I keep a Starlink subscription as my WAN2, after someone started a fire in a nearby fiber cabinet and managed to knock out Frontier and Spectrum at once. It’s worth it to me as a bullet-proof WAN2, especially working from home.
Africans Are Turning to Starlink
101–110 of 294 posts
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why copper? Heavy, thick, expensive, attractive for thieves. Lay fiber: thin, lightweight, less expensive per Gbps, future-proof, corrosion-resistant, lighting-resistant, worthless for thieves.
Worthless for theft, but subject to ransom and destruction by your local warlord.
Failed social institutions are the source of all poverty in the world. The world produces enough of every basic necessity already. It's the distribution, not availability, where the source of hunger and depravity is.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> jump technology generations Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
Once the birds are in orbit, satellite internet is vastly superior to fiber in speed of deployment. Fiber requires custom engineering at the city block level and a single rotten utility pole can block deployment. I say this as someone who waited for fiber and is happily using it now.
So in Poland with Starlink I easily get 120 mbp/s but often in Kenya which I visit the maximum speed is just 10 mbp/s. Often the local 5g network is faster. The reason I believe that this is the case is dues to congestion on the Starlink network in Kenya. Ie. too many users in Kenya.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#104I've lived in SA for about a year. I would have paid a lot of money for something like Starlink a couple of years ago.
Where you have internet it does not work while the local power is out. And it was not that stable and at times we were sitting 10 hours without power a day. And that's in Joburg. And 5g was hard to come by.
So I can only imagine that locals are happy to see such a thing. Especially if you can run it from a car charger or something.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations. Same with electricity: there are many rural places in Africa where solar panels + batteries are a revolution. But then there's a reason why a country with more than 3x the number of people in the US was "missing" technologies: Africa is, overall, very poor (GDP per capita in Africa is something l…
> it's not clear if StarLink shall be able to find customers rich enough to buy their services. Of course they will. If the prices are too high they can just lower them to whatever people can afford. It's not that expensive to cover Africa's customers.
It is not expensive to keep a massive constellation of satellites in a rapidly decaying orbit?
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US). So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".
That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL.
The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#107I worked on the Starlink program in the Redmond facility during the growth from a couple sats as proof of concept to thousands of sats regularly providing internet. I’ve since moved on to other ventures, but I’m still incredibly proud of what I did there. Mostly because it brought internet to those unserved and those who no one was ever going to serve, at least any time soon. I believe the internet and access to the…
If it hadn't been for Starlink I wouldn't have been able to work remotely from my parents house during covid.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's not clear if StarLink shall be able to find customers rich enough to buy their services. Of course they will. If the prices are too high they can just lower them to whatever people can afford. It's not that expensive to cover Africa's customers.
It is not expensive to keep a massive constellation of satellites in a rapidly decaying orbit?
I'm guessing the person you're replying to meant the incremental cost of serving African customers is low.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#109The problem of it not working well during the rain is a huge issue in countries where cloud cover can last days, and 3-5 months of the year has regular rain fall.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure regular internet access is changing the risk like you say, but I agree that people like connectivity and hence will do more risky things because they think it’s safer. Rescues even with EPIRB’s can still be difficult.
this is an absurd thing to say, there are so many situations that are way safer with more information. alot of bad situations happen when people make the wrong decision under uncertainty, or they are in over their head. access to the internet, and increasingly claude, is incredible and changes alot of outdoors risk for the right users
One one hand I understand. On the other, the idea of bringing Claude as a companion on a hiking trip makes me incredibly sad.