One more market for starlink to sell
It's unlikely that Starlink will be anything else than niche in countries where it would cost people half of their salary. Assuming that they can get the equipment at all.
StarLink may be successful in sparsely populated areas of North America and Australia and may have some success in rural areas of Europe.
Anywhere else, it won't be affordable or it won't have the local infrastructure (regional base stations), or distribution of the equipment will be banned or heavily controlled by local governments or the link access will have to follow the same rules as other internet connections, or it will just not be needed at all.
I'm curious to see how it's going to pan out given the high maintenance costs of the infrastructure, but it's clearly not going to have any effect on the average Thai's access to information.
But you’re right, in that scenario while it may address your cost point, the government can still censor it, so that censorship point stands.
Internet cafes get their internet from local ISP, which get their licenses from the government (usually the cafe also needs a license from the government/local authorities).
If you want a Starlink dish and decoder, it needs to be available and distributed in your country, which also falls under government import rules.
Say managed to get your hands on an illegally imported dish, and assume that Starlink enables your location. And how long will your access last once someone notices they can access stuff that's otherwise censored in the country? Do you really think cafe owners will jeopardise their business or their freedom for that?
Starlink can subsidise some costs, but the reality of their infrastructure is that it's always going to be very costly: they need to replace all their 1000s of satellites every 4-5 years, and build regional stations (although they claim they will have satellite to satellite comms once density is enough, but it's not operational now). That also means sending these satellites to space. Even if the price of that comes down (it won't much, a rocket is a rocket and most of it is not reusable and will still cost millions to launch). Each satellite also has a bandwidth limit.
You end-up with a fairly costly system to run, and if you really want poor countries to be able to afford it, you need to subsidise it, which cost you even more and need to rely on a limited number of high-paying customers to cover all costs and make a profit.
I personally don't think Starlink is viable in the long run. It's not a technical issue, we can clearly make stuff like this work, but the running cost is too high for what people are ready to pay, and you end up hitting hard limits.
It will probably be rescaled down and targetted to government contracts for the military, emergency services, etc, and they will limit the number of users to make it workable to those who are ready to pay a lot for it.
> I personally don't think Starlink is viable in the long run.
It’s sustainable on just capturing US rural underserved markets. Why don’t you think it’s viable?
given that countries can force all the major tech companies to censor and remove selective content, what makes people think Stalink will be immune to governmental forces of oppression?
If it's not immune and I don't think it is, how could a billionaire design a system to make it immune today, as I think it's possible to at least try to make it immune from censorship.