Why Musk’s Starlink Can’t Help

After the volcanic eruption, nothing was heard from the inhabitants of Tonga for a few days. On Wednesday, the first telephone calls were possible again. The islanders will probably have to wait even longer for an Internet connection. According to the news agency Reuters it takes at least a month to repair the one undersea cable that carries data signals back and forth between the archipelago and the rest of the world.

People in remote regions of the world who are cut off from the internet – tech companies have been addressing this problem for a long time. Now, if the cables don’t work, can’t Internet satellites just step in? For example Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites? Shane Reti, a New Zealand MP, asked the same question. He published a letter on his Twitter account that he sent to the tech entrepreneur.

In this he asks if Mr. Musk could perhaps take care of the problem and set up an emergency connection through his company’s Starlink satellites. But that’s not as easy as it seems.

Elon Musk interprets the problem in his reply to: “We don’t have enough satellites with laser links.” These laser links, from which the company name Starlink is derived, are to form the Starlink network in the future: The information is to be transmitted by light signals – in the vacuum between the satellites, which orbit the entire earth like a rotating network.

Starlink hopes to one day offer faster Internet connections than are possible with undersea cables. But there are still some pieces of the puzzle missing.

How Starlink should work in the future

One day, data will be transmitted over Starlink in three main steps: first, by radio, from the ground to the satellite; then via laser link between the satellites. And in the third step back to the ground by radio from the last satellite.

How Starlink Internet will one day work

Schematically demonstrated by sending a message via Whatsapp from Zurich to Mumbai

Starlink is not that far yet. Because many of the satellites that the program has already sent into orbit lack the ability to link to each other. Professor Ankit Singla, who works on network systems at the ETH, explains the reason for this when asked by the NZZ. The technology required for communication between satellites via laser was only just mature and was therefore not ready fast enough to be on board the first Starlink satellites. In order to be able to cover the world well with just a laser connection, a dense network of satellites that can communicate with each other via laser would be necessary.

The system is still based on ground stations

In order to still be able to offer Internet connections, as Starlink has been doing in some regions of the world since autumn, the company has come up with an interim solution. In this, the data does not travel back and forth between the satellites, but always uses intermediate stations on earth, which are networked with cable Internet. So the data is put in the right place in a kind of ping-pong involving ground stations and satellites, as Mark Handley, a professor at University College London, illustrates in this video.

Thanks to this trick, customers in Europe, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Chile can already surf with a Starlink connection. To do this, they need a user terminal that they install at home. This works because there are enough ground stations in these areas. Only if a Starlink satellite can “see” a ground station and a user terminal at the same time can it network the two. Ankit Singla estimates that there should be a maximum of around 1000 kilometers between the two locations.

User terminals could be delivered to Tonga without major problems. But the nearest ground stations are only in Australia and New Zealand (there is an interactive world map here). Their transmission radius does not extend far enough to connect users in Tonga to the network via just one satellite.

It would therefore be necessary to have several satellites with the laser function, which could pass on the signal. Providing this would probably not be impossible for Starlink, but it would probably take longer than repairing the cable. In his reply via Twitter, Musk points out that there are already “geo-satellites” in the Tonga area and suggests that they might be a better solution.

In fact, it was Musk’s space company SpaceX that put into orbit this other breed of Internet satellites, namely geo-stationary satellites from vendor “Kacific.”

Alternative solution blocked by litigation

Geo-stationary satellites are orbited in such a way that they follow the Earth’s rotation and thus always hover over the same part of the globe. They are more than 35,000 kilometers above the surface of the earth, so much further away than Starlink’s. These hover only about 500 kilometers above the earth’s surface. The greater distance to earth makes connection via systems like Kacific much slower than cable Internet or Starlink. But for an emergency like this, they are most likely the better solution.

According to the technology portal ZDnet The state of Tonga worked out a 15-year contract with Kacific back in 2019 when undersea cables were damaged and the island was offline for 12 days. However, the contract was never activated due to an arbitration process. The company’s managing director, Christian Patouraux, signaled after the volcanic eruption that the company was ready to activate the contract at any time. “We have a simple message for the Tongan government. We can help. Please get in touch.” The portal quoted him as saying.