for confusing content, but instead to recognize that the cruise line industry is potentially in a phase change about how it delivers and manages customer experience on its cruises. Future generations of passengers (as in Gen-X or Millennials, not Wi-Fi 7 or 8) are digital natives with a different expectation of always-on, high-quality connectivity.

Sailing to the Other Side?

Hotels charged for poor Wi-Fi. Over the years, however, hotel Wi-Fi service went from an expensive customer pain point to a point of customer service expectation and loyalty. Airlines appear to be mid-flight on this same journey, also realizing they have a captive audience that they can entertain and monetize. When will cruise lines also reach the point of no return?

Methodology Remarks

The basic building block of this analysis is identifying Speedtest data tests related to the SSIDs (the name of the Wi-Fi network) of the cruise lines and ships. Comparing the counts of Speedtest samples in 1H 2025 with the cruise line market shares based on passenger totals found at Cruise Market Watch, we are capturing Wi-Fi performance on 80% of the cruise line market. In fact, Speedtest samples correlate with passenger market share (r = 0.75). Furthermore, where we have Speedtest samples identified on a per ship basis, these correlate with ship passenger capacity as well (r = 0.71). Netting this out, the Speedtest samples offer a strong representation based on these anchors of market share and ship size.

Still, as with in-flight Wi-Fi, cruise ships present fresh complexity different from Speedtest’s bread-and-butter fixed broadband and mobile service providers because of ships’ mobility, variety of SSID approaches (ie, one cruise line uses the same SSID on all its ships, while most use SSIDs unique to the ship), changing of internet service providers (fleet-wide upgrades to Starlink), and policies inhibiting high-data usage applications. Thus, this analysis is offered in the context of “here’s what we see” rather than a definitive census of cruise ship Wi-Fi performance.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Wi-Fi
Travel & Leisure

About the author

Kerry Baker

Kerry Baker leads Ookla's research and content efforts in North America. He has over 20 years experience in the telecom industry, primarily at T-Mobile studying network performance benchmarking and customer experience. Kerry also has founder’s experience with four technology-related startups. Kerry holds masters degrees from the University of Washington in Business and International Political Economics.

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| May 7, 2024

Assessing and Addressing Indoor Coverage Issues

Webinar

In an era where staying connected is not just a convenience but a necessity, fast and reliable indoor cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity play a pivotal role for enterprises and consumers alike. In fact, according to Ericsson, up to 80% of all data traffic is consumed at indoor locations and 90% of our time is spent indoors, making good indoor cell and Wi-Fi performance more important than ever. From enabling mission-critical business applications to allowing users to binge Fallout while stuck at the airport, users expect perfect connectivity 24/7, regardless of location. 

However, achieving consistently reliable and high-speed indoor coverage isn’t as straightforward as it might sound. Obstacles like walls, windows, and various building materials can attenuate radio signals and hamper propagation, while suboptimal access point (AP) placement, improper power level configurations, and interference from nearby networks or devices can further degrade indoor connectivity performance.

Chart titled "Deploying solutions can fail if not properly planned"

To overcome these challenges, proper network planning is critical, and that’s where Ookla can help. With complementary datasets like Ekahau’s Wi-Fi performance suite and Ookla’s solutions for mobile network intelligence including Cell Analytics™ and Ookla Wind™, operators can identify and address indoor coverage issues for both cellular and Wi-Fi networks. 

Detecting Indoor Coverage Issues

Internet users often switch between Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but these transitions aren’t always as seamless as one would expect. Some users might encounter poor service while moving between networks, while others may simply switch off one network type altogether, avoiding the need to report any problems to their ISP. This compounds challenges for ISPs in identifying and addressing coverage issues, making proactive network monitoring and testing critical. 

The first step in maximizing indoor connectivity and detecting coverage issues is understanding your network’s current gaps, weak signal areas, and sources of interference or poor performance.

