Airship Startup Avealto Says It Can Undercut Starlink by 80%

By John Maximus · Published 13 October 2026
Reported from named sources and checked against the publishers linked in this article. Corrections: editorial and corrections policy.

Avealto, a British company developing high-altitude communications aircraft, says it can undercut Starlink by flying giant helium airships in the stratosphere rather than putting hardware in orbit. Founder Walt Anderson laid out the plan at a briefing for journalists in London, reported on 13 October 2026 by Aerospace Global News, which attended.

Key facts

• The proposed aircraft would be roughly 100 metres (330 feet) long and fly at about 65,000 feet, or 20km, which Avealto notes is below space.
• Each one would hold almost the same position for three to four months at a time and cover an area 150 miles (240km) in diameter.
• Avealto is seeking $55 million to set up a manufacturing facility in Kent and start its first commercial service in Malaysia.
• The product is called the Wireless Infrastructure Platform, or WIP. Avealto has already tested several smaller prototype airships.
• The company says it will sell only to telecom operators, never to consumers.

Why it matters

The figure cited at the briefing was around 300 million people living outside any mobile broadband signal. The GSMA, the mobile industry’s trade body, tracks that population — what it calls the coverage gap — in its annual State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report, and puts it in the hundreds of millions, concentrated in the sparsely populated, mountainous and island communities that are most expensive to wire. Those are the customers satellite internet providers have been winning, and the fight is over what connecting them costs.

Starlink’s retail numbers come from SpaceX itself: its order and availability pages list United States residential service at roughly $120 a month, with a few hundred dollars up front for the dish, and the company says service is live in more than 100 countries and territories, with prices varying sharply by market. Anderson’s claim is pitched against that incumbency. “We’re going to be 80 percent – not up to 80 percent, actually 80 percent – lower cost than Starlink,” he told journalists, including Aerospace Global News.

What “80 percent cheaper” is measured against

The unit behind that headline number was not given at the briefing, and it is the biggest open question in the pitch. Because Avealto says it will sell only to operators, the comparison implies wholesale capacity rather than a household bill — but wholesale connectivity is quoted in several ways that do not move together: per megabit per second of capacity, per connected tower per month, or as total cost of ownership over the life of the hardware. Nor was it said which Starlink product is the benchmark: the consumer plan, Starlink Business, or the Community Gateway service SpaceX markets to operators for cellular backhaul, which is the product closest to what Avealto proposes to sell. Without that, the claim is a direction of travel rather than a price.

Anderson’s structural argument is that a 240km service area is a feature, not a limit, because the company does not have to spend $27 billion to cover the whole world the way Starlink has, according to Aerospace Global News, and can therefore build region by region instead of all at once.

Backhaul, not broadband dishes

Avealto’s service is not a direct-to-device offering that links ordinary handsets to spacecraft. Instead, the airships would carry backhaul — the link that connects a conventional mobile tower to an operator’s wider network.

Aerospace Global News reports the problem Avealto is aiming at: an operator may be willing to put up a 4G or 5G tower in a remote community but find that connecting it is prohibitively expensive, because laying hundreds of kilometres of fibre across mountains, forests or scattered islands is financially impractical. Anderson argues satellite backhaul is an alternative but that its cost can make serving small populations unprofitable — an economics debate that also runs through AT&T boss John Stankey’s argument that nothing beats fiber.

One airship could potentially connect 20 to 40 mobile towers, the outlet reports, while also linking fixed broadband terminals, schools, hospitals and emergency responders. Customers would keep their normal phones and subscriptions and would not buy dedicated satellite equipment or change provider.

“We’ll never sell to the consumer. We don’t compete with the telecom operators,” Anderson said, per Aerospace Global News, adding that operators already pay to serve whole countries but cannot reach thousands of islands.

Demand first, launch second

Rather than build a global network and wait for customers, Avealto says it will deploy aircraft only where it has already found enough demand: pick the areas, ask local telecom operators if they want to buy, and launch a vehicle there if the business is profitable. Anderson believes the approach suits Southeast Asia in particular, where millions of people live on islands that are hard to connect conventionally.

