We are still facing challenges due to an exclusive license government have with this company, known for their predatory conduct [1]... People here are having to use Chilean addresses to register the kits and pay for a mobile package.
[0] https://www.sure.co.fk/broadband/broadband-packages/
[1] https://guernseypress.com/news/2024/10/02/sure-ordered-to-pa...
Meanwhile not far away in New Zealand, with a much wealthier population Starlink is prolific in rural areas. I am sure it’s also super popular in rural Australia.
It is indeed.
https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/n...
It is also popular in urban areas. Starlink's availability map shows "sold out" in Brisbane (population 2.5 million) and Perth (2.1 million) because it's much faster than the mediocre VDSL2 services otherwise on offer to most of the population in those cities.
End users of terminal equipment are still subject to the regulations of the state in which they are located.
The ITU Radio Regulations (via national legislation) create obligations on satellite operators to ensure that they do not cause harmful interference to other states' services or to violate those states' sovereignty.
But one thing to keep in mind, is that usually ISPs in small countries can't compete on price because they don't have enough scale and enough customers, in the end they just can't compete with a juggernaut like Starlink.
Although as a customer i'd love to just use Starlink and pay less for better quality of service, these local ISPs are important actors of the local economy. If these companies shutdown because of international competition, it's money going to the US, and the local economy taking a hit ...
This is a pretty terrible justification for maintaining obsolete infrastructure.
This is your own (wrong) conclusion.
The problem isn't about obsolete infrastructure as the infrastructure isn't bad (fiber).
The problem is about small companies in a small market (<500000 inhabitants) competing on price with an international juggernaut.
It's obviously difficult for Local ISP(s) to have a good ROI when you're deploying fiber for <50000 customers.
If Starlink comes in and provides slightly better service at half the price, it's gonna be pretty bad for the local companies.
The radio spectrum is far more limited, so the more people use it, the slower it should get.
> If these companies shutdown because of international competition, it's money going to the US
The ideal "free market" result of this is that the ISP lowers prices in response or improves the service, in a rational competitive market.
The question is about customer density - the ISPs + fiber works great with density in miles while Starlink works better with lower density.
So hopefully the cities get better wired and villages get better wireless at the same time.
As radio hardware gets better able to distinguish frequencies, this won’t be an issue. There’s a lot of bandwidth out there once radios can tune into a band so narrow it needs several decimals to delineate.
That said, there I do somewhat see the benefits of giving a fibreoptics provider exclusivity for a while in such a small market.
[1] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/reminder-on-the-use..., previous discussion see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945
Wait, what? What service is the government supposedly providing?
The only remotely believable excuse for that IMO would be "we're using it exclusively to fund a fiberoptics cable for redundancy", but even that I would have a very hard time believing.
Government is balls deep into Sure's spell... On top of that, they subsidize Sure with at least £1,000,000 a year since the Covid era... Sure is all revenue at this point, they are a predatory company with absolutely no excuses. Someone else commented that these 'good faith' ISPs are doing God's work on these remote islands, they are not, they are lining their pockets as much as they can, in many cases grabbing loads of money in subsidies. I will not be shocked if I were to find out that most of the infra was actually paid with tax payers money anyway.
In a place like the Falklands, internet should be nationalized.
Less than a year ago, relatives of mine in rural France still only had around 1.5 Mbps via ADSL. Video chat was borderline impossible. YouTube wasn’t possible in real time (i.e. buffering took significantly longer than the runtime).
I'm always surprised when I talk to people that use Starlink who haven't considered cellular.
I'm a little farther north on Vancouver Island and I see basically perfect connectivity with my latest generation dish. If I go look at the stats in the app it shows small losses of connectivity, but I've never noticed on a video call or anything.
I did a short stint of RV life on verzion throughout Western Washington and received sub 800Kbps on my 4G hotspot most of the time. This was out towards Concrete, WA however, not the state capitol, Olympia.
This resulted in my mother (remote village with ~100ish people) and father (there might be like 10 houses along a mountain road, several km from the village).
Both got upgraded from ReADSL (512k/128k, sometimes 1M on good days, 0kbps on bad ones) to 1Gbps symmetric FTTH a few years ago.
It's absolutely not economically viable to lay out fiber so it has to come from politics, which also mandates that fiber must be shared to prevent predatory pricing through local monopolies.
I do wanna go back and see it though
It is extremely sensitive to obstructions. A small tree branch with a handful of leaves on it will cause intermittent dropouts if it is between your terminal and a spacecraft.
Super exciting to see competition working.
Also I hope Amazon succeeds with their Kuiper constellation. Imagine two competing global satellite ISPs!
Plus (and I'm no expert), I believe that since these satellites specifically require a rather low orbit, they're by-design quick to de-orbit in the case of disaster or destruction.