Evaluating Cellular Coverage with Cell Analytics

Powered by the Ookla® Speedtest® network testing platform, Cell Analytics provides unparalleled intelligence into wireless service quality, RF measurements, data usage, user density – both indoors and outdoors – cell site locations, and much more. Cell Analytics leverages billions of samples from consumer devices to show you indoor coverage gaps, weak signal areas, and buildings with good coverage but poor quality. Some key capabilities of Cell Analytics include: 

  • Assessing the performance, quality, and availability of existing networks
  • Identifying and fixing network issues faster
  • Locating opportunities for capacity expansion
  • Prioritizing network optimization and marketing efforts
  • Focusing engineering efforts where they’re needed most

Evaluating Wi-Fi Coverage with Ekahau’s Sidekick 2

Ekahau’s Sidekick 2 Wi-Fi testing and measurement device assesses your network health and provides early detection for any changes in the environment that can negatively impact your Wi-Fi network. The Sidekick 2 enables comprehensive site surveys to rapidly detect issues like:

  • Poor primary or secondary coverage 
  • Interference sources 
  • Wall attenuation sources 
  • AP placement 
  • AP power levels
  • Security vulnerabilities 

With an easy-to-use mobile app interface, the Sidekick 2 empowers anyone to collect reliable Wi-Fi data simply by walking around a facility. If you can walk a dog, you can use the Sidekick 2!

Chart titled "Leverage Ookla's tools for indoor coverage improvement"

Improving Indoor Coverage with Ookla Wind & Ekahau

Ookla Wind offers another complementary solution for identifying and improving indoor coverage via a controlled walk/drive testing solution. Using our handset-based Android app, Ookla Wind provides controlled testing of 5G, 4G, Wi-Fi, and other network types, allowing ISPs to diagnose coverage problems and validate improvements at a granular level. Some key capabilities include:

  • Walk/drive test automation with scripting
  • Integrated Speedtest SDK for real-world throughput testing
  • Cloud-based reporting and visualization of test data
  • Real-time monitoring during live events at venues like stadiums

On the Wi-Fi side, Ekahau’s software solutions are designed to simplify Wi-Fi design and optimization for anyone, whether you’re a veteran IT pro or a recently hired IT intern. Using measured survey data collected by the Sidekick 2, Ekahau’s software can help you take the next steps toward improving your indoor coverage. Let’s take a look at how Ekahau’s Optimizer and Analyzer software solutions can help solve your network woes with ease. 

Ekahau Optimizer allows you to perform incredibly accurate health check and security surveys with the Sidekick 2 and the Android or iOS device of your choice. Ekahau Optimizer automatically analyzes data from the Sidekick 2, then it identifies and makes recommendations for fixing several key issues that IT admins have to contend with on a regular basis, such as primary and secondary coverage issues, SNR problems, minimum basic rates, SSID configuration, channel widths, and more. 

Ekahau Analyzer provides another convenient solution for troubleshooting the most common network issues, including coverage problems. Connected to the Sidekick, the app validates your network’s configuration and makes it easy to visualize actual spectrum utilization and access point reporting side-by-side, view associated stations, discover rogue devices, and identify the channels your APs are operating on to improve overall Wi-Fi performance. 

Conclusion

In today’s hyperconnected world, reliable indoor connectivity is a must for both businesses and consumers alike. By combining Ookla’s crowdsourced testing and analytics capabilities with Ekahau’s powerful Wi-Fi solutions, organizations get a 360-degree view of their indoor mobile and Wi-Fi coverage and can ensure their networks deliver the seamless indoor experiences users demand.

Image linked to access to On-Demand video of the "How to Optimize Indoor Cellular and Wi-Fi Coverage webinar

From pinpointing indoor coverage gaps and identifying other issues using Cell Analytics and Ekahau to conducting controlled testing with Wind, these complementary solutions provide end-to-end indoor connectivity optimization solutions for IT admins across a broad range of industry.

