New Mexico an early adopter of Starlink internet for rural areas

But what is Starlink internet, and how does it work?

Starlink, a type of satellite-based internet, can be a solution for rural communities lacking other high-speed internet infrastructure.

Editor’s Note: This is one article in a series looking at Cuba Independent School District’s efforts to overcome a major digital divide facing students.

CUBA, N.M. – The satellite internet company Starlink has made inroads into bringing high-speed internet to rural communities in New Mexico that are still years away from tapping into the gold standard of cyber connectivity: super-fast fiber-optic lines. 

Starlink — a division of the SpaceX spaceflight company owned by Elon Musk — provides internet through the company’s private network of satellites. It is marketed by the company as an innovative way to provide internet access to rural and remote regions across the globe.

Since the pandemic’s start, students in places as wide-ranging as Las Cruces, Reserve and Cuba, New Mexico all have benefited from access to high-speed connectivity through Starlink.

Officials with the Cuba Independent School District took the lead in setting up and maintaining Starlink equipment for about 450 homes spread across the rugged, remote area of northern New Mexico it serves, while the New Mexico Public Education Department has been using its network of technology partners to provide this technical expertise for other districts, including Las Cruces Public Schools and Reserve Independent Schools.

“New Mexico was very much a leader in implementing Starlink,” said Joaquin Alvarado, an internet and technology consultant familiar with national broadband trends. He described the statewide move to set up Starlink in New Mexico as “a blended effort” shared by local and state agencies that tapped into federal funding targeting broadband infrastructure.

It was an “all hands on deck” approach statewide, he said, because New Mexico leadership understood the critical need for bringing its communities online, particularly rural ones. Helpful in New Mexico, he said, was the willingness of government sectors to “try new things” and embrace “cutting edge technology.”

What makes Starlink different?

Satellite-based internet isn’t new. But, until recently, one of its biggest drawbacks – aside from being expensive – is the slow, spotty coverage from “latency” –  the delay in the internet signal caused by the long distance it must travel to reach satellites orbiting 22,300 miles above the atmosphere and bouncing back to Earth.

The key aspect that Starlink claims sets it apart from other satellite internet providers, according to the company website, is that its satellites orbit much closer to Earth — only about 341 miles. This translates to a lower latency, the website states, which means faster, more-responsive internet data transfer. So, streaming of video or music, and downloading PowerPoint presentations are much faster.

Starlink company information states that in the time it takes most satellite signals to make one “round trip” from Earth to the satellite and back — 240.2 milliseconds — the Starlink signal has already made 70 round trips. 

Starlink’s technology has piqued the interest of the satellite internet industry because of the potential to provide high-speed internet service to rural areas that are beyond the reach of fiber-optic internet infrastructure.

“The early promise of Starlink’s rollout shows it may be able to provide an important broadband alternative that allows people to connect remotely anywhere in the world, even while traveling,” posted David Stuart, life sciences senior analyst for RSM, a business consulting company that researches trends in the technology sector. 

Edgar San Juan, technology integration specialist at Cuba Independent School District, was the first person in the district to recognize that Starlink might be the answer the remote school system was seeking for its rural students. He helped incorporate the technology once it was brought into the Cuba region.

“I am a big fan of Elon Musk and I follow Tesla and all of his ventures that he's done,” San Juan said. “And I knew about Starlink from the beginning, back when it was not a big company.”

Boosting capacity

Early in the pandemic, Starlink did not have enough Satellites to cover the Cuba area, located between Albuquerque and Farmington, San Juan said. But when the company had its New Mexico satellites operational, and the technology was brought into the area in December 2021, the long process began of equipping rural homes with the technology.

District officials said the great need of their students, particularly those in offline rural areas, was the primary motivation to move quickly and get students online because a state-mandated lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic meant that in-person instruction was no longer possible. Though students across New Mexico have since returned to in-person instruction, access to high-speed internet from home is increasingly viewed as a necessity in modern education.

Reserve schools have tapped into Starlink. At least two students in Las Cruces Public Schools have been assigned the company’s devices and service.

A drawback of the Starlink is the cost. There is a one-time set-up fee of nearly $600, plus ongoing monthly subscription fees of more than $100. And schools aren’t getting any special discount because of their status as educational institutions.

As of July 2022, Starlink has sent nearly 3,000 satellites into the low-orbit sector around the Earth, according to Techtarget.com, a technology research company.  

