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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

It really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential.

It's all very exciting I think.

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Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.

The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.

I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink.

See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen

India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara).

Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Very different case from India.

High density -> large populations.

Density, generally, makes service provision easier.

Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.

Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.

How much is a Starlink setup? They are pretty expensive in Europe, are they cheaper in Africa?

I checked a random Kenyan address on starlink.com, and it would be around 386 USD for the dish there (with service for 50 USD/mo), so not cheap. In Poland I see that they're giving the dish for free with some 1-year contract (58 USD/mo). Maybe it'll become cheaper, they're making millions of them. And you could share it with neighbors - if you can get 300 Mb/s, you could connect like 5 families if the alternative is nothing.

I found a nice website with prices by country: https://www.starlink-prices.com/personal/residential/usd/low

But it may be outdated, because it shows $90/mo price in Poland, while it's much cheaper as I said, even with the free dish.

And some recent articles about Starlink prices in Africa:

https://techlabari.com/average-starlink-prices-across-all-af...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-starlink-vs-lead...

Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.

In NZ it is cheaper than broadband.

I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems.

The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.

Yes indeed.

All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.

They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.

Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.

So how many books have you given to kids in remote places in the 3rd world?

This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.

The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.

Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.

What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.

Nah books distract kids from reigning their horses and crop in fields.

He says, on the internet.

The one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.

> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.

There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.

And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.

So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.

Can you help me understand. Is Starlink, or satellite enabled wifi really the only solution here if you're 10-15 min away from a populated area?

Yes unfortunately.

My parent's in law live on small farm 10 minutes out of a small town in NSW and on the best days, when the sky is clear, they get 1 bar of phone reception on their cell phone and they have to stay within a 10 sqm perimeter within their house in order to make phone calls otherwise calls drop out.

Video chat is basically out of the question unless you want to talk to pixelated blobs on a screen.

After waiting 10 years for the NBN to be rolled out to their property, they decided to bite the bullet and bought a Starlink terminal and now we can have normal conversations on the phone and they can use streaming services whereas that would have been impossible before.

But it is not just them that have issues. When I was living in Brisbane many moons ago, I remember how pitiful the internet speed was so much so that I ditched my home internet and started hot-spotting from my phone instead.

Things have improved in the cities since then I am sure, but for the people out there living in the country side, not much as changed.

Meanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres

Not literally no signal/service, right? More likely “I have a few bars but data doesn’t seem to work… calls often won’t initiate unless 911?” thing you get when there’s too many devices connecting to an overburdened tower, in a network that needs more cells or something, and QoS/qci says no?

If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll

> Not literally no signal/service, right?

Come to Munich, go into any of the large old buildings, the central stairwells usually are phone dead zones. Truly dead.

Or try to go and hike in the Alps. Shit service, but as soon as you walk into Austrian territory, you'll suddenly have service.

Or try taking a train from Munich to, say, Landshut. You'll lose signal about 5 minutes after the train passes through the outskirts of Feldmoching.

Or try driving a car on the A8 highway to Salzburg in Austria. You'll lose signal about 5-10 minutes after passing Holzkirchen.

Or try taking a train from Passau to Wels in Austria. Passau is directly near the border. You will have a shit service right until the train passes the national border and Austrian towers take over.

The reason isn't technical. The Passau and Alps example shows it - identical geography, identical mountainous areas with about zero population... but wildly different attitudes in regulation.

> If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll

Here, you get death threats if you even propose putting up a tower on your land [1], in the UK nutjobs set a 5G tower ablaze [2].

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/wolfratshausen/icking-5...

[2] https://www.blick.ch/ausland/grossbritannien-handymast-eines...

I stand corrected. I didn’t realize you could be a MIMBY for cell towers and also not currently have service.

Any organized resistance I’ve witnessed myself in the US has been something like an HOA saying no not tucked right here where our home values could take a hit or a view obstructed, please put it down the street or … anywhere else.

But if you had no cell service and your call dropped as you backed out of your garage or you tried to sell your house and the buyers phones suddenly had no service or they couldn’t get on the Internet at the open house, that’d feel like pretty concerning missing infrastructure.

I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.

> I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.

They have, at least here in Germany. We have a shitload of what we call "weiße Flecken", zones with zero service, of about the size of half of Schleswig-Holstein [1]. While a lot of these is in forests and mountainous areas, the zones in settlements are mostly due to the whackos and their organized campaigns.

[1] https://bmds.bund.de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/detail/mob...

911 would get you nowhere in the UK;)

I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!

I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common

Yes.

In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.

> unless 911

Probably not that even since it's UK. Isn't it 999 in the UK? Has the UK started accepting 911->999 for the tourists?

According to Wikipedia

> 911 redirects to 999 on mobile phones/public phonebooths[citation needed] and on telephones used in USAFE bases.

So maybe? But without the source who knows.

That is a lot cheaper than it would cost in a developed country, but is not more affordable.

For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.

I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.

Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.

Yes, I do realise that, which is why I recognise it makes a huge difference, I just want to put it into context as not being very cheap.

> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.

Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?

It is exciting.

> On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...

The biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.

Great point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world.

But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?

That they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily.

This is a nice text on the underwater version:

https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...

If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.

You missed the point entirely. If you can distribute the energy you don't need the storage and the storage is the problem right now.

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