In case of destruction, the satellite breaks up into many individual pieces each having a potentially very different orbit. Many of those parts might then stay up longer than the satellite would have if it remained intact. The parts can also cause a chain reaction which eventually breaks everything in low earth orbit.
Starlink V2 is 1000-2000km orbits with expected deployment of 12000 sats.
Moving to 2000km would be a massive downgrade in performance, I'm not able find any source for that, everything points to the next generation (V3) being deployed via Starship at that lower altitude of 350km.
https://www.starlink.com/updates#update10
> Starlink satellites operate in a low Earth orbit below 600 km altitude. Atmospheric drag at these altitudes will deorbit a satellite naturally in 5 years or less, depending on the altitude and satellite design, should one fail on orbit. SpaceX proactively deorbits satellites that are identified to be at an elevated risk of becoming non-maneuverable. This proactive approach minimizes the number of non-maneuverable satellites in space.
Depends on what you mean with "potentially very different orbit". Each piece still has to be at least on some elliptic orbit that eventually again passes through the spot where where it broke up*. If it was on a low orbit to begin with, it'll still burn up soon-ish as it decays. You cannot increase the perigee of some formerly circular orbit with only a singular application of force, nor can you increase the perigee of an elliptic orbit higher than its old apogee through the same means.
It'll take a lot to get pieces into orbits where they avoid decaying within a reasonable time span.
*Disregarding external factors like the gravitational pull of a third object, and assuming no drag and perfect point masses.
> On December 1, 2022, the FCC issued an approval for SpaceX[66] to launch the initial 7500 satellites for its second-generation (Gen2) constellation, in three low-Earth-orbit orbital shells, at 525, 530, and 535 km (326, 329 and 332 mile) altitude. Overall, SpaceX had requested approval for as many as 29,988 Gen2 satellites, with approximately 10,000 in the 525–535 km (326 to 332 mile) altitude shells, plus ~20,000 in 340–360 km (210 mile to 220 mile) shells and nearly 500 in 604–614 km (375 to 382 mile) shells.
https://www.spacex.com/updates/#sustainability
> SpaceX operates its satellites at an altitude below 600 km because of the reduced natural orbit decay time relative to those above 600 km. Starlink operates in \"self-cleaning\" orbits, meaning that non-maneuverable satellites and debris will lose altitude and deorbit due to atmospheric drag within 5 to 6 years, and often sooner, see Fig. 1. This greatly reduces the risk of persistent orbital debris, and vastly exceeds the FCC and international standard of 25 years (which we believe is outdated and should be reduced). Natural deorbit from altitudes higher than 600 km poses significantly higher orbital debris risk for many years at all lower orbital altitudes as the satellite or debris deorbits. Several other commercial satellite constellations are designed to operate above 1,000 km, where it requires hundreds of years for spacecraft to naturally deorbit if they fail prior to deorbit or are not deorbited by active debris removal, as in Fig. 1. SpaceX invested considerable effort and expense in developing satellites that would fly at these lower altitudes, including investment in sophisticated attitude and propulsion systems. SpaceX is hopeful active debris removal technology will be developed in the near term, but this technology does not currently exist.
> https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/figure_...
> Fig. 1: Orbital lifetime for a satellite with a mass-to-area ratio of 40kg/m2 at various starting altitudes and average solar cycle.
But also I don't think the internet has been a net-positive thing.
These typically operate at higher orbits. From a strictly space junk perspective, that makes them more of a debris risk than even multiple Starlink fleets in LEO.
I haven't heard anyone complain about either of these things lately, I'm not sure if it's because they were never legitimate complaints, or it's because once the system was launched it became clear that complaining about it was pointless....
They're not using semantic versioning. SpaceX hasn't even finished a production ready starship, they are still very much in the R&D stage. Just because the latest iteration is know as V2, doesn't mean much.
The fact they haven't achieved the extremely ambitious goals doesn't reflect poorly on the engineering going into Starship, or that "V1" has failed to hit the goals.
I don't really know much about rockets. Do I read here correctly tha Falvon Heavy has 63,800 kg payload to LEO capacity?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy
> Starship 2 flies next week, so it's moot.
So I guess the OP really meant Starship 2.
There are no data caps on any providers because Google Fiber doesn't have them. Everyone upgraded their service to try to match Google's speeds, so Gigabit is easy to get pretty much anywhere in the city. Google is offering up to 8gb now and ATT is trying to match those speeds.
Company reps regularly knock on doors trying to get people to switch to their service offering deep discounts for 1 year+.
Are they still reusing ghost fibre and doing micro-trenching, or are they taking a different angle now?
