Avonline Broadband Satellite Internet

Affiliate disclosure: we may earn a commission if you take out a product through links on this page. It costs you nothing extra and does not influence how providers are listed.

Avonline began installing television and telecommunications equipment in 1981, started putting satellite broadband into British homes in 2002, built fibre networks past more than 2 million UK premises and installed digital services in over 4 million homes and businesses. By 31 October 2016 it was advertising a 30Mbps satellite connection to anyone in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, two years before the government's own universal service floor of 10Mbps came into force.

The brand is no longer sold. Avonline Satellite Services Limited (company 10201939) became Bigblu Services Limited on 31 August 2018; Avonline Network Services Limited (company 10201726) became M Group Telecom Limited on 1 April 2025; and Avonline Limited, registered as Avonline plc until 2019, was dissolved on 16 March 2026. Nothing can be bought under the name today. Every figure on this page was checked on 4 October 2026 against Companies House, Ofcom, the London Gazette and the companies' own websites.

The service itself did not disappear with the name. It is sold today as Bigblu, run out of the same Oxfordshire town on a phone number one digit group away from the old one, at £24.99 a month for an average of 21Mb/s with no data cap. The complication is that avonlinebroadband.com is still live, still advertises the 2016 product in the present tense, and has had cryptocurrency link-spam injected into its home page. That is the gap this page is here to close.

Thirty-five years of rural installs, and the numbers behind them

Avonline was not a reseller that appeared when satellite broadband became fashionable. The company dated itself to 1981 and had been selling satellite broadband since 2002, which made it one of the first in Britain to do so. By its own account in October 2016 it had built fibre networks past more than 2 million UK premises and installed digital services in over 4 million UK homes and businesses — a contractor's record rather than a retailer's, and the reason councils took its calls.

The product that made its name arrived on 14 April 2014. Running on Avanti Communications Group's HYLAS 2 satellite, roughly 22,000 miles up, it was sold from £19.95 a month with a minimum £50 upfront payment and hardware rented at £5 a month on a two-year term. The service guaranteed a 9Mbps minimum average download with up to 20Mbps available, and installation inside a week.

What stood out was the granularity. Allowances ran from 5GB to 150GB a month, unlimited overnight downloads were thrown in free on every package above 50GB, speed was measured on a 30-day rolling basis, and customers had a three-month window to move up or down tiers without charge. Mark Wynn, then managing director, claimed at the time that "no-one else in the UK can give such a specific service commitment and so many different payment options". On the published tier structure that was a fair claim; a decade on, most satellite packages are a single flat tariff.

By 31 October 2016 the ceiling had risen to 30Mbps. Avonline's own framing of why that mattered holds up: it put the figures at 8% of UK homes, some 2.4 million, unable to receive 10Mbps or more, rising to 48% — about 1.5 million — in rural areas, against a government superfast definition of 24Mbps and fibre-to-the-cabinet plans covering 97% or 98% of premises by 2020. A 30Mbps dish beat the superfast threshold in places the cabinet programme was never going to reach, and it saved roughly £200 a year in line rental for anyone who dropped their landline.

The name came off the register in three dated steps

Satellite Solutions Worldwide bought Avonline's satellite arm on 7 July 2016, and rebranded itself Bigblu Broadband Group in May 2018. The paperwork behind that is public, free and exact, and it is the only reliable way to tell what happened to which half of the business.

The satellite retail business. Avonline Satellite Services Limited, incorporated 26 May 2016, became Bigblu Services Limited on 31 August 2018, company number 10201939, SIC code 61300 for satellite telecommunications. Its parent, Avonline Satellite Services Holdings Limited, incorporated 12 May 2016, became Bigblu Services Holding Ltd on the same day, company number 10177312. Both are registered at 60 Gracechurch Street in London. That is the entity a former Avonline customer's contract now sits under.