To learn more about how Ookla and Ekahau solutions can be used to solve coverage problems, check out our recent webinar on-demand, “How to Optimize Indoor Cellular and Wi-Fi Coverage.” 

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Webinar
ISP

About the author

Dave Andersen

Dave Andersen is a Marketing Program Manager at Ookla, where he creates enterprise and consumer content across Ookla’s brands. Dave got his start in the telco space in 2012, producing content for RootMetrics. Dave has a bachelors in marketing from Washington State University and studied creative writing in Oklahoma State’s MFA program.

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Ookla Research™ Articles
| October 10, 2019

We Tested 8 VPNs and Hotspot Shield is Fastest

Global Speeds

VPNs are a key component for today’s savvy web user whether you’re concerned about online privacy or streaming the latest episode of an overseas baking show. But VPNs also have a reputation for destroying download speeds. We tested eight popular VPNs to see which rises to the top by keeping your connection fast.

Methodology

vpn-diagram

We tested each VPN under two circumstances: local and international. A local result means we connected the VPN to our hometown (Seattle) and then ran several tests using Speedtest.net to the closest SpeedtestⓇ server. This is similar to what you might expect to see if you simply turned on the VPN with automatic settings and started browsing. Your browsing would be private, but you wouldn’t enjoy any of the geographic benefits of a VPN.

To test international results, we connected each VPN to a London VPN server and ran a Speedtest to a London Speedtest server. This simulates the experience of accessing TV shows and other media outside of your home country.

The percent difference for both local and international tests is calculated against the mean of our baseline Speedtest results when no VPN was connected. Note that while you can choose between multi-connection and single-connection testing on most of our Speedtest platforms, the results outlined below used multi-connection.

All VPNs slowed our local connections

Ookla_Difference-in-Speed-When-Testing-VPN-to-Local-Server
The greater the percent difference from the baseline, the slower your connection will be. Hotspot Shield had the least impact to download speed in local testing with a decrease of 51.9%. IPVanish was second best — decreasing download speed by 66.7%. Private Internet Access was third at -70.9%, and TunnelBear had the slowest speeds with -98.3%. We should note that while IPVanish, Hotspot Shield and NordVPN have business relationships with OoklaⓇ, our results are independent of these relationships.

Hotspot Shield was actually faster than the baseline on our international tests

Ookla_Difference-in-Speed-When-Testing-VPN-to-Remote-Server-2
Our international VPN test showed Hotspot Shield in first place with a 26.2% increase in download speed when testing between Seattle and London. We spoke to our engineers to find out what allows Hotspot Shield’s technology to improve speeds internationally. Hotspot Shield funnels network TCP traffic through a transparent TCP proxy, from a location on the internet close to the device, to the remote destination. This proxy efficiently manages congestion that typically occurs at the last mile which allows for an increase in speeds versus standard routing.

All other VPNs showed the expected decrease in download speeds when testing internationally. ExpressVPN was the second fastest VPN for international connections with a 42.5% decrease in download speed. Avira was third with an 85.2% decrease. IPVanish and NordVPN followed closely behind, coming in within 1% of each other. TunnelBear, again, had the slowest speeds with a 95.3% decrease.

Now that you know which VPN is fastest, take a Speedtest next time you’re connected to a VPN to see how protecting your online privacy is impacting your speeds.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

Global Speeds
VPN

About the author

Garrett Snyder

Data and maps enthusiast. Senior Program Manager on the marketing team at Ookla.

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| April 11, 2025

Keeping Customers Loyal: Data-Driven Strategies to Prevent Churn

Webinar

Every telecommunications provider faces the challenge of customer churn — the rate at which subscribers cancel or switch providers over a given time period. While churn is inevitable, it isn’t cheap. Industry studies consistently show that acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than keeping an existing one. Despite this economic reality, many internet providers struggle to identify the specific factors that drive customers to switch services.

