Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries | Hacker News Reader

Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries

restofworld.org

260 pointsimpish9208220 comments

It is also the case in the Falkland Islands, where the horrendous de-facto ISP charges £110 a month for 100 GB [0] of data usage at a top download speed of 5 (five, literal five [V in roman]) MBPS, while Starlink offers unlimited usage for £60 per month at an average download speed of 130 MBPS.

We are still facing challenges due to an exclusive license government have with this company, known for their predatory conduct [1]... People here are having to use Chilean addresses to register the kits and pay for a mobile package.

[0] https://www.sure.co.fk/broadband/broadband-packages/

[1] https://guernseypress.com/news/2024/10/02/sure-ordered-to-pa...

Is Starlink also officially prohibited like in Saint Helena [1]? Seems to be a very similar situation (down to the same ISP Sure!).

That said, there I do somewhat see the benefits of giving a fibreoptics provider exclusivity for a while in such a small market.

[1] https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/reminder-on-the-use..., previous discussion see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37645945

For what it's worth Sure in Jersey (channel islands) was fantastic. 80ish bucks for symetrical unlimited gigabit

Jersey is in a vastly different geographic situation. It’s super close to UK & Europe, so cost of trade is massively more economical than these other places in the middle of nowhere. Economies of scale work for small countries in populous first world regions.

De facto it is... but importing the kit is not illegal. Government expects to charge a license of £5000 for each person wanting to use Starlink in an official (legal) way, and being able to justify the use of it as well... Fortunately, after a public petition, legislators are now willing to have a look into the obscene license fee... Time will tell.

> Government expects to charge a license of £5000 for each person wanting to use Starlink

Wait, what? What service is the government supposedly providing?

The only remotely believable excuse for that IMO would be "we're using it exclusively to fund a fiberoptics cable for redundancy", but even that I would have a very hard time believing.

And I forgot the kicker, it's a yearly fee.

Government is balls deep into Sure's spell... On top of that, they subsidize Sure with at least £1,000,000 a year since the Covid era... Sure is all revenue at this point, they are a predatory company with absolutely no excuses. Someone else commented that these 'good faith' ISPs are doing God's work on these remote islands, they are not, they are lining their pockets as much as they can, in many cases grabbing loads of money in subsidies. I will not be shocked if I were to find out that most of the infra was actually paid with tax payers money anyway.

In a place like the Falklands, internet should be nationalized.

Difficult situation. 5 MBPS was certainly better than nothing in the past...and yet the Sure business (now) appears largely obsolete with Starlink, Kuiper etc.

THis is something I worry about in rural NM. 3 local tribes just got a bit more than $20M for broadband infrastructure, and you have to ask ... as much as I hate Elon both before and after he went batshit insane, why not just use starlink? I mean, what justification can there be for putting in new wired infrastructure at this point?

Over a lifetime time scale, fiber will be the same price or cheaper than Starlink but 10x faster. Most people won't notice the performance difference and fiber takes years to install while Starlink is minutes.

Besides he other argument, from what I've heard starlink seems extremely very unreliable compared to fiber

In my experience, this is mostly a function of location. With a clear view of the sky, I've found it to be rock solid.

It is extremely sensitive to obstructions. A small tree branch with a handful of leaves on it will cause intermittent dropouts if it is between your terminal and a spacecraft.

> 5 Mbps

Less than a year ago, relatives of mine in rural France still only had around 1.5 Mbps via ADSL. Video chat was borderline impossible. YouTube wasn’t possible in real time (i.e. buffering took significantly longer than the runtime).

This is how it is in semi rural Olympia, WA. I'm about 20 minutes from the state capitol, but the only options are 1.5mbps ADSL, or starlink. 4g/5g arrived last year, which is a great backup when starlink is down (frequent).

My situation is slightly different but also in semi-rural WA. I'm on Verizon Home 5g and it's way faster and more stable than Starlink.

I'm always surprised when I talk to people that use Starlink who haven't considered cellular.

I should check on them again, at the time (nearly 3 years ago) when I was looking they didn't offer it in my area. But then I noticed AT&T and Verizon were showing full signal strength of LTE in the last few months. At this point my phone is better than starlink in terms of latency, throughput, reliability, and I wouldn't have to pay $120/m to a troll.

Its kind of wild that you are having issues with Starlink. Is it local geography or trees that are an issue?

I'm a little farther north on Vancouver Island and I see basically perfect connectivity with my latest generation dish. If I go look at the stats in the app it shows small losses of connectivity, but I've never noticed on a video call or anything.

probably just oversold.

I'd have to agree with the other comment on being oversold. I haven't heard the speeds being worse than your normal 4g hotspot in the woods though.

I did a short stint of RV life on verzion throughout Western Washington and received sub 800Kbps on my 4G hotspot most of the time. This was out towards Concrete, WA however, not the state capitol, Olympia.

I've noticed it is very dependent on the day. Actually during the day it's pretty good, but around 7pm it gets pretty slow. My guess is that's when everyone in the neighborhood is streaming netflix. It's not the worst for me since I generally log off at night, but if I watched TV I think it'd be annoying.

To be fair France has had this national policy of "digital availability, leave no one behind."

This resulted in my mother (remote village with ~100ish people) and father (there might be like 10 houses along a mountain road, several km from the village).

Both got upgraded from ReADSL (512k/128k, sometimes 1M on good days, 0kbps on bad ones) to 1Gbps symmetric FTTH a few years ago.

It's absolutely not economically viable to lay out fiber so it has to come from politics, which also mandates that fiber must be shared to prevent predatory pricing through local monopolies.

Do you actually live in the Falklands? That's pretty neat.

I do indeed =)

Just passed through on a ship but wasn’t able to dock at Stanley. Y’all should build a port. ;) /s

I do wanna go back and see it though

They've been talking about building a port for ages... Money is an issue. For now they want to keep some form of floating structure going, like the same we have (FIPASS), but less rust.

This is the sad situation in many Pacific nations. ISPs charge a fortune (an absolute not relative fortune) for internet services to very low income populations. Starlink is of course banned.

Meanwhile not far away in New Zealand, with a much wealthier population Starlink is prolific in rural areas. I am sure it’s also super popular in rural Australia.

How do you ban something that is in the sky?

You ban the importation of satellite dishes, and you don’t let Starlink build ground stations. You can still get around this, just like people still import drugs, but you can make it harder.

Try broadcasting on a licensed frequency without a license and find out... If the terminals were completely passive, finding smuggled terminals would be much harder.

Given how tightly beam formed starlink dishes are I wonder how easy they are to locate from any distance outside their transmission vector

"In the sky" does not mean "free from regulation."

End users of terminal equipment are still subject to the regulations of the state in which they are located.

The ITU Radio Regulations (via national legislation) create obligations on satellite operators to ensure that they do not cause harmful interference to other states' services or to violate those states' sovereignty.

> I am sure it’s also super popular in rural Australia.

It is indeed.

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/n...

It is also popular in urban areas. Starlink's availability map shows "sold out" in Brisbane (population 2.5 million) and Perth (2.1 million) because it's much faster than the mediocre VDSL2 services otherwise on offer to most of the population in those cities.

As a resident of a small pacific country where ISP charges >$100/month for relatively low quality of service, i sure can understand the problem and how interesting Starlink looks like.

But one thing to keep in mind, is that usually ISPs in small countries can't compete on price because they don't have enough scale and enough customers, in the end they just can't compete with a juggernaut like Starlink.

Although as a customer i'd love to just use Starlink and pay less for better quality of service, these local ISPs are important actors of the local economy. If these companies shutdown because of international competition, it's money going to the US, and the local economy taking a hit ...

> these local ISPs are important actors of the local economy. If these companies shutdown because of international competition, it's money going to the US, and the local economy taking a hit

This is a pretty terrible justification for maintaining obsolete infrastructure.

It's obsolete until Elon goes into a fit an decides for whatever reason he doesn't like you.

Spinning off Starlink into its own publicly traded company has been talked about for quite a while. I believe even Musk has mentioned it. If that were to happen, especially if Musk wasn't the majority shareholder and/or head of the company, his personal quirks would cease to matter. But you'd still have to be in the good graces of whoever happened to be in control of the United States at the time.

Historically speaking it is never in the interests of any country to be 100% beholden to a US corporation with high political motivations and an unstable CEO.

> This is a pretty terrible justification for maintaining obsolete infrastructure.

This is your own (wrong) conclusion.

The problem isn't about obsolete infrastructure as the infrastructure isn't bad (fiber).

The problem is about small companies in a small market (<500000 inhabitants) competing on price with an international juggernaut.

It's obviously difficult for Local ISP(s) to have a good ROI when you're deploying fiber for <50000 customers.

If Starlink comes in and provides slightly better service at half the price, it's gonna be pretty bad for the local companies.

If the cost of Starlink is half of the local ISP, you now have 50% of that revenue stream going back into the local economy instead of a single company. And the benefit far outweights the cost - 100Mbps+ for thousands of people can be transformative (hoping they all not just start using tiktok), vs a dozen ISP employees. Might not be as bad of a deal as it seems.

Yeah, until another person like you makes the same argument about whatever non-local thing the residents spend all that saved money on.

Alternatively, 50% of that money that used to go into a local company is now going overseas to a foreigner. I guess it’s a matter of perspective, is it worth killing a particular local company or industry in order to get faster cheaper internet or better service in another industry?

Local ISPs usually use 3rd party services and contractors for a lot of stuff. Your average Pacific island nation makes approximately 0% of their networking gear, will use white label foreign ISP software for almost everything, will use contractors for any upgrades, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if more than 50% went to a foreign country in any case.

Almost certainly the peering and connectivity fees are most of their expenses and all of that is international corporation domain. Id wager the ISP fees are mostly driven by connectivity to the island not greed and avarice by the local ISP.

> Although as a customer i'd love to just use Starlink and pay less for better quality of service

The radio spectrum is far more limited, so the more people use it, the slower it should get.

> If these companies shutdown because of international competition, it's money going to the US

The ideal "free market" result of this is that the ISP lowers prices in response or improves the service, in a rational competitive market.

The question is about customer density - the ISPs + fiber works great with density in miles while Starlink works better with lower density.

So hopefully the cities get better wired and villages get better wireless at the same time.

The "traditional" free market approach is that starlink gets a monopoly there, while new providers go out of business before they reach the scale to compete. Meanwhile the talent pool with the knowledge to even install local infrastructure in the first place is shrinking.

> The radio spectrum is far more limited, so the more people use it, the slower it should get.

As radio hardware gets better able to distinguish frequencies, this won’t be an issue. There’s a lot of bandwidth out there once radios can tune into a band so narrow it needs several decimals to delineate.

But if more companies can start up locally and succeed in the digital economy because of better and cheaper internet, is it not a net benefit to the country?

Just run an undersea cable to Argentina, easy peasy. Argentina should be more than willing to help out their fellow citizens in the Malvinas, right?

Nice one. I think recently, we stand a better chance to get fiber from Antarctica: https://www.goremagallanes.cl/wordpress/anuncian-proyecto-qu...

FYI your URL redirects to spam or tries to.

> Safaricom and other legacy providers have responded by lowering prices and increasing internet speeds.

Super exciting to see competition working.

The competition will get even stronger when SpaceX's Starship launches the next generation of Starlink satellites. More satellites with more capacity per satellite and at lower altitudes could make Starlink a viable competitor even in some urban areas with crappy ISPs.

Also I hope Amazon succeeds with their Kuiper constellation. Imagine two competing global satellite ISPs!

You mean Starship 2, right? Because Starship top capacity demonstrated was 1 banana. That's why Elon already started hyping how awesome Starship 2 is gonna be. Because it becomes obvious for everybody that Starship will perform below even most modest past predictions.

Starship 1's LEO capacity has been stated to be 50 tons to LEO. Which is significantly below the goal of 100-150 tons, but absolutely massive compared to anything else. Starship 2 flies next week, so it's moot.

> Starship 1's LEO capacity has been stated to be 50 tons [...] absolutely massive compared to anything else.

I don't really know much about rockets. Do I read here correctly tha Falvon Heavy has 63,800 kg payload to LEO capacity?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

> Starship 2 flies next week, so it's moot.

So I guess the OP really meant Starship 2.

Falcon Heavy can nominally do 64 tons to LEO, but it's volume constrained. It's really hard to fit more than 15-20 tons worth of useful cargo in the fairing. What the extra thrust is useful for is pushing 15 tons to beyond Earth orbit.

Your dislike of Musk is clouding your judgement.

They're not using semantic versioning. SpaceX hasn't even finished a production ready starship, they are still very much in the R&D stage. Just because the latest iteration is know as V2, doesn't mean much.

The fact they haven't achieved the extremely ambitious goals doesn't reflect poorly on the engineering going into Starship, or that "V1" has failed to hit the goals.

Why does every subsequent prediction of anticipated Starship capacity gets lower and lower over the years? You could draw a graph and bet if they manage to finalize the product before payload to orbit reaches zero.

Yeah, Twice the space junk!

such constellations are in LEO, which means their orbits decay in years, not centuries. The satellites associated with "space junk" are in higher orbits like geostationary.

Geostationary satellites are way too far and few in between to meaningfully present a problem. The majority of dangerous (in Kessler syndrome sense) junk is on higher LEO and eccentric orbits.

Correct. Most non-Starlink constellations LEO are going up around 800 - 1200 km altitudes. Those orbits have century to millenium level deorbit times and pose significant Kessler risk.

I actually struggle to think of something "less-junk" than potentially providing tens of millions with cheap(er) access to the Internet. Who otherwise would be exploited for it. Or plain just wouldn't have it. Seems like one of the best-possible uses for orbit IMO.

Plus (and I'm no expert), I believe that since these satellites specifically require a rather low orbit, they're by-design quick to de-orbit in the case of disaster or destruction.

Less junk? Weather satellites, climate monitoring satellites.

But also I don't think the internet has been a net-positive thing.

> Less junk? Weather satellites, climate monitoring satellites

These typically operate at higher orbits. From a strictly space junk perspective, that makes them more of a debris risk than even multiple Starlink fleets in LEO.

> quick to de-orbit in the case of disaster or destruction.

In case of destruction, the satellite breaks up into many individual pieces each having a potentially very different orbit. Many of those parts might then stay up longer than the satellite would have if it remained intact. The parts can also cause a chain reaction which eventually breaks everything in low earth orbit.

Starlink satellites are placed in extremely low orbits specifically to avoid their becoming dangerous space-junk — their orbits are intended to decay after around 5 years, at which point they burn up in the atmosphere and leave no debris behind in LEO. Future iterations of the satellites may have even shorter lifetimes as launch costs get cheaper.

Starlink V1 was placed in low orbits because it was cheaper / constrained by F9 payloads (not only reason by imo primary).

Starlink V2 is 1000-2000km orbits with expected deployment of 12000 sats.

Starlink V2 already started deployment back in 2023, and they actually requested lower orbits (~350km) in order to reduce latency.

Moving to 2000km would be a massive downgrade in performance, I'm not able find any source for that, everything points to the next generation (V3) being deployed via Starship at that lower altitude of 350km.

Apologies, I got 2000km confused with another megaconstellation, later rollouts / V2s+ are suppose to be up to 1200km, which was initially filed / granted with FCC. They did request/allow to move some of of larger v2s to lower orbits, but the full megaconstellation plan won't be constrained to <350km simply because there aren't enough orbit slots (as managed by UN/ITU) for the constellation size star link envisions. Below is recent image of current starlink distribution. Most are 400-500km and above, i.e. much longer decay times. My understanding is they're throwing v2 "minis" which still weight 3x more to lowerish orbits because that's most economical for F9 delivery, but once they have more payload via starship, full size v2+ is going 500km-1200km. 500km more altitude as like ~4 milliseconds of latency, which is not nothing, but still minor vs economic benefits of more coverage with less hardware. IMO current low LEO focus isn't ... starlink being responsible, it's result of cost optimization of coverage:payload for F9. Starship will come with different set of cost optimizations, likely for higher orbits using larger hardware, but less of it.

https://imgur.com/a/VuweZZo

AFAIK Starlink does not plan to put satellites in 1200 km orbits. All Starlink satellites are in orbits of 600 km or less, where any debris naturally decays in less than 5 years:

https://www.starlink.com/updates#update10

> Starlink satellites operate in a low Earth orbit below 600 km altitude. Atmospheric drag at these altitudes will deorbit a satellite naturally in 5 years or less, depending on the altitude and satellite design, should one fail on orbit. SpaceX proactively deorbits satellites that are identified to be at an elevated risk of becoming non-maneuverable. This proactive approach minimizes the number of non-maneuverable satellites in space.

During China's ASAT test, almost all of the debris remained in the same LEO orbit. The amount of energy needed to climb over 1000km to reach MEO or over 35000km to reach GEO is significant, and even then, to reach a stable orbit after the climb is very unlikely. Kessler Syndrome is always a consideration, but with Starlink it's still minimal, especially since Starlink's elevation is only 340km, while China's ASAT test targeted a satellite at 900km.

Next gen starlink v2s are going to be 1000-2000km with starship. Low LEO v1s was more limitation of F9. Shooting high LEO ery expensive (PRC has HQ19s for 3000km), but realistically once US/PRC rolls out starship tier reusable payload vehicles at scale, we're goign to start seeing enough co-orbital asats being launched to guarantee kessler.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

> On December 1, 2022, the FCC issued an approval for SpaceX[66] to launch the initial 7500 satellites for its second-generation (Gen2) constellation, in three low-Earth-orbit orbital shells, at 525, 530, and 535 km (326, 329 and 332 mile) altitude. Overall, SpaceX had requested approval for as many as 29,988 Gen2 satellites, with approximately 10,000 in the 525–535 km (326 to 332 mile) altitude shells, plus ~20,000 in 340–360 km (210 mile to 220 mile) shells and nearly 500 in 604–614 km (375 to 382 mile) shells.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#cite_ref-66

Was not aware they scuttled 1,200km ka/ku band constellation and corrected in another reply. Either way, per your citation, the current plan still puts 10k+ objects in 400km+ orbits where debris hangs around for much longer. Primary point still stands - starlink isn't limited to sub 400km constellation and kessler syndrome risk for higher orbits is real (risk increase not linear). Especially, if starlink plan to go to 42k above currently planned 30k, most are going to be 400km+ since sub 400km orbits are taken. Unless UN/ITU increase slots, the amount of sub 400km slots are fixed, and expanding megaconstellations including future starlink expansion is going to be satuating orbits with multi year / multi decade decay.

Not sure why you picked 400km? All Starlink satellites are in orbits less than 600km where debris is naturally eliminated in 5 years or less:

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#sustainability

> SpaceX operates its satellites at an altitude below 600 km because of the reduced natural orbit decay time relative to those above 600 km. Starlink operates in \"self-cleaning\" orbits, meaning that non-maneuverable satellites and debris will lose altitude and deorbit due to atmospheric drag within 5 to 6 years, and often sooner, see Fig. 1. This greatly reduces the risk of persistent orbital debris, and vastly exceeds the FCC and international standard of 25 years (which we believe is outdated and should be reduced). Natural deorbit from altitudes higher than 600 km poses significantly higher orbital debris risk for many years at all lower orbital altitudes as the satellite or debris deorbits. Several other commercial satellite constellations are designed to operate above 1,000 km, where it requires hundreds of years for spacecraft to naturally deorbit if they fail prior to deorbit or are not deorbited by active debris removal, as in Fig. 1. SpaceX invested considerable effort and expense in developing satellites that would fly at these lower altitudes, including investment in sophisticated attitude and propulsion systems. SpaceX is hopeful active debris removal technology will be developed in the near term, but this technology does not currently exist.

> https://sxcontent9668.azureedge.us/cms-assets/assets/figure_...

> Fig. 1: Orbital lifetime for a satellite with a mass-to-area ratio of 40kg/m2 at various starting altitudes and average solar cycle.

> In case of destruction, the satellite breaks up into many individual pieces each having a potentially very different orbit.

Depends on what you mean with "potentially very different orbit". Each piece still has to be at least on some elliptic orbit that eventually again passes through the spot where where it broke up*. If it was on a low orbit to begin with, it'll still burn up soon-ish as it decays. You cannot increase the perigee of some formerly circular orbit with only a singular application of force, nor can you increase the perigee of an elliptic orbit higher than its old apogee through the same means.

It'll take a lot to get pieces into orbits where they avoid decaying within a reasonable time span.

*Disregarding external factors like the gravitational pull of a third object, and assuming no drag and perfect point masses.

It is perigee, not apogee, that matters for the lifetime of a satellite. In case of collision, it is near impossible for any object ejected to have a higher perigee than that of the original satellite. Some energetic particles might have higher apogees, sure, but that will not affect their time to deorbit.

All those satellites are in low enough orbits to have lifespans measured in single-digit years. They will not stay in orbit as "junk".

Low earth orbit is the best orbit because space junk accumulation is impossible there

Low earth orbit is a range from "pretty much everything down here will naturally deorbit in a few months" to "it'll take decades to naturally deorbit from up here and it'll have to not hit the majority of satellites ever launched on the way..."

I remember when the plans for starlink originally came out, the two main complaints about it were 1) clogging up the atmosphere with space junk, and 2) the satellites clogging up terrestrial bandwidth.

I haven't heard anyone complain about either of these things lately, I'm not sure if it's because they were never legitimate complaints, or it's because once the system was launched it became clear that complaining about it was pointless....

It’s because it’s not being covered anymore. Astronomers only complain more, but nobody cares.

They are in the lower orbits. They will fall off the orbits in couple years and burn up.

Google Fiber had the same effect in Austin, it's so awesome.

There are no data caps on any providers because Google Fiber doesn't have them. Everyone upgraded their service to try to match Google's speeds, so Gigabit is easy to get pretty much anywhere in the city. Google is offering up to 8gb now and ATT is trying to match those speeds.

Company reps regularly knock on doors trying to get people to switch to their service offering deep discounts for 1 year+.

Can confirm. Where I live in Austin I have a choice of no less than 4 different ISPs, two cable and two fiber. Not even counting wireless options, which probably also exist.

I'm watching this happen right now in Mesa, AZ. We just got Google Fiber a few months ago. All of a sudden there are more choices and better prices.

Yes, it's a triumph of capitalism that we have to waste the energy and materials to build out the infrastructure N times before competition kicks in to give us prices that were apparently possible (but not offered) all along!

It's a failure of democracy. Voters are not smart enough to understand the utility of ubiquitous fiber to the home as a utility, so they do not vote for leaders who prioritize that.

Is google fiber still expanding and taking on new customers? I was sure I saw it on that killedbygoogle site ages ago.

Are they still reusing ghost fibre and doing micro-trenching, or are they taking a different angle now?

Yep, they're still expanding! It was all brand new fiber installations across several neighborhoods here. Dug up the streets everywhere for a few months. Mesa just opened up access to anyone that wants to install fiber. I know of different 3 vendors in the area who installed their own new lines.

I was surprised they jumped to our neighborhood so soon. I don't live near downtown Mesa where they started. But I am near a lot of new datacenters.

Just a guess — but I imagine that Starlink passing over a continent and not having any customers below would be a waste of that orbit arc. I mean Starlink could just give away the bandwidth until it actually was running low on it.

That’s not how satellite orbit works. Imagine that the earth rotates below the sat orbit. And that the sat orbit doesn’t go parallel to Latitude or Longitude.

That doesn't negate their point. Starlink satellites still pass over Africa regularly and completely.

The only caveat I'll say is that starlink generally requires ground stations to provide connection at scale. So it's not 0 marginal cost for them to provide it for free. But the general thought is right: the marginal cost is small. Launching satellites is the expensive part, and once you have them up there, you might as well serve Africa

This may be an incorrect generalization, but I thought I read that in much of Africa, people do not really use fixed ISPs. They just use the cell phone infrastructure for their internet needs via their phones. I understand this is because cell phone infrastructure is a lot cheaper to roll out and also that there was less desktop computers, etc to plug into ethernet cables.

So this article seems to be comparing against something that isn't very popular in the first place - fixed ISPs.

It's cheaper, at least where I live in Central Africa.

You can pay as your budget allows — per day, per hour, night bundles, or even smaller data packages like 150MB.

Public Wi-Fi isn’t common in places like malls, gyms, schools, offices, or hospitals here. However, mobile data ensures you stay connected on your cellphone.

I've switched between three ISPs in the past three months, all of which have been disappointing, mainly due to poor customer service. With cellular data, I can easily top up using mobile money whenever my data runs out.

I also use my phone’s hotspot to connect my PCs at home or on the go.

150MB? damn, that's like a SPA

There are lots of lazy software 'engineers' in wealthy western nations who just assume everyone, everywhere has unlimited 5G or gigabit fibre, and that the size of their 150MB React monstrosity or the 300 API calls it makes when you click a button don't matter.

It's an exaggeration 10x but yeah MBs is not unheard of

edit: it's funny there was this cool sports car demo with scrolling animations and if you looked at the code, it loaded like a 1000 images to do the animation

I think if you open the Network Inspector more often, you'll find that you weren't actually exaggerating at all.

Resource utilization has basically zero headspace for many developers now, and even less among non-technical stakeholders (who fundamentally rely on engineers to bring it to their attention).

Things are really bad these days.

It's so rare for developers to care about performance that when you find someone who actually does, it makes quite a splash.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41883419

I always assumed it's largely a SV thing. The rest needs to pay for infrastructure out of pocket and 150MB transferred to any new visitor quickly piles up.

That is technically correct, but we also pay for the data through the nose. I use two mobile providers here in Tanzania. From one I got a dedicated data SIM card, where I pay 1000TZS (40ct) per GB (the normal price listed on the website is double, but for some reason there is always a 100% bonus included). The other is a regular SIM card where data costs 2000TZS (80ct) per GB (occasionally they offer a bonus where i get an extra 1.5GB for the same price). In Uganda earlier I paid $8 for a 12GB package.

If you need a lot of data then a wired connection is a lot cheaper. If you can get it, that is. Fiber is only available in large cities. And even there, only in areas with enough demand to make it worth putting in the cable.

This talk had some very interesting slides from the ITU on internet price due to data scarcity and lack of options.

"38C3 - Net Neutrality: Why It Still Matters (More Than Ever!)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_gqhpLSc_8

I wouldn't worry about it. Government officials will find a way to change this ...

Even now there's countries with a tax on unlimited internet on cell phones.

Starlink is significantly more resistant to graft than terrestrial service.

For the most part SpaceX is playing nice with regulators, but if Zimbabwe's government tried to extort Starlink users, SpaceX could just open up service and Zimbabwe could do absolutely nothing to stop them.

Wouldn't that be considered a form of dumping if they offered it for free?

I didn't say free, they'd just allow signups and ignore local restrictions.

How will they collect payment without an in-country business entity?

Dogecoin.

Same way Russians pay for Steam

This happens all the time for many many businesses. Do you think all software vendors, small businesses that ship products have an in-country business entity? They just take online payments.

Most software vendors do not make themselves a target, they rely on the cooperation of banks in-country to process payments.

Sure they could. They could make it illegal to possess Starklink equipment within their borders, in the name of “national security” or whatnot.

Starlink can talk direct to cell phones.

Those work far worse (bandwidth) than the dedicated terminals.

Only for extremely low-bandwidth service, good for texting and such.

That would be enough to get that information, totalitarian governments don't want you to get. So expect regulations regarding those smartphones soon.

And be aware if you travel with a satellite capable device (india apparently also don't like them):

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-b...

There's no way to put the smartphone genie back in the bottle and there's no way to visually differentiate satelote capable phones. It's going to be easy to smuggle them across borders.

Maybe, but would you currently like to go to india with a satellite capable device?

And in the future I can imagine mandatory software that needs to be installed in many countries, to be able to do any buisness there.

Not specifically against satellites - but for using the bus, paying the hotel, getting a appointment at the police, ... and that app would make sure, you only connect to authorized means of communication.

The hard part will be preventing that shit to become universal.

India sees the ability for anyone to anonymously post things on the Internet as all kinds of stupid, and heavily regulates the access to the Internet so any in-country activity can be tracked back to an individual.

Also, only using allocated spectrum. Starlink Direct-to-Cell requires partnership with mobile providers that hold that spectrum, like T-Mobile. Terrestrial network using those frequencies would probably swamp the signal from space. Legally, Starlink can't use those frequencies without permission from each country.

This is the case in Iran despite there being an ever growing number of them there.

Problem in Africa is that the Chinese will sail in with their alternatives at the first sign of trouble. Right now, we can’t have games like that in Africa. We’re in an almost daily grind trying to counter Chinese influence as it is. The last thing we need is Elon sailing in torpedoing our efforts.

We need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re no longer the only game in town, and act accordingly when using power. Soft or hard.

Well if the point is that Zimbabwe starts playing games and corruption starlink can ignore them. Sure the Chinese could play Zimbabwe’s game, but then they’d likely be more expensive and worse quality by blocking things the government doesn’t like. If people can still access starlink why would they use the state sanctioned but crappy provider?

Because China isn't exactly famed for its corporations' market clearing prices being expensive, and most people would rather buy legal satcomms equipment (and VPN in, if they really need to access something the Zimbabwean government doesn't want them to see or the Chinese government cares about Africans seeing) than jump through hoops to get the equipment and subscription payments to the American service, bandwidth which Starlink has minimal motivation to give away cheaply anyway.

The Chinese don’t have sth similar right now, right? Also at this point tbh would prefer Chinese whatever over us/starlink. At least it will be more rational.

They've already started launching their own satellite internet constellation. It will likely be less capable once completed and take longer to complete, but they are aiming to have that capability.

It is the case in Iran, India, China, South Africa, Russia, North Korea, Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Occupied Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Myanmar, ... a hell of a lot more countries than people seem to realize in this thread.

Almost explains why Musk bought the US government.

I believe that easily totals up to that for more than half of the human population connecting to Starlink is illegal.

Many of these examples are wrong, or essentially wrong. For example it does not work in 99% of India. There are just a few border areas where the geofencing doesn't work.

Same with Occupied Ukraine. It's difficult to pin the area of control down precisely, given that Ukraine uses Starlink for combat capability.

Isn't Starlink subject to frequency spectrum licensing in each country it operates in?

It's in the same band as regular satellite internet, so the licensing is already dealt with.

Has Starlink as an org shown any interest in resisting local pressure to that extent?

I'm asking, I don't know, but even when technically feasible there are lots of concerns with defying local governments, good and bad.

Iran, Myanmar, Sudan (not even the US government or US Media wants them there), Cuba, Venezuela.

Somewhat isolated countries… might apply to some African nations.

Zimbabwe could do absolutely nothing to stop them

They could issue an order to local payment processors to block all payments to Starlink...like Brazil did. In this particular hypothetical, Zimbabwe would have more solid legal grounds for blocking payment than the Brazilian judge (TLDR: X didn't adhere to all of Brazil's regulations and refused to pay the resulting fines so a judge deemed Starlink a related company and blocked payments to Starlink until X complied.)

> (TLDR: X didn't adhere to all of Brazil's regulations and refused to pay the resulting fines so a judge deemed Starlink a related company and blocked payments to Starlink until X complied.)

IIRC, the judge didn't block payments to Starlink; instead, the judge told the banks to take the value of the fines from the Starlink bank accounts.

Per Reuters, the judge blocked the financial accounts of Starlink, meaning that Brazilian companies were barred from conducting financial transactions with it. https://www.reuters.com/technology/brazil-judge-blocks-starl... https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/8/29/brazil-judge-blo...

It's a little more complicated than that. There are two international treaties at play here (that the US has ratified)... the Outer Space Treaty requires that countries regulate the actions in outer space of their citizens and companies, in compliance with the outer space treaty and other international treaties (cf. Article VI and Article III). The Convention of the International Telecommunications Union of 1997 (the last version the us has ratified) specifies that the US shall abide by the rules of the ITU, including in allocation of satellite spectrum (Article 6). The ITU allows countries to limit the use of spectrum in certain bands (including those used by starlink) within their borders.

So Zimbabwe actually can ban starlink. And if it ignores Zimbabwe... well Zimbabwe will complain to the ITU, and the ITU to the US. The US would be under obligation to regulate Starlink... with the minor exception of its not clear that the US has any agency that can, at least under current law.

Anyway, it would be a total mess if Elon did that (except in a country like Russia where the US wants him to do that)... and I have no idea what would happen.

No one would allow a business perceived to be US Owned to play games like that in Africa right now anyway. With the Chinese sitting right there ready to swoop in and help the affected nations problem solve.

We’re not as dumb in the US as the rest of the world seems to think.

The rest of the world only thinks the US is dumb because they rely upon us to make the kind of decisions that they don't want to have to make. It's easy to criticize without real skin in the game.

I mean Trump is an idiot... but umm... Berlusconi?

Note that Starlink requires a ground station near the users.

Not since they turned on the lasers.

Thats still a massive compromise that only suits for low population density like in oceans.

How does that work when I get Starlink in the middle of the ocean as I have done?

I had a coworker who grew up in Africa and was involved with ISPs there. He had some pretty important jobs in a couple countries.

His explanation why he came to the US to do what were lower level jobs was that in the places he worked it was all who you knew and if your given buddy who got you that job fell out of the good graces of those in power ... you were screwed forever.

He had enough of that, good guy, very capable, worked his way up again in the US.

you better read history on colonization in Africa. letting foreign companies to have a grip on resources (data and propaganda channels in modern days) wont end well for host nations.

If you guys are so pro business why blocking TikTok and other Chinese firms?

> Kenyan telecoms have also raised concerns about Starlink taking market share away from local companies that employ thousands of people on the African continent.

The point of infrastructure is to deliver services which enable productivity and quality of life for the broader population. Public services are not a jobs program. I will continue screaming this into the void until I turn transform into a pickle.

Africa is a graveyard of infrastructure.

It's all so tiresome.

I've gotta agree on this. That's a bummer for the thousands of people working with hyper-expensive providers. It might not even be those providers' faults: it's probably not cheap being the first company to run infrastructure into less developed areas. And yet, should we hold down the millions of people who want affordable Internet access because of it? I don't think so.

Edit: And for transparency, I'm about as far from a Musk fan as it's possible to be. I'm not saying this because it's him doing it. I'm glad someone is, and if happens to be him, fine, so be it.

> Public services are not a jobs program.

Indeed but wealth extraction from already piss poor countries by artificially dumping prices that cannot be sustained by domestic industry has been a problem with Africa for decades, and that after centuries of colonialism on top of it.

Africa used to have a vibrant textile and agricultural industry - Simbabwe for example was known until two, three decades ago as the "grain chamber of Africa" - but Western "donations" aka mitumba and "aid" programs completely wiped out the domestic industry, leaving many countries that were self-sufficient now utterly dependant on foreign supply.

That's interesting. We are taught that Zimbabwe's farming collapse was due to government appropriation from folks with European heritage to folks with African heritage.

Because you're ignoring the order of events.

Lmao its definitely not because they kicked out all the white farmers and indian small business owners right?

Here’s some lecture for you: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mugabe.

> Indeed but wealth extraction from already piss poor countries by artificially dumping prices that cannot be sustained by domestic industry has been a problem with Africa for decades, and that after centuries of colonialism on top of it.

You also need to work out what is happening with the money that is saved. Sure, people working for the local ISP are probably out of a job, but more people can access the internet at much more reasonable rates. This boosts the economy; probably more than the local ISP did!

> Public services are not a jobs program.

It definitely feels like a one in Canada (or France).

There is a lot of idealism wrapped up in this statement and just because we think something should be does not make it truth.

This is slightly misleading, as most Internet access in African countries is via mobile phones, not 'traditional' in-home connections.

That being said, it would be interesting to see what happened if all of, say, Lagos (fastest-growing city+suburbs in the world) suddenly started using Starlink exclusively.

"Good things" is not very high on my list...

Lagos can't use starlink very much because starlink has limited capacity in any given area. The future sats might improve that a bit with more sats and more capacity per sat, and also there will be more non starlink constellations, but it's an inherent problem. If they targeted any densely populated area they would vastly over-provision the rest of the more sparsely populated world.

So in general it's good news for the rural population (if they can afford it), but it doesn't really help too much for the cities.

> Lagos can't use starlink very much because starlink has limited capacity in any given area

That's very much not what the Starlink-proponents are, loudly, proclaiming. Because, satellite-peer-to-peer stuff, Elon-magic in general, and whatever.

Please note: I think that Starlink is mostly space pollution, and that offering meaningful Internet connectivity to Africa, or rural America, or anywhere mostly involves 'lots of fiber', some radio, and lots of cooperation.

But: "just get your Starlink dish and be done" is definitely an Internet Truth, and it's Wrong, and I think it's worth Pointing Out.

For a significant population it's right.

What about rural population in poor countries? I live in Kazakhstan where we don't have a lot of money (or population), and many people live in very sparsely populated areas. Internet connectivity in cities is fine (I pay like 10 USD for symmetric 60 megabyte/s fiber), but villages are few and far between, and it's simply not economical to cover them with fiber: you'll need thousands of kilometers of it to cover maybe a few thousand people. Maybe it will be practical when/if the country has 20-30 times the population.

The government has already provided many rural schools with Starlink terminals, and many locations which only recently didn't have internet connectivity now do have it. Apparently they don't see something you do.

> it's simply not economical to cover them with fiber: you'll need thousands of kilometers of it to cover maybe a few thousand people

Are these places covered by "POTS" copper telephone access?

Providing service to sparsely populated rural areas is a good fit for Starlink, but doesn't justify the astronomical cost of the system: they need the "I got rid of Comcast and life has never been better" crowd for that, and they can't do that without inevitably running out of spectrum, bandwidth and physical space in the sky.

So, while technically very interesting, and providing some value before it all comes inevitably (and literally -- see: space junk) crashing down, all that talent and money spent on Starlink would better be put to use elsewhere.

But unfortunately it's easier to get investment for space dreams than for running fiber, even though it's the latter that's mostly needed, and despite plenty of success stories.

I have yet to see a starlink proponent suggest starlinl is a good solve for densely populated areas. Are there some misguided/uneducated people saying dumb stuff on the internet? I am sure they are out there, but you can find someone saying almost anything you can imagine on the internet.

Most African countries operate internet access via buddy/bribery cartels to tax the people highly and enrich the bribers. They hate Starlink's access to anyone who can import a starlink terminal and set it up and they seize them whenever they find them. If Starlink has a licensed path = they would want the lost bribes to be replaced by their fees. All in all = a huge drag on internet access in Africa. A few countries escape this - a precious few..

It's more nuanced than that. African governments, like any other government, want to regulate and control access to all communications and related infrastucture. Governments for example would like a killswitch they can force Musk to push if need be.

Also ISPs are big businesses with telecom companies paying huge sums for licenses (3G,4G licensing etc). Starlink is seen as jumping to the front of the line with little to no similar license requirements (or bribes if you want to call them).

Yes, it does upset their apple cart = what he intended IMHO. The sale of spectrum in the USA/Canada also lards up costs under the guise of 'free market competition' LOL = why internet is USA/Canada is so expensive there compared to many places in Europe/Asia

Dosent every country sell spectrum for 4/5G telecom?

https://pts.se/en does it in Sweden.

Kind of how it has to be?

US spectrum auctions maximize for dollars in governor coffers instead of value to citizen.

The government could give the spectrum to telcos for free. AFAIK spectrum was free (with reasonable usage restrictions) in the US for a long time.

For 3G, instead of selling the spectrum the PTS in Sweden did a "beauty contest" and gave it away to the companies that promised the biggest buildout in the smallest amount of time.

Sounded like a great idea, the money that would go to a spectrum license would instead go to building out the network instead, but it was kind of a flop. Telia was left without a license and had to share licenses with Tele2 who didn't want to invest as much, and Orange got a license and immediately said "nevermind this is too expensive" and canceled their plans. And then everyone took 3 years longer than they promised in their proposals so it didn't even speed up the buildout.

A bit skeptical about the article because in Ghana, Starlink is mostly used by the elites. Majority of people stick to mobile data or the local ISPs because it is known to be cheaper. Also, I wonder which fixed ISP the writers speak of (with respect to Ghana) because those price ranges seem a bit too extreme to be that popular in Ghana. And also, way more expensive than what the local ISPs provide.

Edit: It seems I might be wrong and the perceived high cost comes from the actual starlink device and not the internet plan. The article just compares the internet plan prices. The cost of the device and the restrictions on usage (can’t use in different locations etc) serves a deterrent to the average Ghanaian anyway.

Without seeing the underlying costs its hard to really know if this is like early Uber/Lyft where investors are trying subsidizing growth of a service in order to grow marketshare.

Long term - once the local ISPs are out of business, then do prices go up and to either cover costs and/or excess profits start to go to the investors.

$633 (USD) per month in Zimbabwe is crazy. I could see Starlink becoming the internet backbone for micro-ISPs to slice.

I wonder if they used the official exchange rate or the black market one

It's the price for 100 Mbps. You can pay for as low as 5.

That's if you pay in local currency. They have "promotional" packages in US dollars at $150 for a 100MBps line.

I used to be quoted that for 20MBps and even 8MBps! these days it's a bit better since you can get that for about $150 if you're lucky enough to be near a fibre line.

100Mb/s continuously utilized is 100MB * 60 * 60 * 24 * 31 = 33 TB. AWS egress is $50/TB.

AWS is a perfect comparison because they are also crazy expensive for egress. You get 10 Gbit/s for around 600$ in every NA and European datacenter.

Unbelievable value for money. Will it be possible for Starlink to ever be better than proper fibre though?

It's probably already at a point where from a cost vs. benefit perspective I don't know if we should be laying a lot more cable, but I wonder if it will ever make the existing cables obsolete.

No. Starlink won't be able to offer enough capacity to completely eliminate fibre, even in rural areas.

I can see that being true in high density areas, but I've got to think even now it's good enough that you really should question if rural areas should bother with fibre?

it will never be better than fiber for the simple fact that’s it’s less reliable. The “uptime” of a fiber connection to the home will most likely be higher than a fiber-like connection from a satellite. And you’ll have better “ping”.

Fiber doesn’t care about cloudy days, typical storms, etc.

Starlink is of course superior when there’s a massive natural disaster, or major power loss to your region. Or if you’re in a rural area with zero other good options.

I‘ve had Starlink for over 2 years, not had a single perceptible minute of outage including in thunderstorms. Might have been slower than usual but not enough to notice. I switched because fibre in our rural area was way less reliable.

that’s shocking to me actually. Was the ISP just bad? Wow.

I guess that challenges my perspective. The ping point still stands. May or not be noticeable depending on how you use the internet.

I was very surprised myself. Ping is <30ms to google.com right now so fine with me.

If web servers were deployed to space, and everyone was connecting through satellites would there be any upside for ping?

Sure New York to Ohio is always going to be fastest over fibre, but what about New Zealand to London? Not sure how much that matters though and the speed of light is a pretty hard limit to what's possible.

it mostly matters for video conferencing and gaming. i think everything else can more or less buffer no problem. :)

> Will it be possible for Starlink to ever be better than proper fibre though?

i doubt it, the speed of light is only so fast. Latency up to LEO, down to earth, back to LEO, down to you will always be more than to your local telco CO and back.

Yea, this makes sense, but what if web servers are deployed to space?

I don't imagine it will ever be 'better'. Like wifi though, at some point it will probably be good enough that for 90+% of use cases the tradeoff of cables isn't worth it.

Like I know ethernet is better, but very rarely does that little bit better latency or connection stability practically matter.

Maybe SpaceX should partner with Activision-Blizzard to run Diablo 4 servers in space so Elon can get better latency for His Pit 140+ runs when flying in his private jet.

Would give a whole new meaning to cloud computing. We can only hope.

I think the latency of satellite is very much tolerable as it is for most stuff.

The use cases where it starts to be a problem is usually when humans are interacting with each other or humans/machines with financial markets. Maybe other things I'm not thinking of.

I don't think servers in orbit can solve this problem?

Deploying web servers to space seems ridiculously far-fetched. Just insanely expensive without any real upsides.

Cool though

Fibre will always be better for densely populated areas. But for less dense satellite is making a lot of sense.

However, for nation states there is a lot of value in having redundancy and sovereignty over your telecommunications infrastructure. Having a foreign country's company being sole provider could put you in a tough position (for the good/bad of your population).

If they get satellite to satellite communication working across the entire globe, there's one niche usecase where it's certainly better. Latency over very long distances.

Light travels faster in a vacuum (laser in space) than it does through glass (fibre optic cable), when the gains from that exceed the trip up and down to the satellites you're coming out ahead in terms of latency. It may also be a more direct path than following undersea cables, but I haven't checked.

For bandwidth and regular internet connectivity, you can't really beat fibre. It's just so compact and speedy enough.

In Canada I am going to threaten changing to starlink the when my new telus fibre comes up for renewal and they inevitably want to double the price, and also I would be pleased to never have to use Rogers again

problem is musk has shown that he can shut a country down on a whim. we've seen him doing with starlink with ukraine, and twitter with... anyone that opposes him.

for all the great things starlink does and is, it should not be at the whims of a egomaniacal drug addict.

Headline is right but the numbers in the article are wrong

There is a national security risk angle to this. Elon has been talking to Putin and Putin has been making requests on behalf of Xi Jinping such as not turning on Starlink over Taiwan [1]. Musk has also been turning off Starlink when he decides there is a risk of nuclear war [2].

An American corporation undermining American foreign policy is a security risk. No citizen, especially a crazy one like Elon, should have this much power.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/musk-putin-secret-conversat...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66752264

> turning off Starlink

He didn't turn it off, he refused to turn it on over Crimea when Ukraine requested he do so. Turning it on without the permission of the State Department would have been illegal.

An American company providing American services via American government funding with a founder who can't leave the next American presidents beach house if he tried undermines American foreign policy.

If i wanted to control a country and couldn't get my hands on their banking system i guess their communication systems would do...

I just dont see it somehow.

Countries are choosing to align themselves with China and Russia rather than the US, so this shouldn't be a problem for those countries.

Korea, Japan, Phillipines, Taiwan, Australia, India might have different thoughts

Elon literally didn't turn it on because of the US government rules. How is a person / company doing what the government wants undermining government policy?

How can you state something is cheaper when it doesnt have fixed rates? That claim can only be true at a relatively narrow, fixed point in time.

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