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Spanish and Portuguese mobile users and internet users relied on Elon Musk’s Starlink with record numbers on Monday as a widespread power outage on the Iberian Peninsula revealed vulnerabilities in their communications networks.
Data analyzed by the Financial Times shows that use of the Starlink Satellite Communications Service rose on an average of 35 cents as coverage fell in both countries. Spain had 60% higher usage than Tuesday’s average as mobile networks struggled to get back to speed.
According to Luke Kehoe of Ookla, the data provided by Internet access analyst Ookla showed that “thousands of people” using the service had “recorded” in the country, but the company refused to provide accurate numbers regarding its use.
The quality of Starlink coverage fell as more users turned to service, but it was not cut off during a blackout, he added. Some of the above-ground stations at Starlink on mainland Spain may have lost service, but connections to sites from other countries such as Italy were possible.
However, it is unlikely that a similar blackout event in the future will result in wide enough satellite coverage to provide coverage to millions of users. Users needed sufficient charging to access the service.
Spanish grid operator Red Electrica says it doesn’t know the exact cause of the outage. This is related to the inability to manage very high solar power generation in Spain.
Traditional mobile coverage in Spain and Portugal has been strongly affected by the effects of power outages, calling for Spanish mobile networks to be more resilient.
Network consistency, a service reliability metric, fell to half the normal Monday afternoon, Ookla found.
This was only caused by people who had many thousands of mobile antennas across Spain being knocked out by loss of power, with backup generation running.
“Too many people were trying to access it because they had too few resources, so it was difficult to stabilize connectivity during the recovery phase,” explained Claudio Fiandrino, a researcher at the IMDEA Network Institute in Madrid.
Telecom Networks frequently generate backups at some sites, but their use is limited.
Vodafone España said the backup generator kicked in on 70% of Spanish sites when the outage began. However, by 11pm, the levels of mobile traffic in many regions were still low, with only 20% coverage in areas such as Galicia, Castila La Mancha and Murcia.
Another large provider, Telefónica, said that “by streamlining resource use, it prioritizes critical infrastructure for emergency services and hospitals, and will restore 95% of mobile networks within more than 24 hours and “full normalcy” by Thursday.
Ookla’s Kehoe said Spain and Portugal are “not unique in that there is a significant lack of battery backup generators in the mobile site grid.”
In the UK, a recent report from Ofcom found that in short power outages, about two-thirds of the UK can make emergency calls at least an hour thanks to the approximately one-fifth of the backup generation of the Mast site.
However, less than 5% of these sites have a backup facility for at least 6 hours. It would cost around £1 billion to upgrade its mobile network and ensure four-hour access to contact emergency services for almost everyone, Ofcom found.
The telecom company told Ofcom that the cost of providing backups was “banned,” according to February. Report.
Spanish and Portuguese telecoms operate at “very tight margins” due to their very low prices, Kehoe said. This makes resilience investments more difficult than in Scandinavia, for example when average revenue per user is high and backup production is strong.
The scale of the Spain outage was different from what we had experienced before, but the rise in extreme weather events has led the government to concentrate more on the resilience of its communications networks.
In Norway, operators need to fund two hours of battery backups in cities and four hours of rural areas. Australia has introduced public funding grants to operators to provide 12-hour battery backups to some remote sites.
Grace Nelson, an analyst at Assembly Research, a UK-based research firm, said the cause of the power outages in Spain remains undecided, but its size is likely “Clarion’s call to ensure governments and regulators pay attention to resilience.”
Additional Reports by Kieran Smith