As new technologies like 5G and Fiber to the Home (FTTH) transform the telecommunications landscape, providers need to look beyond traditional metrics like download speed to understand and improve customer satisfaction. Network responsiveness and the quality of everyday connected experiences – like video conferencing, streaming movies, and online gaming – play crucial roles in retaining customers. But without access to granular data and insights into these actual user experiences, providers risk misallocating resources and missing opportunities to address the true drivers of churn.

Ookla’s crowdsourced data provides these key insights by capturing both Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, along with provider ratings and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), to reveal the reasons behind customer churn. In this article, we’ll explore how these comprehensive measurements help providers pinpoint churn factors, improve retention strategies, and optimize user experiences. For a deeper dive, check out our webinar “Why Customers Leave: Preventing Churn with Crowdsourced Data.”

The Connection Between Network Performance and Customer Retention

Customer decisions to stay or leave are heavily influenced by network performance. While promotional offers and pricing strategies play a role in these decisions, long-term retention also depends on delivering a fast, consistent, and responsive experience. Providers that fall short risk losing subscribers to competitors that consistently meet customer expectations.

A recent Ookla analysis revealed a striking pattern across the United States: providers with higher percentages of low-latency connections consistently achieve better customer satisfaction scores and higher retention rates than those with slower, less responsive networks. The impact of low latency on customer loyalty is particularly clear when looking at customer satisfaction for users on fiber compared to those on non-fiber networks:

  • Fiber networks averaged a 3.84 customer rating (on a 5-point scale) versus 3.17 for non-fiber connections.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) — a standard customer loyalty metric that measures willingness to recommend a company on a scale from 0-10 — showed an even more dramatic difference, with fiber networks achieving positive scores of around +20 while non-fiber networks averaged -16.5.

While providers have traditionally emphasized download speed in their marketing and performance assessments, our data shows that latency may play an even bigger role in keeping customers happy and reducing churn.

Beyond Speed: Understanding QoS and QoE Metrics

For decades, the telecommunications industry has typically focused on a single metric — download speed — as the primary measure of network quality. With download speed often viewed as a proxy for overall bandwidth, the assumption was that more bandwidth would generally lead to a better user experience.

However, speed alone doesn’t fully explain why customers with objectively fast connections can still experience issues like slow video buffering, delays in real-time applications, or inconsistent app performance. Other network factors — particularly latency — can significantly contribute to these problems, often leading to user frustration and, in some cases, prompting them to switch providers. 

That’s why it’s crucial for providers to gain a more holistic view of performance that reflects how customers actually experience their network in daily life. Ookla collects this comprehensive data through two complementary approaches:

Quality of Service (QoS): Measuring What Networks Deliver

Quality of Service measures the technical aspects of network performance that affect user experience, including speed and latency, which influence how well a network can deliver a smooth, consistent connection.

QoS is measured when users actively run a Speedtest. These tests capture key network performance metrics, including:

  • Download and upload speeds (measuring network capacity)
  • Latency and jitter (measuring network responsiveness)
  • Network provider identification and connection type (mobile, fixed, Wi-Fi)

Quality of Experience (QoE): Measuring Real-World User Experiences

Quality of Experience metrics examine how users actually experience the network during everyday digital activities. These metrics provide insights into how various network types perform across key performance indicators that directly impact user satisfaction. From streaming Netflix and video chatting with colleagues to competing in online games, network performance plays a significant role in shaping the user experience.

