Two years ago, communities across Northwest Alaska woke to find that they had no internet or cellphone service. A mammoth piece of arctic sea ice had scraped the ocean floor 34 miles north of Oliktok Point, cutting a fiber optic cable buried 13 feet underground, below about 90 feet of water. Overnight, residents suddenly couldn’t withdraw money from ATMs, set up doctors appointments or call 911.
It would take 14 weeks for the cable to be repaired, but by then, Eben Hopson, a photographer in Utqiagvik, had already made the jump to Starlink — a satellite internet option from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
“It’s been a game changer,” Hopson tells me. “You bring a Starlink dish out there and plug it in. Two minutes later, you’ve got the whole world again in the palm of your hand.”
Starlink has kicked off a race to low-Earth orbit, or LEO — the sweet spot in the skies where satellite providers can beam down fast, low-latency internet to people like Hopson. When it launched in 2019, Starlink was joining around 2,000 satellites in the entire sky; an article published in Nature in 2020 determined that 100,000 satellites in the sky by 2030 is “not just feasible but quite likely.”
I’ve heard stories like Hopson’s a lot in my seven years reporting on the broadband industry and its technology. People in rural areas often tell me they have no internet options in their area — or crappy ones at best. Starlink essentially handed over a time machine and fast forwarded people in those places from 2005 to 2025 overnight. But as with any major technology shift there are potential consequences.
Starlink’s horde of satellites have contributed significantly to making space a perilously busy place. Scientists have been ringing alarm bells about the unintended consequences for the ozone layer, astronomical research and a sky cluttered with space junk — from decades of rocket launches and satellite deployments that have only increased in recent years — that poses a threat to internet providers like Starlink itself.
For as long as the internet’s been around, there have been those who can access and afford a speedy internet connection and those who can’t. This gap is referred to as the digital divide, with rural areas often being stuck with few (or just plain bad) options.
It’s an ironic twist: The satellites that we’re becoming so dependent on to help bridge this gap could be their own downfall.
How Starlink has helped close the digital divide
Most of us take our internet for granted. Like electricity, it’s part of our monthly budget, and we only really think about it when it goes out. In 1930, nearly nine in 10 urban and nonfarm rural homes had access to electricity, but only about one in 10 farms did. The gap isn’t quite as wide with internet, but the analogy holds: In 2019, the year Starlink launched its first satellites, 67% of rural Americans had access to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 10Mbps, compared to 98% in urban areas.
“There’s really no comparison,” Edwin Walker, a retired electrical engineer in Chattaroy, Washington, tells me about his previous internet options. “We get 100 or 200 megabits per second downloads [with Starlink] and it’s reliable.” Walker says he had been getting around 10 to 20Mbps from his old provider.
Rural areas have been the last to get high-speed internet because of the prohibitive costs associated with installing fiber-optic lines to sparsely populated areas.
“Fiber is great, but our cost estimates show somewhere around $120 [thousand] to $130,000 per location just to connect it with fiber,” Kevin Lyons, a spokesperson for the Texas Comptroller, says about rural areas in West Texas. “You’re spending all that money to put in fiber — either on poles or on the ground — and the household may not even adopt it.”
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It’s not a stretch to say Starlink revolutionized internet access in rural America seemingly overnight. The satellite internet company was launched in 2015 by SpaceX and has been a personal project of the tech billionaire. Its satellite dishes are about the size of a pizza box and can connect anywhere with a clear view of the sky. Starlink also debuted its Mini dish last summer, which is designed for internet on the go.
Starlink has grown to around 1.4 million subscribers in the US and 4 million globally since its debut in 2021. That’s only 1% of all internet connections in the country. That number might not sound noteworthy, but the homes that Starlink serves have been in the most stubbornly difficult-to-connect pockets of the country.
Starlink has also ushered in a new era for our skies. When SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, there were only around 2,000 operational satellites in the entire sky. Today, that number has grown to over 11,000 — nearly 7,000 of which belong to Starlink. SpaceX has said it hopes to eventually grow the number to 42,000.
Starlink is starting to be joined by competitors too. Amazon’s Project Kuiper plans to launch its first operational satellites in early 2025 and has permission from the Federal Communications Commission to deploy as many as 3,236 satellites.
“It’s not just about Starlink. It’s about everybody who wants to operate in space,” says Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton. “I do not think that we can operate the number of spacecraft safely that we have now, let alone the numbers that are coming down the pipeline.”
Starlink didn’t respond to CNET’s request for comment on this story.
Starlink has been a game changer in rural areas
The truth is, most people in the US don’t need Starlink. The most recent FCC data shows that 90% of addresses are served by cable or fiber internet, which is significantly faster and cheaper than Starlink. But for that remaining 10%, it’s proven to be a godsend.
Maine has the second-highest percentage of residents living in rural areas of any state, with many of them living in exceptionally remote places.
“The nature of population density in Maine is such that it drops so quickly,” says Brian Allenby, senior director with the Maine Connectivity Authority. “When you’re down to one or two locations per mile, LEO service really is the most cost-effective.”
Source: Ookla
