Technology in Climate Action: How we Harness the Starlink Network.

Climate Action and Satellites, two words you wouldn’t necessarily think could be used in the same sentence. Yet, here at Cloudforests, we are always keen to harness and embrace the newest and most innovative technology around in our grand mission to “Make Planet Earth Cooler”.

This willingness to integrate the latest and greatest technology solutions into anything we do has led us in some interesting directions, none more so than our integration of Starlink, SpaceX’s (run by the luminary Elon Musk) state of the art satellite network. Its mission is as worthy a mission as ours; ‘to bring the internet almost anywhere on Earth’.

To achieve this level of connectivity, satellites are being deployed in low Earth orbit to improve latency (the time it takes to transmit data from one point to another and back). In simple terms, the closer they are to the earth, the faster and stronger is the transmission of the signal is.

Starlinks satellites are over 60 times closer to Earth than traditional satellites, they achieve lower latency and have the ability to support services typically not possible with traditional satellite internet. However, the issue is satellites in low Earth orbit take around 90 minutes to complete one revolution around our planet, because of this, these low orbit satellites struggle to maintain the same level of consistency with their signal over geographic regions as satellites in a higher orbit.

To overcome this issue, Starlink has gone for the tried & tested method of strength in numbers. As of August 2021, there were over 1,600 Starlink satellites in orbit. This number is dwarfed by the 42,000 satellites that SpaceX has filed paperwork for, illustrating the lofty ambition and sheer scale of the project.

Cloudforests & Starlink

Starlink Terminal in Cloudforest One in Lahinch Co.Clare

It may seem unlikely that this huge space project would have any connection to us at Cloudforests, after all, we are looking to make this planet cooler, so anything outside of this planet is of no interest to us, right?

Wrong! As of the start of November this year, we became one of approximately only 100,000 owners of a StarLink terminal in the world. This allows us ( with our incredible CoolPartners; Usee, Axis Communications, and Netcelero) to add additional features to our live stream, providing real-time footage of our CloudForest one in Lahinch, which is currently transmitting over 4G.

We’re not the first ones to see the huge potential of this network to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband to rural Irish areas. An agreement between Starlink and Kerry County Council was made in December of last year to provide broadband in areas such as the infamously isolated Black Valley.

Our Starlink terminal located atop of ‘The Shack’ in Cloudforest One, Lahinch, Co. Clare, is just one of the many ways we have embraced technology in our mission to make the planet cooler and provide real, verifiable climate action for businesses. If you would like to learn more about Starlink and how it works take a look at a few resources below.

Resouces:

https://www.starlink.com/satellites

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/starlink-satellite-internet-explained/

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=2019-074D#:~:text=Starlink%20is%20SpaceX's%2012000%2Dsatellite,to%20provide%20broadband%20Internet%20access.&text=At%20the%20end%20of%20life,from%20a%20550%20km%20orbit.