QoE metrics are primarily collected through Ookla’s embedded SDK across hundreds of applications in the digital ecosystem, measuring performance across various network types, including fiber and non-fiber connections. Here are some notable performance differences observed between fiber and non-fiber networks based on QoE metrics:

  • Video streaming: Metrics like video start time show significant differences between network types, with fiber connections averaging 1.47 seconds versus 1.76 seconds for non-fiber, a 16% improvement that reduces buffering when starting videos or changing resolutions.
  • Web browsing: Page load times on fiber networks averaged 1.12 seconds compared to 1.35 seconds for non-fiber, a 17% faster experience that adds up to significant time savings during extended browsing sessions.
  • Video conferencing: Across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and WhatsApp, fiber networks delivered conferencing latency of 51.56 ms versus 79.43 ms for non-fiber, a 35% improvement that, combined with other network factors, contributes to more consistent video and audio quality.
  • Gaming: Lower latency in fiber networks can create substantial competitive advantages in gaming. Ookla data shows fiber networks deliver gaming latency improvements ranging from 22.8% in Atlanta (48.95 ms vs 63.33 ms) to 62.2% in Seattle (39.35 ms vs 104.18 ms). For gamers, milliseconds matter – faster network response means more immediate reactions to controls, giving players a smoother experience and potential edge.

No one likes a laggy game, a frozen video call, or a sluggish webpage — and when frustration piles up, customers often start looking for a better option. Ookla’s QoE and QoS insights can help providers stay ahead of customer experience issues and make the kinds of improvements that keep users happy.

Understanding Churn: Where Customers Go and Why They Leave

It’s not enough to know that customers are leaving — providers need to know where they’re going and why. Traditional churn metrics only tell you that subscribers are switching, but they typically don’t reveal which competitors are gaining them or which locations are most affected.

That’s where Ookla’s Net Flow Percentage analysis comes in. By tracking aggregated, anonymized user data, providers can pinpoint exactly where they’re losing customers, find patterns in subscriber movement, and see how network performance correlates with subscriber losses or gains. Net Flow Percentage analysis helps providers:

  • Identify location patterns by analyzing service areas with changing usage trends
  • Observe provider transitions to understand shifts in market share over time
  • Calculate Net Flow percentage as the difference between users gained and users lost in a given area

When combined with performance metrics, Net Flow Percentage analysis offers key correlations that can guide targeted technical improvements where they’ll have the greatest impact on retention, while also revealing potential reasons behind churn. 

How ISPs Can Prevent Churn

Providers can no longer afford to simply react to customer churn; they must be proactive in staying ahead of potential issues and actively fostering loyalty. Strategies that focus on continuously enhancing the customer experience are now essential. Ookla’s data provides valuable competitive benchmarking and insights to help identify and prioritize areas for optimization. Using this information, providers can deliver a high-quality user experience that minimizes churn and strengthens long-term customer relationships.

With data-driven insights, ISPs can focus on strategies to improve customer retention:

  • Fiber Deployment (FTTH) Expansion: High-performing fiber networks consistently deliver faster speeds and more reliable performance compared to non-fiber alternatives, providing a superior experience that helps reduce churn.
  • Low Latency: Providing users with consistently low latency is crucial for ensuring a smooth and responsive network experience, particularly for activities like video conferencing, gaming, and web browsing. Providers that deliver low latency tend to see higher customer satisfaction and reduced churn.
  • Quality of Experience Optimization and Proactive Monitoring: QoE metrics track critical user experience factors like video start times and service stability, allowing providers to monitor and address issues proactively, preventing dissatisfaction and minimizing churn risks.

Implementing proactive strategies to reduce churn enables ISPs to enhance customer satisfaction and build lasting loyalty, providing a strong competitive edge in the fast-evolving telecom industry.

Turning Insights into Action: Real-World Examples of Churn Prevention

Understanding why and where customers leave is only valuable if it leads to proactive, targeted action. Ookla’s analysis has pinpointed several examples where granular insights into network performance, user behavior, and technology gaps directly guided providers to address the root causes of churn:

  • Tackling Performance Issues: Small performance degradations can drive major customer losses. One provider observed that a 25% increase in YouTube and Google loading times coincided with significant customer departures. After network infrastructure upgrades at key connection points, web performance improved and customer retention stabilized.
  • Addressing Network Technology Gaps: Disparities in technology can significantly impact customer decisions. Data from Houston showed fiber networks delivering 10x faster speeds than non-fiber alternatives (477 Mbps vs. 47 Mbps), while users in Seattle experienced dramatically higher latency on non-fiber networks.
  • Leveraging Early Infrastructure Investments: Providers who deployed fiber early captured significant market share that continues to grow. This underscores the importance of timely network upgrades and the need for providers to accelerate fiber deployments, optimize latency, and consistently enhance the quality of experience to maintain competitive advantage.

