Image: Starlink
South Korea’s Korea Forest Service is buying 74 Starlink kits so forest workers can call for rescue in the large stretches of mountain forest where mobile networks don’t reach. That’s according to a report from Edaily, which says the roughly 1.8 billion won project will put the kits in national forest offices across the country before the end of the year. An earlier Edaily report on the agency’s tender broke the order down into 31 vehicle-mounted units and 43 backpack units, each pairing a low Earth orbit satellite link with a small LTE base station.
The backpack version packs a Starlink Mini dish, a battery, a Wi-Fi router and a temperature sensor into a 15 kg bag that one person can carry and set up in about five minutes, with roughly eight hours of runtime. In a demo in Samcheok on October 7, the kit pulled 162 Mbps down and 59 Mbps up under heavy tree cover, and a separate internet phone connected straight to 119 emergency services where regular phones had no signal.
The agency says about 300,000 hectares of Korean forest have no reliable cell coverage, and it wants to cut the time it takes to report an accident from more than 30 minutes to under 10. Korea’s steep, heavily forested mountains leave plenty of gaps between cell sites, and those gaps get worse in a disaster, when towers lose power or burn. That’s exactly what happened in March 2025, when wildfires that started in Uiseong tore through North Gyeongsang and killed 30 people across the region, scorching about 48,000 hectares in what Yonhap called the country’s worst wildfire disaster on record.
At the height of those fires, Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that 1,192 mobile base stations were down across five Gyeongbuk counties, including 103 sites on the PS-LTE network that police and firefighters rely on, which meant some residents may never have received evacuation alerts. Most of those outages came from power being cut to stop the fire spreading, and in Uljin, SK Telecom service went dark for about two hours until the government triggered emergency roaming onto KT’s network for the first time.
Starlink only became an option for agencies like the Forest Service recently. The science ministry approved Starlink Korea’s cross-border supply agreement with SpaceX in May 2025, and the service launched commercially on December 4, 2025, with SK Telink and KT SAT signed on as business resellers, as The Korea Herald reported at the time.
Public agencies have moved quickly since then. Gangwon’s fire service started a Starlink-based emergency network pilot in April, power utility KEPCO began testing vehicle and backpack terminals in Gyeongbuk and Gangwon in June, and SK Telink installed mobile terminals for Korea Expressway Corporation in July. This week, Gyeongbuk’s fire headquarters also started testing Starlink on a fire truck, and the whole push mirrors the kind of disaster use seen after the Panama quake.
Should more countries be giving forest and rescue crews satellite kits like these?
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