The Falkland Islands Starlink Petition Group Town Hall presentation.

On July 11th, 2024, the team’s hard work in the Falkland Islands culminated in a public meeting in Stanley Falkland Islands’ Town Hall. The meeting presented the results of a Petition demanding changes in the law to allow the use of Starlink on the islands and significantly reduce the cost of the £5,400 VSAT licence. This was intended to disincentivise consumers and businesses from breaking Sure Falkland Islands’ telecommunications monopoly by using VSATs. Yes, LEO constellations are called VSATs from a legal perspective in the islands.

Amazingly, 190 attendees made it to the hall in the depths of winter. In addition to these attendees, 118 watched the event online—a total of 308.

It was an impressive first for the islands as it was live-streamed in HD using a Starlink terminal in the Town Hall! The team should be commended for taking on this technical challenge. This high-quality meeting YouTube Live streaming was experienced around the world. This would not have been possible using the islands’ broadband service due to a lack of appropriate upload speed for an HD video stream. The media who were present were quite envious. The only sad bit is that Falkland Islanders could only watch it using their slow and unreliable broadband service.

As a matter of technical interest and to understand why this is important, Sure Falkland Islands organised an earlier streaming of an election event in the Town Hall. As the Hall is only covered by a single 4G cell, attendees’ mobile data services needed to be disabled and the entire cell data capacity assigned to the stream for it to work with adequate upload quality. No such activities were required using Starlink.

Click on the video below to see the complete public meeting and MLA Roger Spinks’ acceptance of the Petition on behalf of the Legislative Assembly. Also, the audience raised some very interesting questions during the discussion.

Note: Unfortunately, there was little time for practice, and one slide was not shown, though you will hear it being talked through. If you want to see all the slides, a PDF version of the presentation can be seen below the video.

The above recording’s audio is quite echoey due to the hall’s acoustics. If you sometimes have difficulty hearing what is said, listen to the recording below, which has been de-echoed and amplified. Note: There may be a few beeps from my PC.

This is the full presentation used at the Starlink Petition Group’s public meeting.

Town Hall presentation Final PDF

Download the full presentation in PDF format here:

Falklands Islands TV report on the Petition public meeting: Courtesy of FITV.

This is MLA Roger Spinks’ statement, which he reads after receipt of the Petition.

Roger at the town hall

This is the Falkland Islands Government’s Chief Executive, Andy Keeling’s statement read out by Simon Verrechia just before the discussion session as he could not attend (he was in the UK). I believe he did watch the stream.