While customer churn remains a major concern among telecom providers, those who leverage crowdsourced data to identify specific performance issues and technology gaps gain a decisive advantage. The key is targeting investments with precision, creating a virtuous cycle — better performance drives higher satisfaction, reduced churn, and ultimately stronger returns on infrastructure investments.

Conclusion: Using Data-Driven Insights Reduce Churn

The bottom line is that keeping customers is much cheaper than replacing them. That’s why understanding why they leave — and taking steps to prevent it — is so critical. By leveraging insights from Ookla’s QoS and QoE data, providers can gain a comprehensive understanding of both network performance and its impact on real-world user satisfaction.

With a clearer picture of the factors that drive churn, providers can address issues like slow speeds, high latency, and inconsistent experiences. Providers that invest in fiber, consistently deliver low latency, and proactively monitor QoE are better positioned to keep their customers happy — and prevent churn.

Why customers leave: Preventing Churn

For more on how Ookla’s crowdsourced data can help your enterprise reduce churn, reach out to our team! And if you want a deeper dive into applying these insights to your strategy, check out our recent webinar “Why Customers Leave: Preventing Churn with Crowdsourced Data.”

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

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About the author

Dave Andersen

Dave Andersen is a Marketing Program Manager at Ookla, where he creates enterprise and consumer content across Ookla’s brands. Dave got his start in the telco space in 2012, producing content for RootMetrics. Dave has a bachelors in marketing from Washington State University and studied creative writing in Oklahoma State’s MFA program.

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Ookla Research™ Articles
| February 22, 2023

Starlink Resurgence? Speeds Increase in Europe and Oceania

Satellite

Ookla® is back with exciting, fresh data from Q3 and Q4 2022 for SpaceX’s Starlink and Sky Logic in Europe and Oceania, as well as new Starlink markets we haven’t yet featured in our ongoing series on satellite internet. With the FCC greenlighting Amazon’s Project Kuiper and many other exciting satellite developments launching this year, we’re certain all eyes will be on the sky in 2023 as new orbital connectivity options become available for consumers.

This analysis includes Starlink results from six new countries, and data for Starlink and Sky Logic in Europe and Starlink in Oceania. We also examine how Starlink’s internet performance has changed over the past year in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.

Starlink is mostly speeding up again from Q3 to Q4 2022, but is still slower than a year ago

As Starlink rides the wave of becoming an increasingly popular connectivity option for consumers, we’ve seen the service speed up and then slow down year-over-year in most markets. However, Q4 2022 data shows many countries are experiencing a modest rise in median download speeds when compared to Q3 2022. That’s encouraging for consumers, especially as Starlink hit over 1 million users in Q4 2022, and could be a sign that Starlink seems to be maturing its constellation’s capacity. That’s particularly intriguing as Starlink launches more next-gen satellites, which were first deployed at the tail end of Q4 2022 and will most likely show up in Q1 2023 results.

In Europe, all the countries we evaluated for year-over-year median download speeds were slower for Q4 2022 than Q4 2021 when there were fewer users on each network. Most countries showed between 10-20% slower speeds in Q4 2022 than what users experienced in Q4 2021, including Ireland (at least 11% slower), Austria (at least 13%), Portugal (at least 14%), Italy (at least 15%), Germany (at least 16%), and the U.K. (at least 19%). Users in France saw very similar speeds year over year, with just a 4% decrease from Q4 2021 to Q4 2022, while users in Poland saw a large decrease (at least 56% slower), and users in the Netherlands (at least 21%) and Belgium (at least 28%) saw substantial decrease during the same period.