I was surprised they jumped to our neighborhood so soon. I don't live near downtown Mesa where they started. But I am near a lot of new datacenters.
The only caveat I'll say is that starlink generally requires ground stations to provide connection at scale. So it's not 0 marginal cost for them to provide it for free. But the general thought is right: the marginal cost is small. Launching satellites is the expensive part, and once you have them up there, you might as well serve Africa
Tons of people stuck with 2005 tier connects at x10 the price is just sad.
Nor is it subsidies.. it's funding from contracts.. SpaceX is on track to make most of its revenue from Starlink anyways
So this article seems to be comparing against something that isn't very popular in the first place - fixed ISPs.
You can pay as your budget allows — per day, per hour, night bundles, or even smaller data packages like 150MB.
Public Wi-Fi isn’t common in places like malls, gyms, schools, offices, or hospitals here. However, mobile data ensures you stay connected on your cellphone.
I've switched between three ISPs in the past three months, all of which have been disappointing, mainly due to poor customer service. With cellular data, I can easily top up using mobile money whenever my data runs out.
I also use my phone’s hotspot to connect my PCs at home or on the go.
edit: it's funny there was this cool sports car demo with scrolling animations and if you looked at the code, it loaded like a 1000 images to do the animation
Resource utilization has basically zero headspace for many developers now, and even less among non-technical stakeholders (who fundamentally rely on engineers to bring it to their attention).
Things are really bad these days.
If you need a lot of data then a wired connection is a lot cheaper. If you can get it, that is. Fiber is only available in large cities. And even there, only in areas with enough demand to make it worth putting in the cable.
"38C3 - Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_gqhpLSc_8
Even now there's countries with a tax on unlimited internet on cell phones.
His explanation why he came to the US to do what were lower level jobs was that in the places he worked it was all who you knew and if your given buddy who got you that job fell out of the good graces of those in power ... you were screwed forever.
He had enough of that, good guy, very capable, worked his way up again in the US.
For the most part SpaceX is playing nice with regulators, but if Zimbabwe's government tried to extort Starlink users, SpaceX could just open up service and Zimbabwe could do absolutely nothing to stop them.
So Zimbabwe actually can ban starlink. And if it ignores Zimbabwe... well Zimbabwe will complain to the ITU, and the ITU to the US. The US would be under obligation to regulate Starlink... with the minor exception of its not clear that the US has any agency that can, at least under current law.
Anyway, it would be a total mess if Elon did that (except in a country like Russia where the US wants him to do that)... and I have no idea what would happen.
We’re not as dumb in the US as the rest of the world seems to think.
I mean Trump is an idiot... but umm... Berlusconi?
We need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re no longer the only game in town, and act accordingly when using power. Soft or hard.
Almost explains why Musk bought the US government.
I believe that easily totals up to that for more than half of the human population connecting to Starlink is illegal.
Same with Occupied Ukraine. It's difficult to pin the area of control down precisely, given that Ukraine uses Starlink for combat capability.
And be aware if you travel with a satellite capable device (india apparently also don't like them):
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-b...
And in the future I can imagine mandatory software that needs to be installed in many countries, to be able to do any buisness there.
Not specifically against satellites - but for using the bus, paying the hotel, getting a appointment at the police, ... and that app would make sure, you only connect to authorized means of communication.
The hard part will be preventing that shit to become universal.
I'm asking, I don't know, but even when technically feasible there are lots of concerns with defying local governments, good and bad.
They could issue an order to local payment processors to block all payments to Starlink...like Brazil did. In this particular hypothetical, Zimbabwe would have more solid legal grounds for blocking payment than the Brazilian judge (TLDR: X didn't adhere to all of Brazil's regulations and refused to pay the resulting fines so a judge deemed Starlink a related company and blocked payments to Starlink until X complied.)
IIRC, the judge didn't block payments to Starlink; instead, the judge told the banks to take the value of the fines from the Starlink bank accounts.
If you guys are so pro business why blocking TikTok and other Chinese firms?
The point of infrastructure is to deliver services which enable productivity and quality of life for the broader population. Public services are not a jobs program. I will continue screaming this into the void until I turn transform into a pickle.
Edit: And for transparency, I'm about as far from a Musk fan as it's possible to be. I'm not saying this because it's him doing it. I'm glad someone is, and if happens to be him, fine, so be it.
Indeed but wealth extraction from already piss poor countries by artificially dumping prices that cannot be sustained by domestic industry has been a problem with Africa for decades, and that after centuries of colonialism on top of it.
Africa used to have a vibrant textile and agricultural industry - Simbabwe for example was known until two, three decades ago as the "grain chamber of Africa" - but Western "donations" aka mitumba and "aid" programs completely wiped out the domestic industry, leaving many countries that were self-sufficient now utterly dependant on foreign supply.
