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Spanish and Portuguese mobile users and the Internet addressed the Elon Musk Starlink on the record numbers on Monday, as a widespread electricity break in the Iberian Peninsula exposed weaknesses in telecommunications networks.
The use of Starlink satellite communication service increased by 35 cents above average when telecommunications coverage fell to both countries, according to data analyzed by the Financial Times. Use was 60 percent higher in Spain than average on Tuesday, as mobile networks fought to return rapidly.
Data provided by Internet access analyst Ookla showed the “record” use of Starlink in the country with “thousands” people using the service, according to Luke Kehoe Ookla, although the company refused to provide accurate use figures.
The quality of Starlink’s coverage fell as more users addressed the service, but it was not interrupted during the interruption, he added. While some Starlink land stations on the continent may have lost the service, connections were possible for countries in other countries like Italy.
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However, it is unlikely that the satellite coverage would be widespread enough to provide coverage for millions of users during any similar interruption event in the future. Users requested enough load on mobile devices to access the service.
Spanish network operator Red Eléctrica has said he does not know the exact cause of the outage, which some experts have linked to the inability of Spain’s electricity network to manage an extremely high solar power supply.
Traditional mobile coverage in Spain and Portugal was severely influenced by power outage, leading to calls for the Spanish mobile network to become more resilient.
The consistency of the network, a metric of the reliability of the service, fell to as little as half its normal rate on Monday afternoon, the oocles found.
This came as many of the thousands of mobile antennas across Spain collapsed from the loss of energy, leaving only those with reserve generations.
“Many people were trying to use very few resources. That is why during the recovery phase it was difficult to get stable connections,” explained Claudio Fiandrino, an IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid.
Telecommunications networks often have a spare generation on some sites, but there are boundaries for their use.
Vodafone España said the spare generators had begun at 70 percent of its seats in Spain when the interruption began. But from 11:00, many regions still had low levels of mobile traffic, with regions including Galicia, Castilla La Mancha and Murcia that had only 20 percent of the coverage.
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Telephónica, another major provider, said that “prioritized critical infrastructures for emergency services and hospitals rationalizing resource use” during power outages, resetting 95 percent of its mobile network within just more than 24 hours and “full normality” to Thursday.
Kehoe and Ookla said that Spain and Portugal are not “unique in terms of not having a considerable presence of battery reservation generators on the mobile web network”.
In the United Kingdom, a recent report by OFCom revealed that for short energy outages, about two -thirds of the United Kingdom would be able to make an emergency call for at least one hour, thanks to reserve generation for about one -fifth of the mast.
But less than five percent of these countries have reserve facilities at least 6 hours. It would cost about £ 1 billion to improve mobile networks to provide four hours of access to emergency contact services for almost all people, found OfCom.
Telecommunications companies told ofCom that reservation insurance costs are “prohibition”, according to the February report.
Spanish and Portuguese telecommunications companies head to “very narrow borders” because prices are so low, Kehoe said. This makes it more difficult to invest in resistance than in Nordic, for example, where the average users’ income is higher and where the copy generation is stronger.
While Spain’s interruption rate was unlike anything the country has experienced before, the growth of extreme weather events is making governments focus more on the resistance of telecommunications networks.
In Norway, operators must finance a two -hour battery copy to cities and four hours in rural areas. Australia has introduced public -funded grants to operators to provide 12 hours of battery backups on the pages in some remote areas.
The causes of the Spanish interruption remain indefinable, but its degree is likely to be “an explanatory call to the government and regulators to pay attention to Evilient,” said Grace Nelson, an analyst at the Research Assembly, a UK -based research company.
Additional report by Kieran Smith
