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Comment by quechimba | Hacker News Reader

In the village where my brother lives there are no wires. There is a 4G tower but it runs on solar panels and the connection isn't very stable on cloudy days. I spoke to a person who works at a company in that area that uses Starlink. One satellite dish would probably be enough to provide Internet for the entire village.

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That's true, but they aren't doing this to provide internet to villages. As you pointed out, there's not much demand there and that's why no one bothers to provide internet access (I guess the good thing with Starlink and Amazon's version of it is that once it works, it should work in those places too).

Anyway the real reason they are doing it is that is extremely hard to enter the ISP space. It's not even the cost of fiber to run to every home, it is the cost of laying it and all the hoops the existing monopoly will use it.

Google has tried and failed. What often happened is that when they enter market with its 1Gbps offering, suddenly the 30Mbps ISP had 1Gbps and even at a cheaper price. They could sell it at a loss, because they were making a killing in other regions. They also created all kind of obstacles when Google tried to run a wire.

It is ridiculous and we really need a law to force competition.

I'm sure there is demand, it's just too remote to be practical. They did get a fiber connection to the closest city a few years ago which made 4G faster. One million people live in the region and there are more places like that in the world. 32% of the Latin American population don't have access to high speed Internet. Schools, hospitals and businesses could be connected which would be good for education, healthcare and economy.

I spent a few days in Leticia and the Internet connection was really shaky, sometimes they can't even work at the migration office because the connection is so bad. 50 000 people live there and 67 000 in the neighboring city Tabatinga. And there's a lot of islands in the world too.

They're presumably doing it to sell internet to anybody who willing to buy it, why shouldn't that include villages?

If your point is that it's not an act of charity.. so what?

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