One of the biggest problems in the Lahaina wildfire disaster was the inability to communicate that cut the whole west side of Maui off from the rest of the island and the rest of the world after the recent wildfire disaster. A disaster relief team from the Mainland brought in STARLINK units which saved the day for many. How does it work?
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Usually satellite internet works off of geostationary satellites 35,785 km high. They can each see nearly half of the planet so they get good coverage, but signal reception is ass that far out and latency is horrible over 70,000km round trips even at lightspeed.
Starlink is thousands of tiny satellites in low earth orbit. They can’t connect to much of an area due to being that low (the horizon blocks their signal), but they can see their neighbours so they can pass along messages to one of their friends that can see a ground station to connect to the wider internet, and they can get pretty fast low latency connection down to the area right below them.
Result: fast low latency internet, but high maintenance and needs thousands of satellites that only have a couple years of service life.
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