In Oceania, Starlink year-over-year results were mixed, with Starlink’s download speed in Australia 24% slower in Q4 2022 than during Q4 2021, while in New Zealand it was 4% faster in Q4 2022 than Q4 2021.

Starlink in Denmark and Switzerland had the fastest satellite internet in Europe during Q4 2022

Speedtest Intelligence® reveals there was no fastest satellite provider in Europe during Q4 2022, though Starlink in Denmark (147.52 Mbps) and Switzerland (136.03 Mbps) led the pack for fastest median download speed. In all, Starlink download speeds were faster than 100 Mbps in 10 out of 15 European countries during Q4 2022 — a rise from just five out 15 in Q3 2022. 

Starlink outperformed fixed broadband providers over download speed in eight countries, including: Austria (105.67 Mbps), Belgium (104.84 Mbps), Croatia (102.99 Mbps), Czechia (64.67 Mbps), Germany (94.37 Mbps), Ireland (103.39 Mbps), Italy (101.06 Mbps), and the U.K. (96.79 Mbps). Fixed broadband providers were faster than satellite providers analyzed in Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Poland. Results were too close to call in Sweden with fixed providers at 106.73 Mbps and Starlink at 101.83 Mbps, as well as Portugal with Starlink at 108.02 Mbps and fixed broadband at 117.97 Mbps. Skylogic was too close to call between the median fixed broadband speed in Italy at 55.50 Mbps to 59.40 Mbps, and had download speeds faster than 40 Mbps in France (44.46 Mbps) and Sweden (48.09 Mbps).

For upload speeds, every country’s combined fixed broadband providers had faster median upload speeds than every satellite provider, though Starlink in Portugal had the fastest upload speed among satellite providers at 20.86 Mbps. All Starlink upload speeds ranged between 10-20 Mbps except Poland (9.79 Mbps) and Denmark (8.04 Mbps). 

Multi-server latency for all satellite providers was higher than fixed broadband providers in every European country in Q4 2022, which ranged from 12.34 ms in Sweden to 23.46 ms in Italy. However, Starlink had a median multiserver latencies of less than 60 ms in the U.K. (53.24 ms), Portugal (56.81 ms), and the Netherlands (58.85 ms). Most latencies were between 60-75 ms, with Poland having the highest latency at 86.46 ms — still low enough to have a good quality of experience and be able to video chat.

Starlink in New Zealand was the fastest satellite provider in Oceania

During Q4 2022, Starlink in New Zealand had the fastest median download speed among satellite providers in Oceania at 124.72 Mbps, followed by Starlink in Australia (106.43 Mbps), and Starlink in Tonga (35.15 Mbps). However, New Zealand fixed broadband outperformed Starlink, while Starlink in Australia outperformed fixed broadband providers. In Tonga, speeds were too close to call. 

Speedtest Intelligence shows Starlink falling behind fixed broadband providers for median upload speeds in New Zealand (16.89 Mbps) and Australia (11.38 Mbps), while Tonga was again too close to call.

Multi-server latency was higher over Starlink than fixed broadband in all three countries we surveyed in Oceania during Q4 2022. However, Starlink’s median latency was under 50 ms in New Zealand (48.11 ms), which is a very exciting development for consumers, especially with latency becoming an increasingly important metric. Starlink latency in Australia was higher at 65.52 ms, while Tonga followed at 88.81 ms.

New Q4 2022 Starlink countries show very promising results

Speedtest Intelligence shows the six new countries where we found new Starlink data are off to a roaring start in Q4 2022, which include Bulgaria, Finland, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, and Malta. Starlink had faster median download speeds than the country’s respective fixed broadband providers combined in two countries: Bulgaria (110.76 Mbps versus 65.69 Mbps), and Jamaica (87.43 Mbps vs. 48.34 Mbps), while results were too close to call in the remaining four markets. However, Starlink showed promising 100+ Mbps speeds in Japan (156.94 Mbps), Finland (102.70 Mbps), and Malta (101.36 Mbps). 

