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Comment by pelagicAustral | Hacker News Reader

This is not a case of regulation/deregulation, is a case of a government being fully capable of changing the tide and repeatedly choosing not do so, in spite of a vocal majority of the population wanting to be able to provide their own internet service via Starlink.

Before, we did not had an alternative. Sure only ever gave tiny concesions when pressed to do so, or paid to do so. They are still highly subsidized by the local government.

> The horrendous de-facto ISP (Sure) 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.

[0] Sure is a company with a long record of predatory conduct (more on a previous comment): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42657692

> https://guernseypress.com/news/2024/10/02/sure-ordered-to-pa...

View on HN

£110 a month for 100 GB is actually less than I would have expected for a really remote place like the Falklands. As a point of comparison, I used to pay something like 10 USD per GB on flexiroam while traveling, though I think it's a bit less nowadays. Now that's what I call extortion. And it's still 100 times less than the roaming data rate on my standard mobile subscription.

As for Starlink, keep in mind that you are piggybacking on a humongous satellite network that has tons of unused capacity in remote areas. Now that it's available, it's cool to have it, but the previous provider had an exclusive contract for a reason. And presumably it's still binding, so I imagine the Falklands government is in a bit of a bind over this.

And by the way, Starlink itself is not above price gouging where they have no cheaper alternatives. Look at Starlink Marine pricing for example, which is I think 2500 USD / mo, down from 10000. So there is no actual guarantee that £60 per month unlimited usage will still be be there if Starlink is allowed to operate officially.

> price gouging

this is a crazy way of describing a lack of competitive pressure leaving prices high. compare this to the other alternatives that existed. it's not gouging.

You should describe unethical conduct as bad. Most actual human beings have a dim view of unmitigated capitalism.

If this is the caliber of internet people are dealing with, I really hope some kind local techies are helping to set people up with uBlock Origin (ideally on Firefox), ClearURLs to skip unnecessary redirects (I'm assume GEO latencies here), and LocalCDN or DecentralEyes to avoid re-downloading the same libraries and assets over and over. Probably good to add something that defaults Youtube to 360p, and use Pihole for mobile/smart devices.

There are many addons, but I find these are the minimal "set it and forget it" set that makes the most difference.

Personally I would run uBO in at least Medium Mode[1], but I expect that's probably too much for most non-technical users.

Source: I suffered through metered satellite internet for many years.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

Or you know...just use that worldwide broadband speed satellite network.

Perhaps some people object to using that service.

If they object, they can just not use it. As the article says, the petition for abolishing or reducing the fees of a license needed for Starlink was signed by 70% of the islands' population. I think that the main entity that is objecting is the current satellite ISP monopoly (that probably made a deal with the government that included protecting their monopoly as a condition of their investment).

  >Or you know...

Strange to think of it as an either/or choice.

All those services block things I want to block for other reasons anyway, and on fast internet they make it even faster.

Folks should probably use all those things even on less terrible internet.

It’s only 110 pounds a month? I figured it would be much more, given that ~3,500 people live there. That gives a customer base of ~1,500 or so.

There aren’t exactly many places to run a fiber connection to, Uruguay being the closest friendly neighbor (aside from the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego), I assume the current internet connection is a satellite link?

Before starlink, the only way to get a private company to offer internet service to a tiny island with less people than my neighborhood is a monopoly, the economics simply don’t work if there is competition.

Isn’t that how Uber came to exist? Undercut pricing until you amass users then return to profit once the competition is extinct. I would love to believe the starlink price is real but history says otherwise.

pure nitpick:

  - lowercase b implies bits, which is (0|1).
  - uppercase B implies Bytes, which is* 8 bits(1100 1001). 
  - "ps" stands for "per second" and is typically used for bits.  
  - "/s" stands for "per second" and is typically used for bytes. 
  - realistically, context suggests 5120 bit per seconds, which is rather slow.
  - 5MB/s is 40Mbps, 8 times over 5Mbps, enough* for couple 4K H.265 streams.

> realistically, context suggests 5120 bit per seconds, which is rather slow.

How? "5 MBPS" must mean 5 Mb/s (megabits/s) or 5 MB/s (megabytes/s), and for internet speeds megabits are much more common, so it's rather 5 Mb/s ~ 5,242,880 bits per second, equal to ~0.6 megabytes per second or 5120 kilobits (not just bits) per second.

Starlink can achieve speeds around 130 Mb/s (megabits/s), but (normal) Starlink surely doesn't achieve 130 MB/s (megabytes/s), so that would check out.

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