As expected one can work around dysfunctional state trlcos but the base problem remains- the culturally caused taxation of entrepreneurs by leeching families snd communities. This dysfunctional culture is the single thing that is holding africa back. Same as with the middle east islamis inability to form working states because the biggest social unit the culture allows to form is the family clan. Even where oil money or trade taxation allows for western/eastern success cosplay, the ministries and armies are filled with family at the highest ranks. One does not have a nation, a meta family. And all the cofabulayions about past injustices, do not help these stuck cultures.
Africans Are Turning to Starlink
171–180 of 294 posts
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many countries do you think have local warlords problems in Africa to negatively affect fibre deployments.
Maybe not many, but some rather large. Say, Congo, or Sudan. But more often that would be not outright warlords but rather corrupt peacetime officials, who would try to extract or extort some additional personal / clan gain from something that could be a commonly accessible good.
Those are exceptions and can’t be used to characterise an entire continent. I have lived in areas of the continent with poor security and jihadist violence yet year in year out, fibre access kept expanding and getting cheaper. The corruption don’t stop rollouts, just make them more expensive and are not particularly to African countries.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon has total control of Starlink and he’s currently enjoying his bond villain phase. I am very happy my tax dollars are not going into his pockets. It’s not a crusade. You send him your money if you want. It’s none of my business. Pretty sure they are doing a bunch of AI training with your data now too. Opt-in by default. So yeah, no thanks.
The primary purpose of Starlink and SpaceX was from the start to support military goals, civilian goals were never the primary purpose. SpaceX and Elon Musk claimed that reaching Mars was a primary goal, but these are blatant and repeated lies, also by shills in this comment section, as is evident by Michael D. Griffin, under secretary of defense for research and engineering from 2018 to 2020, being involved from the…
Would you prefer that it weren’t used in Ukraine? I believe they find it rather useful.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nor did they claim that.
> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations
For what it's worth, I was specifically thinking about DSL and 2000-2010s era DOCSIS technologies. The analogy is really that when mobile phones became popular in Africa, it was possible to skip the step of having wired landlines and cable TV. 3G/4G could be used for anything those would have provided. Starlink does the same thing, but it lets people skip DSL and cable modems.
However, I actually think that the main "benefit" you get by not having an extensive wired infrastructure is the lack of an incumbent provider. Centralized incumbents can put pressure on any new technology that puts their existing infrastructure investments at risk.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#175Sometimes cheaper, sometimes better, accessible everywhere.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#176Earlier 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?
They just need to price it more than the cost of the base stations and maintaining downlink sites. Any revenue above variable costs is worth trying to capture. The cost of keeping the constellation of satellites healthy will be borne by customers in richer regions.
Look at it this way - the satellites will be traveling over Africa no matter what. If no one in Africa subscribes, then that's a part of their orbit where they aren't earning any revenue. Assuming the rest of the costs are covered by subscribers in other regions, they can price service in Africa as low as they'd like (above hardware costs).
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#177Earlier 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?
You can get $1 of margin in Africa and $100 in the US/Canada for the same product.
See medicine, for example
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?
> Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required…
Starlink right now only uses lasers where terrestrial paths aren't available.
I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#179Earlier 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 individual satellites can cover thousands of miles and use multiple spot beams of 15 miles each.
Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength. >And for the last few years, lasercom…
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
You can read this article. The lasers worked before February 2022, but you don't require them to have multiple spot beams.