Supporting SpaceX Starlink in remote communities

What sorts of support will Starlink customers require? The Chilean pilot study might provide some clues.

Five companies are developing low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband satellite constellations, but, as of now, only SpaceX is planning to market directly to consumers. What sorts of support will they require? A pilot study of Starlink connectivity in remote Chilean communities may provide some answers to that question. 

The Chilean regulator, SUBTEL, has authorized a year-long pilot study of Starlink connectivity in remote, rural communities and is committed to supporting them during the year. In an earlier post, I speculated on the applications the communities might want, and in this one, I'll speculate on the sorts of support they will require, but to set the stage, we need to know what the communities are like.

Sotomó, the first pilot site, is in a forested area on a fjord in southern Chile and twenty families live in the town. While Sotomó is only about 35 miles from the nearest airport in Puerto Montt, the trip takes about three hours driving or driving plus a ferry ride. The second pilot site is in Caleta Sierra on the coast about 1,200 miles north of Sotomó and SUBTEL says there will be others.

A diesel generator supplies power 12 hours a day during the winter and 8 during the summer in Sotomó and they have "patchy" cell phone coverage, but it is used mainly for calls and text since data is expensive. Still, the people have had mobile Internet experience and therefore have some familiarity with Internet services and applications.

Elon Musk quipped that Starlink setup is simple -- plug it in and point it at the sky, in either order. He didn't mention the part about requiring a clear view of the sky and antenna installation and cabling may be difficult. In Sotomó the Starlink terminal is at the school, headed by professor Javier de la Barr. Someone had to attach the antenna to the roof of the schoolhouse where the terminal is located and run a cable to a WiFi access point in the building. A clinic shares the building with the school and they may have run a cable into the clinic. 

The Starlink connection gives the users access to online storage, but many applications -- like interactive courseware -- will have to be stored on a local server that would have to be acquired, configured, operated, and maintained. Since each test site will need a similar local-area network (LAN) and server, they can jointly agree on a standard configuration, setup, and operating procedures. 

Professor de la Barra and his counterparts in Caleta Sierra and other test sites in Chile and other nations will be able to share experience and ideas using the collaboration-support tools and services on the Internet and that may require some training or setting up some application to facilitate their collaboration.

For now, Sotomó has just one terminal in a single building, but if demand grows they may want to create a community LAN, which will require establishing wired or wireless links between buildings and perhaps integrating multiple Starlink accounts.If they decide to connect multiple buildings, they should also evaluate the offerings of Starlink competitors OneWeb and Telesat which plan to be offering service in 2022.

The above sounds like a job for a part-time system administrator -- someone local who will need training initially and subsequent online support as needed. For the pilot study, that training and support may be provided by SpaceX, SUBTEL, or the regional government. The system administrators will also be able to help each other.

Application training and support will also be needed. For example, an educational consultant specializing in online teaching and curriculum development or a consultant familiar with online medical resources and services and experience in telemedicine may be able to help Professor de la Barra and the clinic staff. These specialists would be available for consultation, to recommend Internet services, training resources, databases, etc, and to facilitate collaboration and experience sharing among the community of users -- teachers and nurses -- in their area. 

The community members are users, not developers, and during the course of the pilot year application software will have to be written. For example, community members will want to download software, educational material, entertainment, news, etc. Since the community will be sharing a single link to the Internet, that will require a system for requesting and queuing material for subsequent unattended download to the local server. The scheduling-downloading system will have to be designed and programmed. That is one example of supporting software that will be required, but my guess is that community members will come up with others during the pilot year -- perhaps in support of teaching, remote health care, or for Sotomó's local industries -- aquaculture, tourism, and farming.

Antennas and hard drives will occasionally break and if Internet access catches on, they may be able to justify more fuel for the current community generator or a dedicated generator at the schoolhouse -- one more thing to support.

LEO broadband ISPs will be serving remote, hard-to-reach locations like Sotomó and each operator will have to deal with the mundane issue of support. SpaceX plans to sell directly to end-users and if Starlink succeeds, there may be 50 or 100 communities like Sotomó in Chile and thousands around the world. User and system administrator support groups will form and be valuable, but SpaceX will have to play a role in support. I've offered some guesses as to the kinds of support that will be needed and we will learn more about what remote communities need during this pilot study.

Update 9/13/2021

For a lightly edited Microsoft Translate version of this post in Spanish, click here. Please give feedback on translation errors.

