When Olivia Lott left her London job for a village in rural Devon, she expected a calmer pace of life—but not the near total absence of mobile reception.
With patchy phone signals forcing her to trek up hillsides just to make a call, Lott eventually resorted to installing a landline, a rarity among her fellow millennials. “Sometimes I like the peace,” she says, “but if my Wi-Fi goes down I’m stuck. I have to go into town to find a café to work from.”
This digital isolation may soon be a relic of the past. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk are on the cusp of reshaping connectivity in Britain’s rural regions through satellite technology. Musk’s Starlink, which currently beams home internet signals from space, is poised to launch a new generation of satellites capable of directly linking to ordinary mobile phones. The vision: end “not spots” forever, transforming remote hillsides and valleys into fully connected zones.
Starlink is not alone. The California-based SpaceX subsidiary is locking horns with rivals—satellite operators backed by telecoms giants and tech behemoths—who share an ambition to fix blackouts from hundreds of miles above Earth. If these plans materialise, the idea of losing mobile signal in the remote British countryside could become unimaginable.
Yet the race to create “direct-to-device” satellite services is already turbulent, marked by regulatory battles and accusations of “misinformation.” Rival satellite firms have challenged Starlink’s bids for US approval, while SpaceX has shot back at what it calls an orchestrated campaign to block its progress. The stakes are high, and the outcome could redraw telecoms markets worldwide.
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