A pilot project between an Eastern Kentucky nonprofit and Elon Musk's aerospace company is bringing high-speed, broadband internet to 30 households in rural Bell County.
Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) has partnered with SpaceX to offer low-income, senior residents free,high-speed broadband internet to access telehealth services via the growing Starlink satellite network. The project was funded by the Kentucky Department of Public Health under the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, specifically its Office of Health Equity and the Department of Aging and Independent Living.
Colby Hall, executive director of SOAR, said it was a connection he made as a student at the University of Kentucky that led to the formation of the SpaceX partnership. His former classmate, Jake Ingram, is a mission integration engineer at SpaceX, and when Hall took on the leadership position at SOAR in late 2020, they had a conversation about bringing Starlink internet access to Eastern Kentucky.
"I reached out to Jake and said, 'Hey, how can we get something going here? How can we spotlight what this type of technology would mean for a region like Eastern Kentucky?'" Hall said. "He helped me find the right avenue to approach Starlink."
SpaceX has launched more than 2,000 Starlink satellites since 2018, and has plans to launch thousands more in the coming years to develop and offer high-speed internet on a global scale. For Eastern Kentucky, that means another option for crucial internet without the challenge of building out last mile fiber infrastructure in hard-to-reach geographies.
As I previously reported, the $350 million KentuckyWired project wrapped up last year, establishing 3,000 miles of high-capacity fiber-optic cable that extends through the commonwealth’s 120 counties. Louisville-based Accelecom, which manages commercial access to that network, invested an additional $50 million in that network last year and has been working with Eastern Kentucky agencies to continue to bridge the digital divide.
Hall said he sees SpaceX's Starlink as a compliment to the KentuckyWired network, not a competitor, and that SOAR's main focus is getting the region completely covered with functional internet service for telehealth, e-learning, remote work and other capacities.
"We're probably one of the most difficult places, if not the most difficult place, to build fiber and future-proof technology in the country, especially last-mile," Hall said. "It's not a knock on anybody to say that we have gaps because everybody's been doing what they can, but the reality is that there's still some gaps and those gaps typically exist in some of our most sparsely populated areas."
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 81.6% of Kentucky households have a broadband internet subscription, while the national average is 85.2%. About 5% of Kentuckians live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure, according to a benchmark set by the Federal Communications Commission.
The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that President Joe Biden signed into law in November includes a minimum of $100 million to Kentucky to improve broadband access. Additionally, about a third of Kentuckians will qualify for the Affordable Connectivity Program, in which broadband providers will get up to $30 a month per low-income household they service and pass those savings on to the customer.
In Bell County, within a 10-mile radius of Pineville, Kentucky, SOAR is looking to identify 30 households that will receive free Starlink equipment and setup, plus one-year of paid service. Each household will roughly cost $1,700, so the project will cost slightly more than $50,000 in total. After the first year, it will cost $100 a month for the service, and if residents don't want to continue it, SOAR will give the equipment to another household that would like the connection.
"The nexus behind trying to do something even on a small level with a partnership with SpaceX and Starlink is focused on those people that are hardest to reach... the people that are so far out there that traditional wired infrastructure is going to take a long time and super expensive to get to," Hall said. "We believe that if you're born in Eastern Kentucky, you should be able to have access to the same basic services that anybody else has in a larger, or maybe more affluent part of the country."
For more information or to apply, email starlink@soar-ky.org.
