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Africans Are Turning to Starlink

economist.com

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Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#121

Post by underlipton »

uxhacker wrote: post #103
Polizeiposaune wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only in Kenya.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#122

Post by SoftTalker »

kibwen wrote: post #37
Zigurd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Africa is mostly on 4G networks, and while 3G isn't a majority of the connections, it's still the next biggest share of infrastructure, far ahead of 5G which is relatively scarce. This is in the context of a population that really depends on mobile wireless for market information if they are farmers, and for payments. Having a mobile phone can take priority over having a flush toilet. Starlink has both opportunities…

> Combine this with a big rural population, and Starlink has a great opportunity, if they can find customers who can afford it. This is the rub. The primary market here are people whose communities aren't wealthy enough to afford infrastructure that would provide superior service (5G being a step up from satellite, and wired being a step up from that). So Starlink depends on there existing a growing population of peo…

One starlink receiver, a router, and some CAT-5 wire run through the village? Seems like an opportunity for local would-be ISP entrepreneurs.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#123

Post by bathtub365 »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #86
snohobro wrote: post #84

I 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…

> take full advantage of the wealth of knowledge provided by the internet Seems like a bit of a stretch in modern times. Do you have any idea what percentage of traffic is TikTok/YouTube/Facebook?

YouTube has excellent creators for almost any topic you can think of and for almost any video style you can think of

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#124

Post by xoa »

fluoridation wrote: post #51
LorenDB wrote: post #4

I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo.

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 for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean.

Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it.

Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#125

Post by modeless »

dreambuffer wrote: post #52
drnick1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> requires 30% black ownership What an absurd requirement.

The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.

Requiring SpaceX to set up a token reseller just to meet the the ownership requirement does exactly nothing for "national security". It's pure graft for whoever gets handed ownership of the reseller and nothing more. In fact if blatant enough it could be illegal under the FCPA.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#126

Post by zuzululu »

rayiner wrote: post #111
snohobro wrote: post #84

I 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…

I have a Starlink shout out! My brother in law worked on a salmon fishing boat in Alaska a couple of summers ago. They are at sea for weeks and keep fishing until the boat is full. He's done crabbing trips before and was basically out of communication for a month. On this trip, they had Starlink and were able to send us pictures and even FaceTime. Starlink delivered a huge quality of life improvement to guys who work…

man I am happy to hear that. in Europe there is still widespread cynicism and vitrol against anything Elon Musk especially Starlink.

I think that many people appreciate Starlink in rural parts but your story is one of many that are just amazing

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#127

Post by fluoridation »

sephamorr wrote: post #106
fluoridation wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.

Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#128

Post by fluoridation »

fragmede wrote: post #118
fluoridation wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.

Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.

I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#129

Post by pixl97 »

kibwen wrote: post #32
whateverboat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thieves are not educated enough to understand the difference and will steal the fiber and try to sell it (with no success) and in the anger, destroy huge swathes of the remaining fibre.

No. By that logic, PVC pipes wouldn't be safe from thieves, because thieves wouldn't be able to understand the difference from copper pipes. Anyone who's ever touched a fiber cable before immediately understands the difference from a copper cable, and if thieves can't get paid, they're not going to waste their time stealing it.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of a large portion of thieves, they will destroy $100,000 in property to steal $50 in iron to pawn off. Fiber runs to cabinets and they run those cabinets over to get the metal they are made of.

Re: Africans Are Turning to Starlink

#130

Post by Rebelgecko »

stevage wrote: post #47
robear wrote: post #22

I am not sure how to write this without it sounding like an ad for Starlink. It definitely isn't. Just trying to add an anecdote to the conversation. I live in Canada and there are a small number of people that I know that have given up faster, cheaper internet from Telus/cable/etc for Starlink. I think what it comes down to is people are tried of the two year contracts and having to negotiate a better rate and never…

How do they know Starlink isn't going to jack the prices up?

They just did a month ago, so it'll probably be a few months before they do it again
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