The network and installation business. Avonline Network Services Limited, company 10201726, kept the name far longer and became M Group Telecom Limited only on 1 April 2025. It is registered in Stevenage, is up to date on its filings — accounts to 31 March 2025 filed, next due 31 December 2026 — and carries all three telecoms SIC codes. It is a contractor that builds networks for other people, not a service a householder can buy.

The holding companies. Avonline Holdings Limited (10177556) was dissolved on 8 June 2021. Avonline Network Services Holdings Limited (10177313) was dissolved on 4 April 2023. Avonline Limited (03756315), incorporated on 21 April 1999 and registered as Avonline plc until 24 April 2019, filed its last accounts to 30 June 2019, its last confirmation statement on 21 April 2020, and was dissolved on 16 March 2026. Its registered office by then was care of an accountancy firm in Bristol.

Read in order, those dates say something useful: the trading business was sold and renamed in 2016 to 2018, the contracting business carried the name until 2025, and the original company was wound up in March 2026. There is no insolvency in that sequence and no customer was left without a service. The brand was retired commercially, in stages, over a decade.

The website nobody switched off

Eight years after the rename, avonlinebroadband.com is still resolving and still selling. Its home page carries the headline "Superfast 30Mbps broadband now available in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland", quotes 30Mbps download and 2Mbps upload, and gives a phone number, 01869 222 895. Nothing on it says the company has been renamed.

The regional pages are worse, because they are more specific. The Northumberland page offers "up to 22Mbps speeds and unlimited data" with uploads to 6Mbps, promises "now get connected FREE this month", describes Avonline as "the UK's largest satellite broadband provider", and states that it "has been hand picked by Northumberland County Council as their satellite broadband partner" under the iNorthumberland programme. It names a regional coordinator and offers a mobile demonstration vehicle for community groups.

Northumberland County Council's own broadband pages, last updated 20 June 2025, name no satellite provider at all. What they describe is Project Gigabit — the government's £5 billion fibre programme — with £7.3 million going into more than 3,750 rural premises in north Northumberland, a national voucher pot of up to £210 million and individual vouchers raised to £4,500 a premises, plus council top-ups for properties below 30Mbps. A reader who rings the number on that regional page expecting a council-endorsed satellite install is working from a prospectus about a decade out of date.

There is a further problem, and it is the one that should decide whether anybody follows a link to this domain at all. The home page now carries a paragraph of injected search-engine spam promoting cryptocurrency presales: "Satellite broadband enhances crypto transactions by providing high-speed, global connectivity... For investors exploring best crypto presales 2025, satellite technology ensures uninterrupted access to platforms". That is not marketing copy anyone at a telecoms company wrote. It is the signature of an unmaintained site that has been compromised or sold for links, and it is dated to 2025 by its own text. Several pages that would let a visitor check anything — the FAQs and the contact page among them — return a 403 error and cannot be read.

Where the satellite service actually went

Bigblu still sells satellite broadband to British households from a consumer site, and the continuity with Avonline is not a guess: the contact number is 01869 722 425, in the same Bicester dialling code as Avonline's 01869 222 895. The advertised offer on 4 October 2026 was £24.99 per month for "average speeds of 21 Mb/s" with an "uncapped, unlimited data allowance", and a 14-day risk-free cancellation period. Hardware and installation charges were not stated on the page, and the contract term was not either.

Priced against history, that is a reasonable deal and a sobering one. A household paying £19.95 in 2014 for a guaranteed 9Mbps minimum average now pays £24.99 for an advertised 21Mb/s average with no cap — roughly 25% more money for more than double the speed and no allowance to watch. Over twelve years that is barely a real-terms rise. But the ceiling has gone nowhere: 21Mb/s in 2026 is below the 24Mbps superfast line that Avonline's own 2016 release used as its benchmark, and well below the 30Mbps the brand was advertising when it was sold.

