President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) said this Friday (20), during a meeting with businessman Elon Musk, in the interior of São Paulo, that the partnership with the owner of Starlink, which intends to provide internet connection to 19,000 schools Brazilian rural areas and environmental monitoring of the Amazon, will help fight deforestation and fires in the region.
“We are going to show that the Amazon is preserved. There are burning niches, irregular deforestation, but his participation with his satellites will help to preserve it”, declared Bolsonaro.
According to Musk, it is necessary to have data about the Amazon for its protection. “If you try to take a bunch of photos and videos to understand what’s going on, the amount of data to be transmitted is going to be huge, so we need that connectivity to monitor the Amazon effectively,” he explained.
An arm of SpaceX, Starlink is a company that uses low-orbit satellites to provide internet services. The connection works by sending information through the vacuum of space, where data travels faster than fiber optic cables.
According to Starlink, while most satellite internet services are carried out with equipment that orbits the earth at an altitude of about 35,000 kilometers, Musk’s company has satellites about 550 kilometers from the planet, which reduces the time of sending and receiving data.
The main objective of this type of project is to reduce the cost of installation, taking satellite connection is cheaper than moving heavy infrastructure of cabling and antennas to remote locations.
In January, the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) granted approval for Starlink to operate the satellites in Brazil. But there is still no set price for the monthly service fee.
Source: CNN Brasil
