Will satellite internet technology connect the world?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2022
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After a volcanic eruption severed Tonga’s communication cable Elon Musk donated 50 Starlink terminals, allowing the government and residents to connect to the network of satellites orbiting above earth. The company have also sent the technology to Ukraine after Russia’s invasion, and we hear from Stepan Veselovskyi of Lviv IT Cluster using it to keep vital services online and Kyiv resident Oleg Kutkov, who bought a dish online before the war and now hopes to use it as a back-up in case conventional communication networks fail. It’s proved extremely useful, but is this the future for bringing internet to remote corners of the globe? We also hear from expert on space law Professor Melissa De Zwart about the race among SpaceX and other companies to put more of these satellites in low earth orbit, and how too many of them could impede dreams of further space exploration.
Presenter: Sam Fenwick Producer: Hannah Bewley
(Image: Oleg Kutkov with his Starlink dish; Credit: Oleg Kutkov)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Sam Fenwick. Today on the program, |
| 0:07.5 | we're looking at how satellite broadband is helping people access the internet in the remotest |
| 0:12.8 | parts of the world. Starlink is the only reason that we're able to talk right now. We have no |
| 0:17.4 | cell phone service at our house and very limited options when it comes to |
| 0:21.7 | internet, especially high-speed internet. It's helping the Ukrainian government to keep essential |
| 0:26.2 | services going following Russia's invasion of the country in February. And it's being used in |
| 0:31.7 | Tonga, where a volcanic eruption and tsunami destroyed all methods of communication there. |
| 0:44.3 | To see the houses being being stuck pieces of them were just stuck towards coconut trees. As days go by, it was also hard for us to communicate, especially to our families overseas. |
| 0:50.3 | Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to provide this service. But what's the cost of |
| 0:56.2 | having tens of thousands of these satellites orbiting the Earth? There's plans to return humans to space, |
| 1:03.1 | to go to the moon, to go on to Mars. But all of these plans will come to nothing if there's so much |
| 1:08.4 | debris and it's so cluttered that we can't even launch from Earth. |
| 1:13.5 | Here is my dishy. |
| 1:15.7 | It's quite big? |
| 1:16.6 | Yeah, it's quite big. |
| 1:18.6 | It's big in the typical pizza. |
| 1:22.6 | So, yeah. |
| 1:23.5 | Meet Oleg Kotkoff. |
| 1:25.4 | He's a computer software engineer and lives in a flat in Ukraine's capital city Kiev with his wife. |
| 1:31.5 | He says he's into robotics, operating systems, space and astronomy. |
| 1:36.2 | We'd call you a tech nerd perhaps in the UK. |
| 1:39.2 | I'm a nerd, yeah. That's true. |
... |
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