In the article they talk about a person who lives in a rural location and Starlink has been a godsend for them, in terms of surviving an EMP attack it would be so devastating does it really matter what survives because it would anarchy of the highest order
No one really knows.
Testing EMP effects is extremely difficult.
Real world tests of EMP are nearly impossible because the effects are so widespread.
Survivability of devices exposed to EMP, on what small scale testing has been done, varies enormously depending on whether the device was turned on, plugged in, or shielded.
An EMP attack is essentially a nuclear attack, and should have the same consequences for the attacker.
Risking nuclear retaliation with an attack where the attacker does not know, and cannot know the actual effects, makes an EMP attack less likely.
There is a huge difference between an EMP which destroys/disables 75% of the power grid and communications systems, and an EMP which destroys/disables 99% of the power grid and communications systems.
If we have to worry about EMP attacks internet service will be the least of our concerns.
We’re rural and had one, very iffy, internet provider. They kept trying to upsell us to their 80Mbps service, even though tech after tech kept telling us the line on the road had been damaged by lightning and the fastest we coukd get was 40 Mbps. For our needs 40 is fine, but the techs also told us we were lucky to even be getting 40 and that we were the end of the line on the road even though the road conti n ues another. 2 miles with dozens of houses. It wasn’t enough potential business for the company to bother with repairs. So the second that Starlink was available in our area we jumped, and it’s been fantastic. We’ve had 1 outage in 8 months and that was fixed quickly. With the old service we had routine outages that sometimes took days to resolve. On the down side, the service is expensive and only business class was available so doubly expensive,and the equipment was expensive to purchase and a pain in the butt to install the way we wanted.
A widespread EMP attack would require nuclear weapons and would constitute a strategic nuclear attack against the US directly threatening vital US interests. US defense policy is pretty clear. The betting man would go all in on the per being a goner.