How will rural Chileans use SpaceX Starlink?

How will the people in the test towns use the Internet during this year-long pilot study and how will it impact individuals and organizations?

Sotomó is 3-5 hours by boat and car from the nearest airport.

The Chilean Undersecretary of Telecommunications (SUBTEL) has begun a year-long pilot study of SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet service. I don't know how many test locations they are planning, but the first two have been selected. Last week I discussed the first, the John F. Kennedy school in Sotomó, an isolated town at 41.6° South on a fjord in Chile's Lake Region, and the second will be in Caleta Sierra on the coast about 1,200 miles north of Sotomó. SpaceX is also considering a European pilot study in Georgia and perhaps (hopefully) others.

These pilot studies provide an opportunity to learn what applications the people in a newly connected, remote location want and use and to study the impact of the Internet on individuals, organizations, and society in the community. 

In the early days of the Internet, my colleagues and I used a six-dimension framework for assessing its state in developing nations and one of those dimensions was sectoral absorption -- the extent to which the Internet was being used for business, education, health care, public administration, and, after an interview with a wise Indian professor, I added entertainment.

The Starlink terminal in Sotomó is installed in a school building, so the first application will be grammar school education. The children have already begun using online educational material and when the teacher in charge of the Kennedy school Javier de la Barra was asked how he saw the school using the Internet link he replied that, among other things, he looked forward to using it for professional development. 

While a single Starlink connection cannot support simultaneous interactive online education for an entire community, downloadable interactive material like that of Learning Equality and other recorded educational material (broadly defined) can be downloaded and served locally. It will be interesting to see what educational material is accessed during the year of the pilot study, who accesses it, and what they think of its value.

I spoke with Claudio Fuentes whose family operates a summer resort and an aquaculture farm in Sotomó. He is now a professor in Wales but returns to Sotomó every year and spent all his summers there before moving to Europe. One of the things he told me was that there is also a clinic at the schoolhouse. Starlink will enable medical information retrieval, remote medical consultation, and telemedicine and, like professor de la Barra, people working at the clinic can use the Internet for professional development. 

Business is another one of the sectors we measured and professor Fuentes told me that the two major businesses in Sotomó are small tourist resorts and aquaculture -- raising baby mussel "seeds" for sale to other aquafarmers and raising adult mussels. His family does both and they have a simple Web site for their resort and can communicate with customers and suppliers using mobile phones, but he says mobile data is very expensive for the people of Sotomó and they mainly use their phones to communicate with each other. Furthermore, de la Barra says the signal is patchy and residents get on their phones by leaning out windows or paddling out into the bay. Might a fast, stable Internet connection enable a resort to maintain an elaborate Web site and reservation system? Might a mussel farmer search for and talk with suppliers and customers and find information on research and techniques in the field?

In addition to operating procedures, one can envision both businesses and the general population using the Internet to retrieve government information and file taxes, apply for licenses and conduct other government transactions.

With only a single Internet link, individual entertainment, like educational material, will mostly be downloaded -- movies, telenovelas, games, etc. I suspect that a robust "sneakernet" will develop offline with people exchanging files on flash drives. This can be done within a community like Sotomó or on a wider scale. The foremost example I know of is El Paquete Semanal, a weekly package of entertainment, news, software, etc. that circulates throughout Cuba. El Paquete might be Cuba's largest private employer and you can see the contents of a typical week here. 

While most entertainment will be downloaded, there may be occasions for community viewing outside of school hours, for example, watching soccer games on weekends or streaming movies to a large display during the evenings.

When we did our early Internet studies, we totally overlooked the potential of the Internet as a news medium -- there were few online papers and magazines and no blogs or social media at the time. It will be interesting to see what news sources the community decides to download and make available. This is particularly important at this time since Chile is undergoing heated political debate and a new constitution is being written. The constraint of limited connectivity might be an advantage in the case of news since personal, interactive social media, a major source of division and false information, will not be practical. Instead, the community will have to agree on a slate of downloaded news sources and that process in itself might lead to positive dialog.

I've speculated on some possible applications we might see in Sotomó and the other pilot cities -- the services and content they may produce and consume. I am sure there will be others I have not thought of -- Sotomó is not Los Angeles. The most important things we will learn are how, after a year, the people have used the Internet and how it has impacted individuals and organizations in the test towns.

