A small town in northern France has said a firm ‘non’ to the installation of antennas intended to speed up internet access.
The antennas are part of Elon Musk’s Starlink company’s plans to roll out satellite-powered internet to the world’s more remote regions. They would be linked to thousands of satellites in orbit around the globe.
But the inhabitants of Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron (population 350) are not too happy. Saint-Senier is a village 20 kilometres from the English Channel.
It is one of four sites Starlink plans to use in France to install ‘radomes’ (three-metre-tall globes protecting the antennas). Plans to instal nine in Saint-Senier were blocked in December, but on the basis of a technicality. According to Starlink’s contractor, the municipal council is unlikely to be able to block a revised request.
The residents of Saint-Senier insist that while they are not technophobes, they need more information about the potential impacts of the devices before they can accept the project. The antennas are designed to capture signals and send them to individual user terminals by cable. Farmer Noemie Brault, deputy mayor of the village, said that the project worried the community because they had no data on potential side-effects on human and animal health from these signals.
Greens council member, Francois Dufour, a retired farmer, said: ‘The risks from electromagnetic waves is something we’ve already seen with high-voltage power lines, which have disturbed lots of farmers in the area.’ He added that ‘social networks, internet, they exist already — why do we need to go look for internet on the moon?’
France’s National Radio Frequency Agency (ANFR) has approved the proposed stations, saying that given that the antennas will be emitting straight-up into the sky they will not pose a risk to residents.
[Image: Ikmo-ned, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34936787]