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Comment by guybedo | Hacker News Reader

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 ...

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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.

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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