Why Elon Musk’s Starlink has set up a satellite base on a tiny island in the Irish Sea
LONDON — Starlink, the space internet service created in 2015 by Elon Musk’s space transportation firm, SpaceX, has set up a “ground station” on a tiny self-governing island in the Irish Sea to help it beam internet from satellites in low-Earth orbit to homes and offices.
Starlink’s Isle of Man ground station, first reported by The Telegraph late last month, can be seen on the Starlink.sx website.
The government of the Isle of Man said Starlink has been working with local communications provider Bluewave, adding that the pair have together licensed some of the island’s available spectrum.
Bluewave has a ground station just outside the capital of Douglas that can be seen on Google Maps. It acquired the site last year from SES Satellite Leasing. SES pulled out of the Isle of Man last summer.
The site boasts between four and eight radomes, according to a local source who works in the satellite industry that asked to remain anonymous as they’re not permitted to discuss the matter. These are structural, weatherproof enclosures that protect a radar antenna, which sends and receives data transmissions.
“There is a nearly new vacant base station array here linked directly into data centers,” said another source who works in the Isle of Man’s tech industry, who asked to remain anonymous as they’re not directly involved with the Starlink project. The source added that it has “an excellent horizon scan because being surrounded by sea it means there is nothing in the way.”
Measuring 32 miles long and 13 miles wide, the Isle of Man is a British Crown dependency that sits in the middle of the Irish Sea roughly equidistant from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Starlink already has bases in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall in England, and the Isle of Man base will enable the company to provide blanket internet coverage across Britain.
The island’s location, spectrum and existing satellite infrastructure have all contributed to Starlink’s decision, according to the two CNBC sources.
The first source, who received a Starlink kit in May, said the island has a “very efficient” telecoms regulator that’s fast to issue relatively cheap licenses.
“Then of course, the Isle of Man is a low tax jurisdiction so [there is] very little overhead,” they added. “Plus the nation has an adequacy agreement with the EU for GDPR compliance. All this makes the island a good place for satellite or data related services.” GDPR is a set of data protection and privacy regulations introduced by the European Union in May 2018.
The island also has its own spectrum bands that are less busy than those used in the U.K.; the Isle of Man has just 85,000 inhabitants whereas the U.K. has around 70 million.
The Isle of Man Communications and Utilities Regulatory Authority confirmed to CNBC on Thursday that Starlink and Bluewave have been granted a license for “provision of services and location of associated equipment on the island.”
A spokesperson for the island’s Department for Enterprise told CNBC: “This is very exciting and positive news for the Island which will enable the deployment of satellite broadband service on-Island and further afield.”
They added: “Locally, the licensing of available spectrum will provide more choice for local consumers and potential for further jobs within the Island’s telecoms sector.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment, while Bluewave declined to comment.
What is Starlink?
Starlink ultimately wants to provide the world with faster internet, starting by improving internet access in parts of the world that aren’t currently served by broadband providers.
It allows people to connect to the internet via a satellite dish that is placed on or near a person’s property. The internet is beamed down to the dish via a network of Starlink satellites that have been put into orbit by SpaceX and ground stations.
The company has said it plans to spend $10 billion putting 12,000 small satellites into low-Earth orbit that can beam high-speed, low-latency internet to the ground. It has launched 1,700 so far and the service is being used by 90,000 customers in 12 countries.
“You can assume they’ll need lots of ground stations, in lots of places, to ensure uninterrupted coverage,” Craig Moffett, an analyst at research firm MoffettNathanson, told CNBC.
“The satellites aren’t yet equipped with fiber interlinks, so for now, they need to be in constant contact with the ground. That requires a tremendous number of ground stations,” Moffett added.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
DoorDash was the latest tech company to join during the last rebalancing in March. Cloud software vendor Workday was added in December, and that was preceded earlier in 2024 with the additions of Palantir, Dell, CrowdStrike, GoDaddy and Super Micro Computer.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
CNBC: Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel on the cloud computing outlook
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
BitMine Immersion Technologies, a bitcoin miner that announced plans this week to make ETH its primary treasury reserve asset, jumped about 20%. It’s gained more than 1,000% since the announcement. Betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy, added more than 11%. Bit Digital, which last week exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, jumped more than 6%.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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