Median upload speeds for Starlink lagged behind fixed broadband providers in all markets, though Malta was too close to call (20.40 Mbps for Starlink and 20.25 Mbps for fixed broadband). Starlink upload speeds ranged from about 14 Mbps to 20 Mbps in every market.

Consumers and enterprises stand to benefit from satellite developments in 2023

Starlink dominated headlines in 2022 — and for good reason. They’ve gained over 1 million users worldwide, will be available in connected vehicles, planes, RVs, and ships, partnered with T-Mobile to bring Starlink to mobile devices, and launched their second-gen satellites at the end of 2022. But that could very seriously change in 2023 with multiple competitors deploying major offensives in the satellite market. We’ll say it again: there is a new space race for connectivity being waged, and we’re just at the tip of what’s to come.

Here are some major updates about what’s next for various different satellite competitors:

Amazon’s Project Kuiper approved by the FCC

The biggest news concerning satellite connectivity is the FCC approving Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation, which will include 3,236 satellites in an LEO array. On two fronts, this poses two potential challenges for Starlink: on one hand, Amazon has the global reach, scale, and consumer base that being one of the largest companies in the world provides. On the other, Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, and won’t have to rely on the service or other vendors to launch their array into space. Amazon is in a good position to compete and Project Kuiper could become a major player if their prototypes, which will be launched in early 2023, reach speeds anywhere close to competing with broadband internet. 

Viasat set to launch Viasat-3 arrays around April 8, 2023

Long-term incumbent satellite internet provider, Viasat, has a big year ahead after years of planning and providing connectivity to remote locations around the world. Viasat is finally set to launch its Viasat-3 array, which aims to provide 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) of network capacity on each satellite, allowing its users to experience 100+ Mbps connections; that’s a huge improvement for the mainly GEO provider. While consumers likely won’t see these results until Q4 2023, we’re very excited to see how Viasat improves its network.

Eutelsat’s merger with OneWeb approved by Eutelsat board, second-gen array being planned

One of the biggest mergers in recent years among satellite providers has jumped a major hurdle and was approved by the Eutelsat board. While the combined entities still have to be approved by shareholders and regulators, this merger could expand both companies’ market share, particularly in India, which has fast become an important satellite market. Furthermore, OneWeb is already planning a second-gen satellite, which they’re aiming to launch in 2025.

European Commission forges ahead on Constellation Iris

The European Union has been working to create its own satellite constellation since 2020, and during November 2022, agreed to a plan to commit €2.4 billion for a third satellite array named Iris, in addition to Galileo and Copernicus. The project, which includes GEO, MEO, and LEO arrays, will help support EU connectivity priorities including the economy, environment, security, and defense, and is hoping to launch in 2024, and be fully operational by 2027.

HughesNet aiming to launch Jupiter 3 array in H1 2023

Incumbent satellite internet provider HughesNet is planning to launch its new Jupiter 3 array in the first half of 2023, which will help expand its network capacity, “doubling the size of the Hughes JUPITER fleet over North and South America.” While the Jupiter 3 array will still be a GEO constellation, the added network capacity will alleviate congested networks and give consumers more bandwidth to use the internet.

Ookla will continue monitoring new satellite internet developments

As 2023 continues to shape up as a pivotal year for satellite internet providers, we’ll be watching the sky to make sure providers are providing the connectivity consumers need. We’ll continue our series next quarter with Q4 2022 and Q1 2023 data from North and South America and any new countries where Starlink launches, and be back with Europe and Oceania data in Q3 2023. In the meantime, be sure to download the Speedtest® app for Windows and Mac computers or for iOS or Android for devices and see how your satellite internet stacks up to our findings.

Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.

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Network Evolution

About the author

Josh Fomon

Josh was a senior content specialist at Ookla.

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