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Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

> I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites.

I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed.

Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.

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I've been there, it's beautiful. Although under ten kilometers from a town of tens of thousands wasn't exactly what I had in mind; I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber. A solar powered base station that relayed mobile internet, even if slow, would make a meaningful difference.

The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.

It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.

> I was picturing some of the places I've been in Africa that don't have mobile reception and may well never get it if it means laying fiber.

When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent.

EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.

This isn't about being able to afford infrastructure. It's about population density in rural areas.

North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.

The U.S. actually does do this! The FCC alone spends more than $2bn annually subsidizing telecom infrastructure in rural areas. There are a number of other similar programs, and Ajit Pai (current FCC chairman) recently proposed another $20bn of spending on subsidies for rural internet connections: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-204-billion-rural-...

If Ajit actually cared he'd unlicense more spectrum. Paying the Daughters Bell our own tax money to encourage them to further victimize us is fascist.

And yet you used Africa as an example, instead of North America and Australia. Why?

EDIT: Wow, you guys are really bad at admitting your own blatantly obvious biases, aren't you?

I assume because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

This is completely irrelevant to GP's claim that Africa was only used as an example because of population density.

Because I've been to the Sahara desert and it's the most remote place I've ever been. I experienced the gaps in coverage first hand.

There are equivalent places in central Australia, but even though I grew up here I haven't been more than a few hours drive away from the coasts.

I haven't been to North America. Russia didn't cross my mind, but I haven't been there either.

This isn't to say I don't have warped perspectives or prejudices about Africa. I didn't realize the population density is that high in the south, where I haven't been.

Western media only discusses African countries when things go wrong. The only people I know from there are three white families who left South Africa. If you asked me to draw a map of the countries it would be my worst continent.

The original post though really was just based on my personal experience with remoteness.

I believe you, thank you for engaging with my questions in a civil manner (I can't say the same for the way people initially downvoted my questions, but that isn't your fault of course - I hope it was clear that the "you guys" in my previous comment referred to them).

I think asking why I said Africa and not the specific country or region is fair. Had I traveled there instead, would I have said North America or Alaska? Would I have said Russia or Siberia? I'm not sure.

For what it's worth an initial rush of downvotes (or upvotes) is fairly common on HN; I'd ignore them for the first hour or so. After that you'll probably have a fair idea of the HN consensus (fickle as it is).

People that really care about an issue will sit there and refresh a thread constantly, so in the short term you're mostly knowing what they think about your comment. But they can't vote more than once.

My first comment in this tree was downvoted to -3 within two minutes of posting, but now sits at +40. I actually wasn't sure at first whether it was being downvoted by people for or against Starlink et al. Maybe both.

>> No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.

Why not? It has been done before. Every developed country went through a period of rural electrification whereby schemes were developed to encourage and/or force electric companies to run wires out into the rural farmland. Internet is the modern analogue for electrification. Those same approaches would work equally well for fiber.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification

The American approach: "The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. It was charged with administering loan programs for electrification and telephone service in rural areas. Between 1935 and 1939 – or the first 4½ years after REA's establishment, the number of farms using electric services more than doubled"

Large scale infrastructure is no longer possible in the US for all kinds of reasons. But you can't just compare infrastructure projects from the 1930s and pretend it will work. If you had to build the interstate highway system, or transcontinental railroad, or Hoover dam today, it would take decades and cost many times the price in real dollars.

If we're talking about population density in rural areas, then the poor countries of Africa (excluding Saharan desert) have a much higher rural population density than middle of USA, and there rolling out cell coverage is quite feasible, definitely more feasible than rolling out an electricity grid - there's already something like a hundred million people in sub-Saharan Africa who don't have electricity connections but do have mobile phones and coverage.

Funny, Canada, even less dense, is doing exactly that. Maybe not 10, but at multiple levels of government there have been up to half the capital without many strings attached to get broadband out to rural areas. My understanding though, it's not work the time even with the fibre there for the larger companies in many cases. This is the latest program https://www.canada.ca/en/radio-television-telecommunications...

Sure, and the US had a similar program. Just because the government promised something doesn't count until the thing is actually delivered.

Alberta already has one of the largest fiber networks on earth and has for more than a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_SuperNet

I know of at least some of the communities on the James Bay coast recently got fibre service and I think others along the Northern coast of Canada, along anecdotally several others in rural Ontario.

I am talking about money already spent and delivered, not future project that will probably be delivered on.

> So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on

Except they could have been referring to the continent. "some of the places" could refer to different places in different African countries, hence "some"; and doesn't imply all, everywhere, or "forever" in Africa.

Would you have had a second thought if someone said "Some of the places I've been in North America don't have great reception"? OP never claimed or implied Africa was a country.

When I was last in Djibouti 2g coverage was spotty, something like 20% of the country had no coverage, no 3g.

> Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.

Perhaps you are. I'm from the same country, and I couldn't be happier :).

I mean, LEO Internet constellations are awesome for providing access (not just in rural areas, but also in remote areas and at sea). But more than that, we're talking Starlink here in particular. The problem it's solving isn't (just) how to improve Internet access for some people. The main problem it's solving is how to fund SpaceX's R&D on Starship. Which translates to dropping another order of magnitude from the cost of access to orbit. Which will, longer-term, translate to a boon for astronomy.

I remember being on a tour in Romania in 2019 on a bus and in the middle of a forest in Transylvania and a colleague called that they have some issues at work and if I could please look into it. Then I just tethered my LTE reception (sometimes it dropped to 3G but was still usable) to my laptop, SSHed in and fixed the issues for them. In Germany, even being on a quite populated beach some 500 meters away from the promenade of a popular vacation city (Heringsdorf) is a hit or miss in regards to a usable mobile reception not even talking about LTE (this is on O2 Deutschland, in August 2020). There are many parts of Germany, that are more or less white spots in regards to a usable mobile data connection. I mean, sometimes my phone would just use the polish signal from Świnoujście even though Heringsdorf is about 10 km from the border.

There isn't anywhere in Europe that's "rural" by the standards of North America.

The North Slope Borough in Alaska is nearly the size of Romania, but has only about 9,000 people living there. The state as a whole is larger than all of Western Europe, but has only about 700,000 people.

Much of Canada is the same, only more so.

"There's food in my refrigerator. Ergo, world hunger is pretty much a solved problem."

If we are just going to completely ignore costs, then I can say that getting great astronomical observations is solved as well, since we can just launch satellites to take the observations instead of doing ground-based observations. So it's not clear what the big deal about these satellites is anyway.

> Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem.

No it isn't. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean the same solutions can apply everywhere.

It's not a solved problem in Sudan, Polynesia or on vehicles. Satellites is the solution there.

*4G

Romania is an outlier when it comes to internet speed.

But I know people from rich countries like UK, US, Germany with download speeds under 5 mbps paying more than you would pay for the most expensive line on Romania.

I wonder if all the people without internet will join the discussion? Oh .... wait ....

Let me summarize what you just said:

I've gotten decent internet speeds in one place that looked pretty wild, therefore worldwide internet access is a solved problem.

Romania is ranked 5th in the world broadband internet speeds: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/romania

So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy

In the United States it is far from solved.

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