Federal government boosts funding for internet

As part of its pandemic relief efforts, the federal government OK’d the Infrastructure Investment Act, which allocated $65 billion to provide high-speed broadband “all across America” in its fastest and most-stable form: fiber-optic internet lines.

While satellite internet is considered a broadband connection by the FCC, it is still not a fiber internet connection — the preferred recipient of federal internet funding — so its funding pockets are smaller than that of fiber broadband and is considered an alternative technology.

Pools of funding to upgrade internet across New Mexico are hefty and include:

• The Connect New Mexico Pilot Program, funded by American Rescue Plan Act’s Coronavirus Capital Projects Fund, is one way the state of New Mexico is funding satellite internet for its rural communities. Through House Bill 2, the state in 2021 appropriated more than $123 million to “plan, design, construct, renovate and equip broadband, including alternative and satellite broadband, statewide” for fiscal years 2022 through 2025.  

• Last November, the office of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that the state would receive $38.6 million from the Connect New Mexico Pilot Program, which would be matched “by $28.3 million in nonstate funding for a total investment of $66.9 million, with plans to expand access to more than 13,400 homes, businesses, farms, ranches and community institutions across New Mexico.”  

• This past December, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that New Mexico would receive an “Internet for All Grant” in the amount of $5.7 million.  

“Improving that access opens so many doors – empowering students to easily complete homework assignments at home, small local businesses to sell products online, rural New Mexicans to take advantage of telehealth services, and more,” said Lujan Grisham when announcing the funding award.

Cuba schools await state support for Starlink efforts

The flow of relief money might be moving from the federal level to the New Mexico Public Education Department (PED), but some rural districts, like Cuba, are caught in that bureaucracy, waiting for the component that is most critically needed: for the state to allocate funds to set up satellite internet connections for impoverished rural student households that don’t have access to any other form of internet. So far, CISD has funded its costly effort to outfit students with Starlink at their homes by pursuing federal funding directly.

“PED has not helped us with one penny. We have had to do this ourselves,” said CISD Superintendent Karen Sanchez-Griego. “They said they were going to, but they never did.”

Instead, she said the district worked directly with federal funding, and added that PED officials “have not replaced any of the Starlink money they said they were going to,” she said. “They might have given us a little bit of money, but it was not for Starlink.”

The Navajo Nation, a portion of whose population is served by Cuba schools, also has not issued funding for the Starlink service.

State records show that in March of 2021, the American Rescue Plan’s Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER, allocated $652,704,171 to New Mexico, and then another $327,057,762 in July of the same year. 

These were the first payments for a total anticipated allocation of $979 million approved to be distributed to the state.

District records show that nearly $1.9 million was approved from the federal ESSER III Fund for the 2022-23 school year, a portion of which the district set aside for the Starlink connections. The Cuba district now has 451 Starlink subscriptions, officials said, and an additional 35 have been ordered. 

Sanchez-Griego said the school district moved to bring in Starlink by dealing directly with the federal programs, bypassing the state’s slower response.

“We are not waiting,” said Sanchez-Griego. “The longer they (PED) take to do it, the more time that is going to be spent for these kids who are already underserviced and who don't have connectivity and cannot get what they need.”

Officials from the New Mexico Public Education Department agreed that Cuba “has been the most ambitious” school district in the state to go after funding to set up internet connections for offline students.

“To be quite honest, we were not really all that involved with Cuba,” said John Chadwick, digital equity coordinator for the New Mexico PED. “They were way ahead of the curve on this, and I give them a lot of credit for jumping out and taking the lead. They developed a plan, they used their tech people, and they did a really good job of getting Starlink out to some very rural difficult areas to connect.”

NM funding other Starlink connections

The New Mexico Public Education Department also was allotted $1.6 million of COVID-19 relief money for Starlink equipment and subscriptions for rural areas in Gallup, Grants, Alamogordo, Silver City and Reserve. Las Cruces Public Schools, a primarily urban district, also provided two of its rural households with Starlink service. 

A few minutes from home, Michael Salas was driving through the snow with chains on his pickup truck’s tires and paused to chat with a SNMJC freelance reporter in mid-February. He has a daughter who is a freshman at Cuba High School. His family didn’t have reliable internet before Starlink, he said, but the new service “helps out big-time, man.”

“We only had, what do you call that? Hot spot? And we used to use our phones, too. Sometimes we’d run out of data.”

Salas said he also uses the connection to locate parts for his vehicles, and uses YouTube to watch instruction videos for vehicle maintenance.