The corporate picture behind that offer needs stating plainly. On 4 October 2026 Companies House showed both Bigblu Services Limited and Bigblu Services Holding Ltd as "Active proposal to strike off". Neither has filed accounts since those for the period ending 30 November 2022, filed on 30 November 2023; accounts have been due since 30 November 2024. Bigblu Services Limited's last confirmation statement was dated 17 May 2024 with the next due 31 May 2025; the holding company's was dated 23 May 2024 with the next due 6 June 2025. A first Gazette notice for compulsory strike-off was published for Bigblu Services Limited on 28 January 2025 and that action was suspended on 14 March 2025, which is what a company does when it objects or starts filing again. The London Gazette holds 31 notices against the name across eighteen years.

A proposal to strike off is not insolvency and is not a closure. It usually means paperwork, and it was suspended once already. It is still the single most important thing to know before paying a deposit, and the clock is readable: anyone considering a two-year commitment can check the same status word on Companies House before they sign, for nothing, in a minute.

What satellite is for now, and what Ofcom will accept instead of a cable

The case for a dish has narrowed to a sharp point, and the regulator has drawn it. Ofcom's guidance on the right to request a decent broadband connection, published 8 August 2023 and last updated 19 June 2026, sets the floor at 10 Mbit/s download and 1 Mbit/s upload. If the only decent service available to a property costs more than £59.60 a month, the householder can request a connection instead. Where the cost of building or upgrading their share of the network is £3,400 or less, BT pays for the work — or KCOM in the Hull area. Above that figure, the customer covers the difference, and those bills have historically run into tens of thousands of pounds.

In July 2026 Ofcom confirmed that an available Starlink service can count as a decent alternative, which means a request can be refused on the strength of it. Trade reporting of Ofcom's January 2026 data put roughly 39,000 UK premises beyond the reach of decent fixed-line or fixed-wireless broadband — about 23,000 in England, 9,000 in Scotland, 6,000 in Wales and 1,500 in Northern Ireland. Those figures come from the trade press rather than from an Ofcom page this page could read directly, and are worth confirming with Ofcom before anyone relies on them.

Two things follow for a reader who arrived here looking for Avonline. First, a geostationary service of the kind Avonline sold — signal travelling 22,000 miles each way, with the latency that implies — is now the third choice rather than the first, behind fibre where it exists and behind low-orbit satellite where it does not. Second, the universal service route is free to try and is worth trying before buying any dish, because the same regulator that will accept satellite as an answer also obliges BT to spend up to £3,400 trying to avoid needing one.

The consumer protections a retired brand cannot give you

This is where the gap between satellite and the rest of the broadband market is widest, and it has nothing to do with Avonline's conduct. Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme pays £10.34 for every calendar day a fault goes unrepaired beyond two working days, £32.31 for a missed engineer appointment and £6.46 for each day a new service starts late, with the amounts rising annually with inflation. The scheme is voluntary, and exactly ten providers have signed it: BT, EE, Hyperoptic, Plusnet, Sky including NOW Broadband, TalkTalk, Utility Warehouse, Virgin Media, Vodafone and Zen Internet. No satellite provider is among them, and none ever has been. A rural customer therefore gets no automatic payment for the outage that the dish was bought to prevent.

The same pattern repeats in Ofcom's quarterly complaints tables, which name only providers above a market-share threshold. No satellite ISP is large enough to appear, so there is no published complaints rate for any of them — not a good one and not a bad one. That is an absence rather than an accusation, but it leaves a buyer with nothing comparable to check.

Telecoms providers must belong to an alternative dispute resolution scheme, which in this sector is CISAS, run by CEDR, or the Communications Ombudsman, reachable after eight weeks or on a deadlock letter. Which scheme covers the successor could not be established for this page: the terms and complaints pages on the Bigblu consumer site are blocked to automated reading, and nothing on the surviving Avonline pages names a scheme. It should be confirmed on the phone before signing anything. The practical backstops remain Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 for anything bought on credit above £100, and card chargeback below it.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 4 October 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.