Mobile and Internet users in Spain and Portugal turned to Elon Musk’s interstellar link on record numbers on Monday as the Iberian Peninsula exposed widespread power outages in telecommunications networks.
According to data analyzed by the Financial Times, when telecommunications coverage in both countries declined, the use of Starlink satellite communications services rose by 35%. Spain's usage rate is 60% higher than Tuesday's average as mobile networks struggle to recover speeds.
According to Ookla's Luke Kehoe, data provided by Internet Access analyst Ookla shows that the country uses "records" using "thousands of people" using Starlink's "records", although the company refuses to provide exact figures about usage.
He added that as more users turn to services, the quality of the Stars and Stripe link coverage has declined, but has not been cut during the power outage. While some Starlink ground stations in mainland Spain may have lost service, there may be connections with websites in other countries, such as Italy.
However, in any similar power outage in the future, satellite coverage will not be able to provide coverage to millions of users extensively enough. Users need to charge on their mobile device to access the service.
Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica said it did not know the exact cause of the blackout, and some experts were related to the fact that the Spanish grid was unable to manage unusually high solar supplies.
Traditional mobile coverage in Spain and Portugal has been severely affected by power outages, leading to calls for more resilient mobile networks in Spain.
Ookla found that network consistency is an indicator of service reliability, with normal interest rates dropping in half on Monday afternoon.
This is how many of Spain's thousands of mobile antennas are knocked down by power losses, and only those who are alternately generated run.
"Too many people try to get too few resources. That's why it's hard to get connectivity during the recovery phase," explained Claudio Fiandrino, a researcher at the IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid.
Telecommunications networks often have backup generation at certain sites, but use restrictions.
Vodafone España said the backup generator was already 70% of Spain when the power outage began. But by 11 p.m., mobile traffic remains low in many areas, including Galicia, Castilla Lamancha and Murcia, with coverage of only 20%.
Telefónica, another large provider, said during the power outage that “prioritizing emergency services and critical infrastructure for hospitals by rationalizing resource utilization”, recovering 95% of its mobile network in just 24 hours, will be "completely normal" by Thursday.
Ookla's Kehoe said Spain and Portugal are "not unique in terms of the existence of no large number of battery backup generators in the mobile site grid".
In the UK, a recent Ofcom report found that about two-thirds of the UK can call for at least an hour due to backup generation of about one-fifth of mast sites.
However, less than 5% of these sites have a backup facility for at least 6 hours. OFCOM found that upgrading the mobile network costs about £1 billion to ensure four hours of access to everyone.
According to a February report, the telecom company told OFCOM that the cost of providing backups is "outdated".
Telecom in Spain and Portugal runs with "very tight profits" because the prices are too low, Kehoe said. This makes elastic investments more difficult than Nordics, for example, with higher average income per user and more powerful backup generation.
Although the scale of the power outage in Spain is different from anything the country has experienced before, the growing extreme weather events have prompted the government to focus more on the resilience of telecom networks.
In Norway, operators must fund two hours of battery backup in cities and four hours of rural areas. Australia has provided operators with publicly funded grants to provide 12-hour battery backups to sites in certain remote areas.
Grace Nelson, an analyst at the British research firm Assembly Research, said the cause of the power outage in Spain is still undetermined, but its scale may be "a call on governments and regulators to pay attention to resilience".
Other reports by Kieran Smith