BT will not launch its partnership with Elon Musk’s Starlink until “the noise has died down” over controversial recent disruptions in the satellite provider’s service which hindered Ukraine’s military, its chief executive said. Allison Kirkby said the service was “ready to launch” but that BT was “cautious on how Starlink might be viewed at the moment considering what happened in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago”.
Kyiv was blindsided by unexplained signal failures on Musk’s Starlink systems last month, which disrupted frontline communications and hindered military missions amid escalating Russian attacks. The disruptions came at a time of tension between US President Donald Trump and his counterpart in Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose armed forces rely heavily on Starlink for battlefield connectivity. Ukraine’s access to Starlink has since been fully restored.
“We will only launch it proactively when we feel the noise has died down a little bit on Elon Musk and Starlink as a result of the Ukraine thing,” Kirkby told the FT. BT’s chief executive added that Starlink was “so far ahead” of its competitors and that the US company, part of Musk’s Space X empire, was “super excited” about the partnership.
Through the partnership, BT will use Starlink satellites to provide connectivity to customers in areas not covered by its fibre broadband network, Openreach, which spans roughly 25mn homes. Kirkby has described it as representing “a giant leap” for rural connectivity. BT said last November it expected the service to be available in “the latter half of 2026” and now plans to launch satellite broadband with Starlink “in the coming months”.
Rival UK telecoms group Virgin Media O2 already has a deal with Starlink covering mobile customers. Space X announced in August it planned to challenge US telecoms groups directly with its own commercial mobile offering. In May, the European Commission proposed reserving part of its spectrum band for direct-to-smartphone satellite connectivity for European players.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing