Saint Helena Island Communications | Hacker News Reader

Saint Helena Island Communications

sainthelenaisland.info

223 pointskickofline143 comments

> A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has an area known as ‘Saint Helena Island’. For this reason it is best when using Google™ to append to your search ‘-napa -carolina -california’, which will remove many of these irrelevant results.

Not any more! Since google "enhanced" their search to remove such operators. I just tried searching in this way for eg some restaurants and there was indeed a bunch of irrelevant results even with the exclusions. I wonder what they do now.

When did Google do this?

At least five years ago. Drives me crazy.

It’s their M.O. Relentlessly cut “power user” features. Relentlessly undermine the user’s wishes and redirect the user to Google’s preferred results.

I don’t know why we continue to put up with it. Boiling frogs I guess.

Because changing habits and routines costs energy and we don't like that.

The more direct their search the less opporunity to data mine, upsell you, or otherwise abuse your experience.

Google used to be the best site to find illegal content. Probably that's why they removed those "power user" features.

The operators work for me. I get different results with and without '-napa -carolina -california'.

Truly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"

Yeah they're not actually parsing your operators anymore. They're feeding the whole query to some machine learning model they trained and pulling "what you really meant" out of that.

It seems to me the map at the top ignores the minuses.

Do any regular web results show your - terms? I'm not seeing any in my testing.

Disclosure, I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

I also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.

Depends where you live, for me in UK it brings up a) a location in uk, then the rest are about the island.

[Saint Helena Island] brings up only results about the island

I switched to Kagi and never looked back, it's like Google was before a decade of enshittification.

How curated and censored are the search results with Kagi? As someone involved with Tantra, for example, I rely on sites that are niche and not always SFW.

You can raise/pin the NSFW domains to curate the results yourself to what you'd generally prefer to see.

You could also set up a seperate NSFW lens based on what style of results you want.

Kagi uses the Google Search API. Its results are largely Google results.

Sure, but without the ad and SEO spam, it's a totally different experience. It's really a testament to how much damage Google has done to its own product in the name of monetization.

I typed St Helena island which worked grest

Under Telephone History it says:

> The current PABX-based system went live over the weekend of 27-29th July 1990

A PBX serving a whole country, even a small one, is wild. From what I could find [1] the system used was a UXD5 exchange [2] which is technically a PSTN exchange intended for rural areas and based off the Monarch 120 PBX [3].

The architecture of the UXD5 is common to a lot of telephone exchanges of the time (possibly modern ones as well?) with actor based message passing, actors running on different levels (more real time vs less real time) and a combination of assembly and a high level language (in this case, Coral [4]). Fascinating stuff.

[1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cable_wireless_has_contrac...

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/uxd5-...

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/monar...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORAL

Population <5k people

> In July 2019 the Government of St Helena announced that it has issued a letter of intent to connect the island to Equiano. The 1,140Km branch to Saint Helena was completed in 2021 so this cable will provide the first fibre optic connectivity from St Helena to the outside world through both Europe and South Africa.

> Compared to the current satellite link the cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people{16} could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub

> [...]

> A route survey was conducted in August 2019 and at the end of the year the Government of St Helena announced that it had signed an agreement with Google™ to land the cable at St Helena, aiming to commence service in 2022.

> On 6th February 2020 Sure announced that it had no plans to upgrade domestic and small-business Internet connections to Fibre-Optic when the Equiano Cable arrives in 2022, meaning ordinary users would not see the full benefits of the new system.

Screw this ISP, man.

However it seems that they are now building an island wide fiber network owned by the government and not by an ISP, and will end the current monopoly as soon as this network is ready: https://openfalklands.com/st-helena-plans-for-an-island-wide...

Good for them. Imagine living in a natural paradise with high speed fiber at home.

Apparently Sure is based in Bahreïn ... quite a few kilometers from the island. So why would they care about anything other than money?

Looks like service was upgraded after all, though: https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/PRESS-RELEASE-Con...

The fact there is an internet monopoly barring residents to use other internet providers is sad, especially given the impact on the GDP of the island if proper high speed internet and technological resources are available.

I have a feeling the government is doing the cease and desist as a hand wavy thing to make the internet company happy, but will put little if any effort in actually enforcing it (if there is even something that could be done legally). From what I understand, the Saints are an incredibly kind and chill group of people, just living life without much worry. I can't imagine the government giving a shit

>>The fact there is an internet monopoly barring residents to use other internet providers is sad

I guess the deal was that if this company brings internet connectivity then they get exclusivity on the island for X number of years. I wish the article would get into more details about this deal.

Edit: on second read, the article does actually. It mentions the exclusivity deal was meant to expire in 2022, but because of lack of suitable replacement or alternative solutions it was extended to 2023 and it was just extended again to 2024.

u/skrause mentions in another subthread that the government has commissioned a fiber optic network going live at the end of the year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37651113

https://web.archive.org/web/20230925221524/http://www.indepe... (page 3)

> It has come to the attention of the St Helena Government that members of the public may have acquired, imported and be currently using terminals, such as Starlink, for the purposes of internet connectivity. Using such terminals is in contravention of the exclusivity of current telecommunications licencing arrangements made under section 3(4) of the Telecommunications Ordinance 1989. From 1 November 2023 anyone using such a terminal will be liable to be subject to a ‘ceaseand desist’ order issued on behalf of the Government. A cease and desist order is an instruction to stop using terminals, and continue to refrain from using terminals, whilst the exclusivity of the current telecommunications licencing arrangements remain in force. Any breach of such a cease and desist order may result in the confiscation of the equipment.

Starlink seems to be illegal to protect the government’s investment in a monopoly on the main satellite.

Relatedly, it's worth watching the entire Bill Gurley talk at the recent All-In Summit.

Edit: Updating link to jump to the relevant section of the talk. https://youtu.be/F9cO3-MLHOM?t=397

What's the connection?

The chat covers some egregious examples of regulatory capture in the US. Part of the focus is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which purported to increase competition but in fact accomplished the opposite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Thanks for sharing! I haven't come across this podcast yet and it looks like some great content.

Awesome! Thanks for the link. Ending regulatory capture is the main plank in RFK Jr's presidential campaign. He's mentioned the FDA, NIH, EPA, the CIA and the military industrial complex, but I haven't heard him talk about capture of the telecom regulators.

Sorry for the political ad, but I'm frustrated by news articles that say "voters don't want Biden or Trump", but fail to mention RFK's campaign.

(stepping off the soapbox)

Oh, and did you hear that neither New Hampshire's nor Iowa's delegates to the Democratic national convention will be counted? Or rather, they'll automatically go to Biden. I kid you not.

(I'll just show myself out)

neither RFK or Vivek Ramaswamy have a chance

if you would like candidates like that to have a chance, petition your state to allow non party members to vote in primary elections

partisans of any party are a now minority in this country but the growing number of independents dont know it yet and have no representation, while their participation in the primaries would smooth out the candidate selection

in the mean time, fawning over non consensus candidates are a waste of time

it is accurate for there to be frustration over the two predictable candidates because rabid partisans are going to pretend that the rest of the population have a choice (as long as its the "choice" they like)

To add to your suggested voter reforms, implement ranked choice voting instead of first past the post.

Alternate take: "the current licensee will sue us if we allow Starlink".

It’s sad how $$$ legacy satellite services worked almost everywhere (Inmarsat, iridium, globalstar, even ham/hf), but now that it’s within reach of the poors, they get heavily regulated to oblivion.

Seems to me that ham radio doesn't fit in that list.

pretty sure the radios came first and then the regulations came after as it became more available. Depends who you ask whether it's been regulated to oblivion.

That could mean they don't plan to strictly enforce this ban, but are merely contractually obliged to officially ban it.

Why bother with Starlink if the fiberoptic subsea cable is live now?

It's not rolled out yet: http://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm#maestrotech...

> Due to delays in finalising designs for the new network, it is now accepted that it will not be completed by January 2024

If they haven't finalized the design, I'd say they've got a ways to go.

Is that for the cable or FTTP deployment on the island itself? Seems like they could at least get much better mobile internet rates using the subsea cable instead of satellite for backhaul.

I had a very difficult time trying to figure out if that subsea cable was online or not.

Per the ISP (Sure), it does appear to have been rolled out: https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/PRESS-RELEASE-Con...

You still have to run the cable the last mile, even on an island.

Not necessarily, we have wireless technologies. Stringing cables along poles could well be cheaper, though.

I’m thinking with 4G, 5g, one day 6g and one day 7g, physical data infra’s days are numbered or will become a premium product at the residential level.

Except in Canada and elsewhere where the mobile and wireline providers are the same and deliberately keep mobile pricing high enough to disincentivize cord cutting.

None of those create more radio spectrum. I don't see a real replacement for wireline fiber and ethernet ever.

Each "g" let us modulate more data in the same channel size. Spectrum re-use via smaller cells is virtually limitless.

And we're re-allocating more spectrum for 2-way data regularly.

But if the cells keep getting smaller, at some point it will be cheaper to just bury that one fiber to beat out 12G plus the next 5 generations, rather than buy another cell to cover that one household.

Redundancy is also nice – given how remote Saint Helena is, I could imagine repairs taking quite some time.

Because the government seems highly regressive and is almost certainly controlling and monitoring the one cable they've allowed?

I’m curious where you get that impression. From their public communications, they seem to me like a pretty chill bunch. And from the size of the island, I’m not sure the advantage of snooping on the wires versus just gossiping around town. That’s assuming you could find and pay enough qualified staff to do the analysis, given that “anything to do with a computer” is on the “shortage occupation” list that automatically qualifies you for a work permit. [0]

Even in this hand-wavy announcement clutching their pearls at Starlink, they were careful to build in an extra few months for people to finish importing and hiding their Starlink terminals before they might start sending sternly-worded letters...

[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Sh... (PDF)

I wonder if other countries will (or have) ban Starlink for censorship reasons. Or frankly, lack of censorship control.

So much of our governance, if not all, is based on geographic sovereignty, and satellites can supersede that.

I hope we finally get more global governance to deal with more and more global issues.

I remember reading that Starlink routes traffic via base stations in the subscriber’s own country, in order not to anger regulators.

If you think about it it makes sense; otherwise governments could just ban the sale of Starlink equipment for violating the law.

Frankly it would be easier to enforce at the payments layer. Governments have a lot greater control over their financial system than the movement of physical goods (see war on drugs where drugs move freely despite massive interdiction efforts but money is done through currency as integrated financial products are easily monitored and controlled)

Telcos do pretty much the same -- US SIMs in China receive different Great Firewall treatment than Chinese SIMs, and I've seen some Chinese SIMs / phones on some cell networks in the US get routed back through the Great Firewall. Which is IMO pretty disgusting on the part of the US telcos, but sorta functionally the same as what you say Starlink does.

Can be seen as a positive or a negative:

You can still access your home country’s Netflix/streaming content. Log into websites that might geo-block (Homedepot.com blocks Europe…), log into work without security admins losing their mind about a “suspicious foreign access”.

Downside is that ads won’t localize into a language you don’t understand. I love it when that happens when travelling.

Actually with mobile roaming, I believe the implementation is that everything just gets tunneled back to your home carrier; so I think it is not so much the case that US carriers are deliberately discriminating Chinese traffic.

It doesn't have to be "disgusting on the part of the US telcos" to route Chinese SIMs through the Chinese Firewall if the other side of that agreement is that non-Chinese SIMs in China get to bypass that firewall.

Because ultimately, that means more ways to bypass that firewall. Chinese people in the US could but a US SIM to avoid the firewall. They could even take it home.

But routing Chinese SIMs through the firewall is only acceptable if the reverse is also true: letting non-Chinese SIMs in China bypass it. Otherwise it's just more censorship.

Seems unlikely that Starlink would put a base station on Saint Helena just to be able to serve some percentage of ~4000 population. Most likely the base station is somewhere else.

I've no idea of the numbers, but it's possible they'd one one somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic — either St Helena or Ascension — for traffic from aircraft and ships.

Indeed, they recently announced a deal with OneWeb [0] as the first under their new Ground Station Policy [1]. From the incredibly slick (for SH) promo site [2], it looks like at least some contingent of Saints are really excited about the possibilities here.

[0] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/lease-signed-with-o...

[1] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2020/news/satellite-ground-st...

[2] https://www.earthstation.sh/

I wouldn't expect Starlink to serve remote ocean areas until after they have their space lasers working well and can transport the traffic to a continent.

They already do provide service to ships.

Base stations on remote islands are a routine thing to construct. The British Empire built the first global telegraph network using their island colonies, and some of these routes are still used for Internet cables. Ascension Island for example.

They have global coverage, including oceans:

https://www.starlink.com/maritime

https://support.starlink.com/?topic=9eb841b3-2e43-a6fb-ecc7-...

They don’t need a base station now with their sat to sat lasers. They serve McMurdo now

There was a line, I believe in the Machineries of Freedom, that says the goal of "effective" libertarian politics is not to change laws - it's to design disruptive technologies that make existing laws irrelevant.

We saw one version of this with Uber and Airbnb, essentially blowing up taxi and rental regulations, respectively. This is happening with AI, where regulation is hopelessly lost in its current state. We have seen this (unsuccessfully so far) with finance and the blockchain. And arguably this is a legacy which traces its way through industrial revolution (which saw the breakup of monarchy's monopoly on labor and land) or even the stirrup or the sword.

Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

"This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" -A Man For All Seasons (1966)

Depends: are we cutting them all at once?

The context of the quote is a debate about whether to give the Devil the benefit of law. And yes, it was cutting them all at once to get at the Devil.

You can watch the original at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqReTJkjjg. (I picked the longer version at 3 minutes that includes the leadup to why the debate happened.)

> Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

Looking at Starlink's coverage map (for stationary service at least), they seem to very much be playing by the rules (i.e. international laws and regulations regarding satellite communication services): https://www.starlink.com/map

A "break rules and become unregulateable" approach would not have service boundaries corresponding to political borders.

The map is not the territory.

Don't these sats orbit the entire Earth? How is it possible there's anywhere on the planet (except maybe the poles) that they don't cover? Especially the eastern half of the US is particularly puzzling on that map.

Satellite-to-satellite forwarding is still being rolled out with Starlink, and without that, every satellite needs to have a ground station within its view to work.

The initial constellation also lacked polar orbits, which limits the maximum latitude at which satellites are available.

But both are being addressed now, and then it’s really only a question of regulatory approval.

I was of the impression that the waitlist in the Eastern US was more a problem of saturated capacity than one of coverage.

And we can see the effects of bypassing laws in stark relief - the erosion of decades-fought labor laws with the gig economy, the rent spikes from AirBnb forcing scores into homelessness.

This is the problem with deregulating businesses (as opposed to deregulating people).

This is a good reason for the new King of the UK to override that territory’s law

The new King has no powers to do anything like that. It'd be up to the British government to stick their noses in, if at all possible.

Does a monopoly make sense here? Pre starlink, there was probably a huge cost to bring internet to the island, and those doing so wanted to have some form of protection in order to confidently invest the capital to do so.

Yeah, I could totally imagine some long-term bandwidth lease funding the launch of a geostationary satellite.

But enforcing that monopoly against private users, i.e. not resellers/ISPs, seems somewhat extreme.

A number of years ago NYC decriminalized ownership of beehives, and a journalist interviewed a bunch of people who had them anyway. They all had schemes to hide their hives. One guy made it look like an AC condenser, and went so far as buying himself work clothes to make him look like a repairman.

If you make it out of the right materials, it shouldn’t be too hard to conceal a starlink antenna without destroying the gain.

The Mystery of Red Brooklyn Honey:

https://us.latinhoneyshop.com/blogs/news/the-mystery-of-red-...

Direct link:

https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/use-of-unlicenced-t...

It's extra delicious when read in context of these quotes:

> In the summer of 2016, the United Nations declared access to internet is a human right. While we are just beginning to realize the internet’s potential for our island and with the prospects of a high speed cable arriving on our shores, perhaps now is the time to re-evaluate the importance of information technology for EVERYONE. Can we truly reach our fullest potential if access to the World Wide Web is available only to those who can afford it?

> Inhabitants of the tiny tropical island of St Helena pay through the nose for an internet service that mainlanders would have considered painfully slow even during the pre-Netflix era.

> St Helena’s isolation and reliance on satellite technology, means that internet services are limited and expensive compared to many countries, and are a major barrier to development. The top residential package offered in St Helena provides 13.3 megabytes of data at a speed of 1.5 megabits per second, and costs £180.50 per month.

Yikes! Internet is expensive! And there is only a single provider legally allowed to operate.

18£: 30GB. 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up

36£: 60GB. 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up

67£: unlimited. 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up

120£: unlimited. 20Mbps down, 1Mbps up

https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/Residential-Broad...

Wait until you hear about what it costs in regular parts of the US...

Umm... significantly less than that? US telecom isn't a shining star of good value and fair pricing, but a median speed of 210 Mbps with a roughly $75/mo bill is a lot better than Saint Helena Island.

You're paying about the same amount as a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. It should not even be close!

Yes, yours is faster, for now.

I pay roughly 50 pounds for 300 mbps down and 20 up. That seems pretty typical for parts of the US without gigabit availability, sans rural areas that depend on satellite connection. I think if you want to shit on a devloped country with slow and overpriced internet, Australia is still the gold standard (not that the US is perfect by any means)

Sounds like a better and cheaper deal than in Berlin!

(Semi-joking. Never lived in Berlin, but the mind-blowingly bad infra for such a big EU IT hub is a recurring meme).

IT hub isn't exactly the vibe you get from walking around Berlin IMO.

Notably you’re looking at the _enhanced_ packages, available starting next month. The current packages available are significantly worse! https://www.sure.co.sh/broadband/broadband-packages/

The highest tier offers a whopping 31GB of data at 2mbps for the low low price of £160

From TFA:

> Currently Sure has a monoply contract with the Government of St Helena for the provision of Internet services and under this it is not clear whether it would be legal for a consumer to use Starlink. Examination of the SURE exclusive licence suggests that, if an offence is committed by somebody using Starlink, it is Starlink that commits it (by providing the service), not the consumer who receives it, but this has not been tested. It is also possible that the Government of St Helena, to protect its investment in Maestro, might outright ban the use of Starlink systems, though exactly how this might be enforced is not clear. At the time of writing it is believed that some individuals and businesses are already successfully using StarLink on St Helena{18}.

It's illegal to use the only alternative, so they can charge whatever they want.

The most interesting part (to me) is buried in the middle:

"Compared to the current satellite link the [undersea, Google owned fiber-optic] cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub, with satellites in space linking via groundstations on the island to the world via the cable. The Government of St Helena believes St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic and its political and physical stability make it an ideal and almost unique location for this use."

There is something to be learned from the simplicity and quaintness of this site - the information density is much higher than 90% of modern web sites. In a single page, by simply scrolling I learned so much about the communication infrastructure of a British island outpost.

There's a meme-like website that demos this very concept. Then there's a v2.0 or some ++ type versioning where they use very minimal CSS to actually improve the readability. I'm a fan of the use of the minimal CSS to add margins and widths as it improves readability for me.

Searching for it with only the vagueness of what I can think of right now returns nothing useful, and that's with not using Google. Maybe my vague description will be enough with someone with better recall than I have.

The original (I think): https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

First improvement: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Later iterations: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

yup, this is it. thanks for being the collective memory

https://bestmotherfucking.website/ perhaps, which I have to admit improves on http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Searching for "the best fucking website" is not fruitful though.

You missed https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ :D

There's nothing to be learned from the site's terrible organization, navigation, layout, or extreme density which makes it difficult to read. Density is not necessarily good; have you noticed that most hardcover and paperback books have pretty limited line length? Fairly generous inter-line spacing? Indented paragraphs?

There's so much "cruft" scattered around, too - tiny text "explaining" things. You shouldn't have to explain how to use your site's UI to visitors. And that UI incorporates incredibly tiny buttons that are impossible to use on mobile.

And then there's this absolute dumpster-fire: https://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm#q_navigati...

The author stopped learning about web design in the late 90's and seemingly doesn't give a damn about making his site actually useful and easy to navigate. It also doesn't come remotely close to passing HTML validation.

> Note that the postcode (‘zip code’) ‘STHL 1ZZ’ applies to the entire island, and also that the ‘South Atlantic Ocean’, while strictly unnecessary, does seem to help prevent letters being routed to California, South Carolina or Australia!

Took me several paragraphs to realize this wasn’t invoking my beloved Beaufort County

Seems that the post codes of British colonies follow a pattern.

Gibraltar is GX11 1AA (the whole country).

I believe postal codes for the British Overseas Territories (etc.) were adopted in early 2000s to allow for more convenient online ordering since for the remaining British territories postal codes are probably overkill (having about 80.000 residents at most).

I took one of the last voyages of the RMS St Helena (the only way to get there prior to 2016) and stayed on the island for 10 days. AMA

How did you spend your 10 days? Were the locals friendly to you?

I stayed in several guest houses during my time there. I also took some tours around the island. Wandering was probably the best part. The locals were extremely friendly and helpful, not to mention a riot during late nights at the pub...

Would you go back for an extended stay of more than, say, 6 months?

If I was younger and my job allowed it, certainly. I think they are close to getting an undersea fiber optic internet connection, which could make it an ideal place for someone able and willing to due a stint working remotely.

St Helena is beautiful and the people are great, but there isn't "much to do." It's like living in the countryside. If that's your vibe -- or you have a novel you want to hunker down on -- it's an ideal place.

What made you choose St Helena for your travel? Did you feel like you got to see most of the island in 10 days?

Way back in 2006/2007 I worked a severely boring, soul draining desk job. I cruised Wikipedia deeply and often. On one of these online excursions, I came across the article for St Helena -- by some measure the most remote inhabited island at the time -- and read more. I learned about the RMS St Helena and how it was the only regular way to get to and from the island. I knew at some point in my life I had to make the journey by sea and check it out for myself.

In grad school I also became acutely obsessed with the (poorly documented) voyage of Edmond Halley to the island in order to observe a transit of Venus. I spent hours in the British Library/Kew looking for anything that might mention what he got up to during that time (apparently the British Governor was replaced for sketchy reasons, etc etc).

A decade later, I got the news that the long-awaited airport was complete and would open in 2016, and that the RMS would be decommissioned. I was in a weird position between jobs and fortunate enough to have the means to book the travel for what was supposed to be the penultimate voyage of the RMS. I had grand visions of interviewing people about what they thought of the airport opening and such (some of which I conducted and wrote about [1]).

The passage I took was 5 days by sea from Cape Town to St Helena, with 10 days on the island. After that, the voyage continued north (which was unusual) to the UK, stopping at Ascension Island en route. That leg of the trip was 14 days at sea.

So really, it was kind of a daydream that turned into a real dream that turned into a lived experience. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

[1] http://www.homoridiculus.com/blowout-on-the-island-of-furiou...

I enjoyed your writeup.

Looking forward to the new cloud region!

Compared to the current satellite link the cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people{16} could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub, with satellites in space linking via groundstations on the island to the world via the cable. The Government of St Helena believes St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic and its political and physical stability make it an ideal and almost unique location for this use.

Does it have reliable supplies of plentiful and cheap electricity and water?

Because without that, datacenters won't be showing up...

And even if it did, big US companies don't really like to have data centers in places that are too remote, if only because staff have to visit from time to time and don't want to have to take an 8 hour seaplane ride to get there...

Communication hub. Probably just a downlink for Starlink for most of the South Atlantic.

They aren't talking about general purposed datacenters, but satellite uplink stations. These new constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) internet satellites (like Starlink) can network with each other but eventually need to downlink into a big terrestrial dish where the traffic meets a fiber backbone. It's position in the southern hemisphere, middle of the Atlantic and political stability (still part of keeping the sun from setting on the British Empire) would make this an interesting place for downlink stations.

Not a ton of jobs, but some CapEx for construction and probably a couple dozen people year-round.

If you want to learn more about life on St. Helena, I recommend a blog called What The Saints Did Next: https://whatthesaintsdidnext.com/

My favorite posts are the trip reports... They have hiked to every corner of the island. Great photos, and lots of history.

The beauty contest winner doesn’t have an impossibly thin body. Already looks like an interesting place…

relevant documentary video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-QejUTDCWw

Content behind the random google video ID

"The World's Most Useful Airport [Documentary]" —Wendover Productions, 2019-12-31

On 6th February 2020 Sure announced that it had no plans to upgrade domestic and small-business Internet connections to Fibre-Optic when the Equiano Cable arrives in 2022, meaning ordinary users would not see the full benefits of the new system.

Having their ISP refusing to connect customers to the long awaited fiber is the most Telco thing ever.

They changed their minds, will offer unlimited data. But the down/up isn't quite there

That's good news. I've been cheering for them since the 1st undersea cable deployment was announced (the one that fell through).

I'm surprised they didn't use the .sh domain for the website.

Given their current slow satellite internet uplink I'm surprised they don't call it Saint Helena Island Telecom.

For those of you interested in reading about work being done to start a new city (1) or new semi-autonomous country (2) where people can plan something new, St Helena Island sounds like a good candidate- remote but can still in the middle of several trade routes.

(1) https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-tech-investors-new...

(2) https://www.wired.com/story/itana-binance-charter-cities-ins...

I (sorta) know the author of a self-published book, Finding Napoleon which I think covers his time on St. Helena.

It's funny that they don't much mention the main reason anyone's heard of it.

You mean the epic steps?

I did a find on "Napoleon." what did I miss?

Why would the communications page of their site mention him? He's mentioned on other pages if you're curious enough to explore the site, though.

I guess I wasn't.

Oh, you meant that this site doesn't mention Napoleon.

I don't see a reason for a how-to site on their site to mention whatever this island's claim to fame is? Sounds like someone putting a plaque at Milford Sound that says “You might have heard of New Zealand as the filming location of Lord of the Rings!”

I've been to Milford Sound. Actually, there are tons of LOTR tours in NZ, and it's got a lot more reasons for being famous than just Peter Jackson movies.

You AND the other guy could have just said,

"You missed the other pages on the site."

Anyone's heard of what? St Helena? I think it is pretty well known in its own right so I don't see reason for a site about telecoms on the island to reference someone who was on the island hundreds of years ago ?

Why does Saint Helena have import duty, or are they talking about packages not coming from the UK?

Saint Helena has import tariffs like other colonies do. They used to have preferential rates for commonwealth countries but I'm not sure if that still exists. I guess my response would be they have import duties for the same reasons other colonies do. Why wouldn't they tax imports?

edit: found an updated tariff document https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/ST... . I don't see anything special for commonwealth countries so it's probably a thing of the past.

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