Update 8/25/2021

For a lightly-edited Spanish language version of this post, click here.

SpaceX Starlink comes to South America

This one-year pilot study in rural Chile will be productive and successful.

Starlink antenna on the roof of the
John F. Kennedy school

SpaceX has roughly 90,000 Starlink beta test customers in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand and now they have one in South America --  in Sotomó, an isolated town at 41.6° South in Chile's Lake Region. Chile's second terminal will be online at a school in Caleta Sierra in a few days and other pilot locations will follow.  

Twenty families live in Sotomó and it is only accessible by private boats or subsidized services that navigate the Reloncaví Estuary on which it is located. The town has electricity about 12 hours a day thanks to a diesel generator installed by the Lake Region government in 2019. 

Javier de la Barra, the teacher in charge of the seven-student John F. Kennedy school where the terminal has been installed, said the service will be available to community members as well as students. Tablets are being provided for the students and he expects Internet connectivity will enrichen and improve the curriculum and student experience and, perhaps more important, he expects that it will improve his ability as an educator.

The John F. Kennedy school in Sotomó

My first reaction was that that sounds like a lot to expect from a single 1-200 Mbps Internet connection, but then I remembered that this a school with seven students and a teacher who is motivated to improve his ability as an educator. Add a local-area network with a server for downloaded courseware like that of the Khan Academy or other teaching material and provide technical and pedagogic support and this sounds like a promising pilot project. It will be most interesting to see what sort of procedures, software and curricular innovation is developed around a single link to the Internet and if it is replicated, by the online community of educators like Javier de la Barra.

Furthermore, speed and latency will improve with time as SpaceX upgrades its software and, in the long run, the satellite constellation. My guess is that the first equipment upgrade will be a new generator or larger diesel fuel tank so they can be online, perhaps downloading content, more than 12 hours a day.

It will also be interesting to hear how the community members use their access. I don't know anything about the Sotomó economy so can't speculate on business applications, but there is at least one tourism business, Termas de Sotomó (Sotomó Hot Springs), which already has a Web site. (Perhaps it uses a geosynchronous satellite ISP). In addition to business applications, I'll bet a lot of movies and other entertainment content will be downloaded and a thriving sneaker net -- sharing files on flash drives -- will evolve. How long will it be before someone develops a system that takes requests for unattended downloads?  (For an idea of the breadth of material that can circulate on a sneakernet, see this look at the contents of one week of Cuba's "weekly package").

In the early days of the Internet, my colleagues and I studied its diffusion and application in developing nations, including Chile. Sotomó and other pilots present us with a fresh opportunity to study the applications and social and individual impact of today's Internet on a new, "greenfield" community.

At the time of our early studies, Chile was arguably the most advanced networking nation in Latin America and Chile's GDP per capita is second only to Uraguay in South America and 50% greater than that of third-place Argentina. Furthermore, the government and telecommunications industry recognize Chile's significant digital divide and are committed to rectifying it. (This was not lost on SpaceX -- they established a Chilean foreign affiliate company in July 2019). Given that background, I would not be surprised to see SpaceX Starlink become part of Chile's future rural connectivity infrastructure.

The opening ceremony for the Sotomó project was attended by the Chilean Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hutt, who said:

The arrival of Starlink in Sotomó marks a before-and-after in terms of digital inclusion for our country. This revolutionary technology will allow us to bring high-speed connection to the most extreme points of our immense and varied geography, democratizing internet access and all the benefits it brings in favor of multiple areas of our lives.

That statement is reminiscent of the rosy vision that many, including me, had in the early, academic years of the Internet, but we were naive. We have since learned that the Internet enables Nigerian princes, fake news, filter bubbles, etc. along with the good stuff.

Chilean prosperity, combined with economic inequality (the Chilean Gini coefficient is fourth highest in South America), has led to violent protests and deep political division. Chile should heed the experience of the United States and other nations and be aware of the social and political risks that may attend enhanced rural connectivity.

I don't want to end on a negative note. As Minister Hutt pointed out, rural connectivity and reduction of the digital divide, will in itself diminish the economic and cultural inequality at the heart of Chilean unrest.

Update 8/11/2021

I spoke with someone from Sotomó today and learned that there is also a clinic in the school building -- paving the way for medical information retrieval, remote medical consultation, and telemedicine.

Update 8/20/2021

For a lightly edited machine translation of this post into Spanish, click here and let me know of corrections to the translation.