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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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