Initially, I wrote this for my newsletter Zero Retries 0063 (will publish Friday 2022-09-09 at 15:30 Pacific), but to avoid "Starlink isn't Amateur Radio fatigue" in the Zero Retries readership, I decided to move the article here and reference it in Zero Retries 0063 as optional reading. I believe that Starlink is poised to become a significant influence on Amateur Radio’s traditional role of providing emergency communications, thus this discussion is appropriate for an Amateur Radio audience.
I believe that by the end of 2023, every Emergency Operations Center (EOC) will have Starlink installed and have it set up as failover Internet. This includes not just local, regional, state, and national EOCs, but private defacto EOCs such as electrical suppliers, natural gas suppliers, water distribution, grocery retailers, trucking companies, healthcare… even garbage removal. Not to mention centers of information such as National Weather Service (NWS) offices, United States Geological Survey (USGS), airports, etc. In short, Starlink is poised to become the emergency Internet. In short, if it matters in an emergency, it will have Starlink connectivity. And the converse is true: in an emergency, if it doesn’t have Starlink… that facility / organization won’t matter (in managing the emergency).
That includes Mobile Command Centers (MCCs). I predict that by end of 2023, every MCC will have a “Starlink for RVs” unit installed. (Never mind that Starlink currently doesn’t offer a “mobile” unit - someone, or Starlink, will figure out how to make one optimized for mobile use because the market for that use case is enormous.) One attraction for doing so is that Starlink service can be suspended, and reactivated, via a web page, thus during the months that a mobile command center is unused, it’s not burning up the $135/month (retail) usage fee.
Tom Evslin makes this case in his article Every First Responder HQ in Vermont Needs Two Portable Starlink Dishes:
When tropical storm Irene lashed Vermont eleven years ago, many towns became islands. The roads and bridges to them were gone. Some towns were also cutoff from all communications. The poles that brought them electricity, phone, and some Internet service (if they had any) were gone. Cellular towers were blown down, lost their own wired connections to the communications backbone, and/or ran out of diesel fuel for their backup generators. repair crews did a fabulous job; but they couldn’t be everywhere at once – and some places were simply inaccessible to the trucks for weeks.
Some cut off towns sent couriers out on foot to get emergency medicine or arrange helicopter evacuations of sick and injured people. Sometimes people found there was one hill they could drive to and get spotty cellular coverage as long as they had enough gas to get there and run the car to keep the cellphones charged.
No matter what weather or catastrophe hits us in the future, there is no excuse for ever losing communications again. The difference is the ready availability of satellite communication. Satellites circling 200 miles above us and powered by solar power obviously aren’t affected by whatever terrestrial problem afflicts us. As long as first responders have some source of 110-volt power and a view of the northern sky, they can keep on communicating during and after a storm or other catastrophe.
To be clear, wireline (especially fiber), fixed wireless, and cellular will all continue to be primary methods of broadband Internet access… when they are available. But all three of those methods of broadband Internet access (eventually) fail when there is loss of grid power and especially physical damage to infrastructure. Examples: hurricanes, loss of the Texas power grid last winter, wildfires, etc.
We haven’t seen this movement quite yet because:
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Budget cycles for most organizations are annual; Starlink wasn’t a significant factor in time for 2022 budgets submitted in 2021.
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Starlink has only matured as reasonably usable in 2022 with two key capabilities - Starlink Business (higher bandwidth and reliability) and Starlink for RVs (nomadic capability).
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In 2021, Starlink’s long term reliability and usability remained to be proven.
Why won’t anything that doesn’t have Starlink connectivity matter? Because once there’s a critical mass of Starlink users in emergency situations, the Broadband Internet capabilities of Starlink will quickly become the expected norm. Emergency managers will expect communications to just keep working - VOIP, email, websites for information dispersal (weather, wind), and especially video. Any communications system that can’t “keep up” with the reliability and usability (and relatively low cost) of Starlink just won’t be considered useful.
Will Starlink become saturated like what occurred with the early Iridium system? The “extreme test case” of the war in Ukraine, where there’s probably the most intense use of Starlink in the world, is evidence that despite intensive regional use, Starlink will remain usable. Starlink is sophisticated enough that it could, if needed, prioritize users. In fact, it’s already doing so with the offering of Starlink Business:
With a higher gain antenna, additional throughput allocation, and better extreme weather performance, Starlink Business helps ensure bandwidth for critical operations 24/7.
One of the primary attractions of Starlink, versus Amateur Radio, is that you don’t need (Amateur Radio) specialists and their licenses to use Amateur Radio spectrum. Starlink providing broadband Internet is “just another Information Technology (IT) function, and every organization already has IT specialists on staff or quickly on call. Unlike previous satellite communications systems, Starlink’s self-aiming capability doesn’t cost a premium of thousands of dollars, so “specialist installation” isn’t needed.
Starlink has not sought this role, but it’s rapidly proven that it’s usable in such extreme situations because of its highly visible use in the war in Ukraine. A recent article in the Kyiv Independent - How Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet keeps Ukraine online provides a testament to Starlink’s usability and reliability:
Among the Ukrainian military, Elon Musk, the richest tech entrepreneur in the U.S., is often half-jokingly referred to as “Saint Elon.”
The reason is Starlink, Musk’s satellite communication system that keeps many Ukrainians, most importantly the military, online despite power outages and Russia’s attacks on the country's internet infrastructure.
Starlink allows access to the internet even during power outages or in the absence of other internet infrastructure. It is also more secure than other types of communication: Experts say that it’s nearly impossible for Russian troops to intercept.
Lastly, I suspect that Starlink for RVs, or just the existence of Starlink in general, combined with the corporate sponsorships and the abundance of IT professionals with time on their hands, will “supercharge” Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC) in the next few years. ITDRC’s tagline is “America's premier team of volunteer technology professionals - Connecting Communities in Crisis” Think of ITDRC as ARES, but showing up with Starlink, lots of Ethernet cable, and Wi-Fi units instead of Amateur radios.
I asked a friend with experience in Amateur Radio and operating Emergency Operations Centers and Mobile Command Centers for feedback on this article and their primary feedback was that Starlink does work as I describe, especially in the field… but for EOCs and MCCs, the monthly billing is a major pain point, requiring approval paperwork to be submitted every month. It would make their life much simpler if Starlink offered an annual billing plan.
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA
Portions Copyright © 2022 by Steven K. Stroh