You also need to work out what is happening with the money that is saved. Sure, people working for the local ISP are probably out of a job, but more people can access the internet at much more reasonable rates. This boosts the economy; probably more than the local ISP did!
It definitely feels like a one in Canada (or France).
That being said, it would be interesting to see what happened if all of, say, Lagos (fastest-growing city+suburbs in the world) suddenly started using Starlink exclusively.
"Good things" is not very high on my list...
So in general it's good news for the rural population (if they can afford it), but it doesn't really help too much for the cities.
That's very much not what the Starlink-proponents are, loudly, proclaiming. Because, satellite-peer-to-peer stuff, Elon-magic in general, and whatever.
Please note: I think that Starlink is mostly space pollution, and that offering meaningful Internet connectivity to Africa, or rural America, or anywhere mostly involves 'lots of fiber', some radio, and lots of cooperation.
But: "just get your Starlink dish and be done" is definitely an Internet Truth, and it's Wrong, and I think it's worth Pointing Out.
The government has already provided many rural schools with Starlink terminals, and many locations which only recently didn't have internet connectivity now do have it. Apparently they don't see something you do.
So, while technically very interesting, and providing some value before it all comes inevitably (and literally -- see: space junk) crashing down, all that talent and money spent on Starlink would better be put to use elsewhere.
But unfortunately it's easier to get investment for space dreams than for running fiber, even though it's the latter that's mostly needed, and despite plenty of success stories.
Are these places covered by "POTS" copper telephone access?
Also ISPs are big businesses with telecom companies paying huge sums for licenses (3G,4G licensing etc). Starlink is seen as jumping to the front of the line with little to no similar license requirements (or bribes if you want to call them).
https://pts.se/en does it in Sweden.
Kind of how it has to be?
Sounded like a great idea, the money that would go to a spectrum license would instead go to building out the network instead, but it was kind of a flop. Telia was left without a license and had to share licenses with Tele2 who didn't want to invest as much, and Orange got a license and immediately said "nevermind this is too expensive" and canceled their plans. And then everyone took 3 years longer than they promised in their proposals so it didn't even speed up the buildout.
Edit: It seems I might be wrong and the perceived high cost comes from the actual starlink device and not the internet plan. The article just compares the internet plan prices. The cost of the device and the restrictions on usage (can’t use in different locations etc) serves a deterrent to the average Ghanaian anyway.
Long term - once the local ISPs are out of business, then do prices go up and to either cover costs and/or excess profits start to go to the investors.
It's probably already at a point where from a cost vs. benefit perspective I don't know if we should be laying a lot more cable, but I wonder if it will ever make the existing cables obsolete.
i doubt it, the speed of light is only so fast. Latency up to LEO, down to earth, back to LEO, down to you will always be more than to your local telco CO and back.
I don't imagine it will ever be 'better'. Like wifi though, at some point it will probably be good enough that for 90+% of use cases the tradeoff of cables isn't worth it.
Like I know ethernet is better, but very rarely does that little bit better latency or connection stability practically matter.
The use cases where it starts to be a problem is usually when humans are interacting with each other or humans/machines with financial markets. Maybe other things I'm not thinking of.
I don't think servers in orbit can solve this problem?
Light travels faster in a vacuum (laser in space) than it does through glass (fibre optic cable), when the gains from that exceed the trip up and down to the satellites you're coming out ahead in terms of latency. It may also be a more direct path than following undersea cables, but I haven't checked.
For bandwidth and regular internet connectivity, you can't really beat fibre. It's just so compact and speedy enough.
Fiber doesn’t care about cloudy days, typical storms, etc.
Starlink is of course superior when there’s a massive natural disaster, or major power loss to your region. Or if you’re in a rural area with zero other good options.
I guess that challenges my perspective. The ping point still stands. May or not be noticeable depending on how you use the internet.
Sure New York to Ohio is always going to be fastest over fibre, but what about New Zealand to London? Not sure how much that matters though and the speed of light is a pretty hard limit to what's possible.
However, for nation states there is a lot of value in having redundancy and sovereignty over your telecommunications infrastructure. Having a foreign country's company being sole provider could put you in a tough position (for the good/bad of your population).
for all the great things starlink does and is, it should not be at the whims of a egomaniacal drug addict.
An American corporation undermining American foreign policy is a security risk. No citizen, especially a crazy one like Elon, should have this much power.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversat...
He didn't turn it off, he refused to turn it on over Crimea when Ukraine requested he do so. Turning it on without the permission of the State Department would have been illegal.
If i wanted to control a country and couldn't get my hands on their banking system i guess their communication systems would do...
I just dont see it somehow.