The stratospheric track record

Avealto is not alone in chasing persistent platforms in the stratosphere, Aerospace Global News notes. AALTO, a subsidiary of the European aerospace group Airbus, is developing Zephyr, a lightweight solar-powered fixed-wing aircraft that has already flown for 67 days and which AALTO markets to governments and operators rather than to consumers.

Anderson argues buoyant airships beat fixed-wing platforms on two counts: payload and station-keeping. A lightweight aeroplane has to keep generating aerodynamic lift, so its structure, propulsion and payload must stay exceptionally light, while a helium airship gets its lift from buoyancy and can carry heavier telecoms gear. He questions whether Zephyr-class payload allowances can support the infrastructure he envisages, telling journalists there is nothing you could do commercially with a 12-kilo payload because the antenna alone weighs more than that. Avealto’s own communications payload is designed to weigh about 55kg, on top of batteries, avionics and propulsion.

The sharpest independent test of the economics comes from the companies that tried and quit. Alphabet shut down Loon, its balloon-borne internet venture, in January 2021 after close to a decade of development; chief executive Alastair Westgarth said at the time that the road to commercial viability had proved longer and riskier than hoped and that the team had not found a way to get costs low enough to build a sustainable business — the same cost argument Avealto is now making in its own favour. Facebook abandoned its Aquila solar-powered internet drone in 2018. Endurance has also proved harder than planned: a Zephyr test flight over Arizona in 2022 ended in a crash after roughly two months aloft, short of the three to four months Avealto says each airship will manage, which would set a new high-altitude benchmark rather than match an existing one.

Background and what is not yet clear

Anderson has spent more than a decade developing the technology, according to Aerospace Global News, whose account is so far the only published record of the briefing. The report does not give a date for the first commercial flight, name any committed investor or operator customer, or say whether the $55 million has been raised.

The cost claim, the 20 to 40 towers per aircraft, the station-keeping in high winds and the power savings are all Avealto’s own figures, drawn from prototype work rather than from a commercial service in operation, and no high-altitude platform has yet run one at scale. Until the first WIP flies with paying traffic on it, there is no independent measurement to test them against.

Malaysia was named as the first commercial market and Southeast Asia as the priority region. On a demand-first model, any deployment in Africa or elsewhere would hinge on a local operator signing first — and operators buying rural backhaul there are already being courted by SpaceX’s own Community Gateways and by geostationary satellite providers, so Avealto would be arriving as a third option rather than a first.

The pitch arrives while Starlink consolidates its position on several fronts, including what Starlink’s expanding spectrum holdings could mean for satellite internet prices, and while state-backed challengers take shape, such as the European Commission’s plan for a first phase of a “European Starlink” by 2029.

Frequently Asked Questions

How would the airship stay in one spot instead of drifting like a balloon?

According to Aerospace Global News, the aircraft would use four electrically driven propellers to push back against prevailing winds and hold its position relative to the ground. Founder Walt Anderson described flying into a 20mph wind at 20mph to stay in the same place. That station-keeping is what would allow customer antennas on the ground to stay fixed rather than tracking a moving aircraft.

What powers the airship, and what happens at night?

Avealto told Aerospace Global News the aircraft would carry solar panels that generate electricity during daylight to run its telecommunications payload and electric propulsion. The same panels would charge batteries so the airship can keep operating overnight.

How much less electricity would Avealto’s ground equipment use?

Anderson claims Avealto’s ground equipment could draw eight times less electricity than terminals that have to track moving satellites, as reported by Aerospace Global News. He frames that as an advantage in remote villages where even a reliable power supply is hard to come by.

How does 20km compare with where communications satellites normally sit?

Aerospace Global News notes that Starlink’s low Earth orbit satellites typically operate hundreds of kilometres above the planet, while geosynchronous satellites sit at about 36,000km. Anderson described his concept as bringing a geosynchronous satellite down to 20km, and said the shorter path cuts the power needed for a reliable link because radio signals weaken with distance.