Unlock the publisher’s digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Spanish and Portuguese mobile and Portuguese internet users turned to Elon Musk Starlink in record number on Monday, as a widespread power outage on the Iberian Peninsula exposed vulnerabilities in telecommunications networks.
The use of the Starlink satellite communication service increased by 35 hundred above average when telecommunications coverage dropped in the two countries, according to data analyzed by the Financial Times. The use was 60% higher in Spain than the average on Tuesday, while mobile networks had trouble recovering.
The data provided by Internet access analyst Ookla showed Starlink’s “recorded” use in the country with “thousands” of people using the service, according to Luke Kehoe of Ookla, although the company has refused to provide exact figures on use.
The quality of the Starlink coverage fell while more and more users turned to service, but it did not cut during the power failure, he added. While some Ground Starlink stations in continental Spain may have lost services, connections were possible at sites from other countries like Italy.
However, it is unlikely that satellite coverage will be widespread enough to provide coverage for millions of users at any event of similar power in the future. Users need sufficient loads in mobile devices to access the service.
The operator of the Spanish network Red Eléctrica said that he did not know the exact cause of the failure, that some experts have linked to the inability of the Spanish electricity network to manage an unusual solar energy supply.
The traditional mobile coverage in Spain and Portugal was seriously affected by the power failure, which causes calls to make the Spanish mobile network more resilient.
The consistency of the network, a metric of the reliability of the services, fell as low as half of its normal rate on Monday afternoon, revealed Ookla.
This came, because many of the thousands of mobile antennas across Spain were eliminated by the loss of power, leaving only those with a generation of emergency operating.
“Too many people were trying to access too little resources. This is why during the recovery phase, it was difficult to obtain stable connectivity, “said Claudio Fiandrino, researcher from Imdea Networks Institute in Madrid.
Telecommunications networks frequently have a backup generation on certain sites, but there are limits to their use.
Vodafone España said that rescue generators had started 70% of its sites in Spain at the start of the breakdown. But at 11 p.m., many regions still had low levels of mobile traffic, with regions such as Galicia, Castilla La Mancha and Murcia having only 20% coverage.
Telefónica, another large supplier, said that it “prioritized critical infrastructure for emergency services and hospitals by rationalizing the use of resources” during power outages, restoring 95% of its mobile network in just over 24 hours and “total normality”.
Kehoe d’Ookla said that Spain and Portugal are “not unique in terms of significant non-presence of rescue generators in the mobile site grid”.
In the United Kingdom, a recent OFCOM report revealed that for short current failures, about two-thirds of the United Kingdom would be able to make emergency calls for at least an hour, thanks to the safeguard generation for about a fifth of mast sites.
But less than five percent of these sites have backup installations of at least 6 hours. It would cost about 1 billion sterling pounds to improve mobile networks to guarantee four hours of access to contact emergency services for almost all people, discovered OFCOM.
Telecommunications companies have told ofcom that the safeguard supply costs are “prohibitive”, according to February report.
Spanish and Portuguese telecommunications companies work on “very tight margins” because the prices are so low, Kehoe said. This makes investment in resilience more difficult than in the Nordic, for example, where the average revenues by user is higher and where the safeguard generation is stronger.
While the extent of the Spanish breakdown was different from everything the country has known before, the increase in extreme weather events encourages governments to focus more on the resilience of telecommunications networks.
In Norway, operators must finance the two -hour battery backup in cities and four hours in rural areas. Australia has introduced subsidies funded by the state so that operators provide 12 hours of battery backup to sites in certain distant regions.
The causes of the Spanish breakdown remain indeterminate, but its scale is probably “a buzzer call to government and regulators to pay attention to resilience,” said Grace Nelson, analyst at Assembly Research, a research company based in the United Kingdom.
Additional report by Kieran Smith
