Member Sign In
As you are likely aware, Recon Analytics runs the fastest, largest, most flexible customer insights service in the market. We survey over 200,000 mobile consumers, over 200,000 home internet consumers, and more than 20,000 businesses every year about their experiences and intentions. With our consistent set of questions and our massive sample size, we do not only pick up on small nuances in the changes around how large operators are perceived. Over time, we also pick up enough data to get a read even on the smaller providers.
Starlink has grown significantly over the last few years, and we now have enough respondents on a regular basis to report on this growth as part of our comprehensive data set. Over the last year, we found over 1,300 Starlink respondents who tell us with robust statistical significance about their experiences. *
What do customers tell us?
85% of the respondents are in rural areas, 5% live in suburbs, and 10% in zip codes classified as urban areas. They are mostly white, as we would expect from a predominantly rural population.
Who did they use before Starlink?
Unsurprisingly, the largest groups of customers for Starlink are either coming from small rural providers or have never had an internet provider before.
A full 11% of Starlink’s customers are new to home internet, as they often live in very rural areas. The largest individual contributors to Starlink’s growth are CenturyLink, Spectrum, and Frontier.
How about service issues?
Starlink customers tell us that they experience fewer service outages than cable customers, but more than fiber customers. Starlink customers also tell us that they experience near industry-leading speed consistency with the most reliable router.
Customer-reported Issues in the last 90 Days (arithmetic average of providers)
| Internet connection went down | Internet was slower than usual | I had to reset Wi-Fi router | Devices disconnected from the network | |
| Starlink | 30% | 24% | 20% | 19% |
| Major Fiber | 24% | 31% | 27% | 25% |
| Large FWA | 25% | 27% | 27% | 25% |
| Major Cable | 39% | 34% | 33% | 28% |
| Major DSL | 33% | 32% | 28% | 26% |
Considering that Starlink is a service that requires a direct line of sight to a passing satellite, these metrics are impressive. Starlink has been able to get 6,146 working satellites into orbit, providing significant capacity and reliability to its subscribers. It has also been able to manage bandwidth, even during peak hours. It is also clear that Starlink’s router is among the most stable in the market.
How satisfied are Starlink customers with their service?
We are also collecting component net promoter scores (cNPS)* by looking at the customer experience in 16 different dimensions. Starlink’s cNPS scores for all the metrics that do not involve interacting with a person are among the best we are seeing in our data.
Selected cNPS categories
| Complete Experience | Easy Installation | Streaming Video | Connecting/Maintaining WiFi Connection | Gaming | |
| Starlink | +42 | +30 | +44 | +37 | +23 |
| Major Fiber | +18 | +18 | +22 | +18 | +12 |
| Large FWA | +40 | +52 | +39 | +36 | +29 |
| Major Cable | -2 | +8 | +6 | +2 | -7 |
| Major DSL | -10 | +5 | -6 | -8 | -20 |
Starlink provides excellent scores when it comes to the technical delivery of the service. It is very similar to Fixed Wireless Access, in that when it works, it works very well and when it does not work, the service provider makes it easy to return the product within 30 days with either a total refund or only having to pay for services rendered. Furthermore, especially with Starlink, the rural alternatives are generally underwhelming. Most Starlink customers come from DSL providers or other satellite providers that are just not competitive when it comes to speeds and latency. Even though Starlink is $99 per month after $499 plus cost for the equipment, value for price cNPS is a very healthy +19. When you have no other options, even pricey internet looks like it’s worth it.
In all of our technical categories, we see constant year over year improvements of aggregate cNPS scores. The service providers are trying to provide a better service, and customers recognize it.
Starlink needs to improve in three categories: Billing support over the phone, technical support over the phone, and in-store experience.
More selected cNPS categories
| Billing Support | Technical Support | In-Store Experience | |
| Starlink | -1 | -3 | -17 |
| Major Fiber | +1 | -3 | -8 |
| Large FWA | +24 | +22 | +29 |
| Major Cable | -13 | -14 | -16 |
| Major DSL | -15 | -20 | -27 |
Fixed Wireless is the benchmark: Great in-store experience where customers can get the box, generally without an upfront cost, and take it home. Starlink’s in-store experience numbers are very similar to those of the mobile providers that predominantly sell through Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. It’s a channel where salespeople are not that educated about the product and its ins and outs. Fiber providers with a store are doing a much better job. The challenge for Starlink is that due to the heavily rural customer base, which implies a low population density, it is not cost effective to open its own stores. One solution is to invest in having its own salespeople in its third-party retail stores. The other challenge is support. While Starlink has a similarly great cNPS number for having an easy-to-understand bill like FWA, the billing support numbers are radically different. Generally, an easy-to-understand bill is correlated to billing support satisfaction, and while correlation does not imply causation, it is a necessary prerequisite.
Overall, Starlink’s mostly rural customer base is very satisfied. Customers like it despite the above average monthly cost and the high cost to purchase the satellite dish and router. Where things get interesting is that Comcast for Business just came to an agreement with Starlink to offer Starlink nationwide to businesses. In our business survey, where we speak with up to 800 businesses of all sizes, we find that fixed wireless access is making significant inroads with cNPS metrics that are similar to what we see in the consumer space. We are actively looking at the impact that the Starlink/Comcast for Business has on the market.
*We ask if they would recommend component elements of a product or service on a scale from 0 to 10 as a battery of questions and then calculate a net promoter score from it. We subtract the percentage of people who rate it 9 and 10 from the percentage of people who rate it 0 to 6, which gives us the net promoter score for this component.
