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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

I mean, it's not a shortcut to send tens of thousands of satellites into space instead of running copper wires across vast stretches of desert where they're going to get stolen, but it has certain advantages.

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Why copper? Heavy, thick, expensive, attractive for thieves. Lay fiber: thin, lightweight, less expensive per Gbps, future-proof, corrosion-resistant, lighting-resistant, worthless for thieves.

Worthless for theft, but subject to ransom and destruction by your local warlord.

Failed social institutions are the source of all poverty in the world. The world produces enough of every basic necessity already. It's the distribution, not availability, where the source of hunger and depravity is.

How many countries do you think have local warlords problems in Africa to negatively affect fibre deployments.

Maybe not many, but some rather large. Say, Congo, or Sudan. But more often that would be not outright warlords but rather corrupt peacetime officials, who would try to extract or extort some additional personal / clan gain from something that could be a commonly accessible good.

Those are exceptions and can’t be used to characterise an entire continent. I have lived in areas of the continent with poor security and jihadist violence yet year in year out, fibre access kept expanding and getting cheaper. The corruption don’t stop rollouts, just make them more expensive and are not particularly to African countries.

You mean to say there are no shortcuts to improving lives of poor people without actually improving their lives. Only yesterday, there was video of people stealing concrete mix from road construction sites in India for their own homes.

EDIT: In order to improve their lives, they need internet, but they also need everything else. Not providing everything in lockstep fails hugely. (And this includes providing good governance and non-corrupt leader, a problem we have no idea how to solve.)

I've spent a little time in Northern Iraq and war torn Northeast Syria (Kurdish areas). You can, and I have seen people leave thousands of USD in the street and no one will touch it. That's a ~year wages in the area. Crime exists but you can hand almost anyone a year's wages worth of stuff and be sure they won't steal it, even if they badly need it.

You can call it religion, you can call it culture, you can call it fear of choppy choppy of the hand, or maybe the fact everyone and their brother has a full auto AK, but there's something on a whole other level happening with poor (and also rich thieves) people in much of Africa.

Is anyone actually running new telecom copper these days? I’d be surprised if so.

Thieves are not educated enough to understand the difference and will steal the fiber and try to sell it (with no success) and in the anger, destroy huge swathes of the remaining fibre.

No. By that logic, PVC pipes wouldn't be safe from thieves, because thieves wouldn't be able to understand the difference from copper pipes. Anyone who's ever touched a fiber cable before immediately understands the difference from a copper cable, and if thieves can't get paid, they're not going to waste their time stealing it.

People do steal PVC pipes, albeit more commonly in bulk:

https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/BNI-disco...

In any case, the fiber situation in Ghana was dicy for a time because theives were cutting the fiber lines in hopes they were copper. Thieves are often in a hurry so they cut first, check, then move on.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of a large portion of thieves, they will destroy $100,000 in property to steal $50 in iron to pawn off. Fiber runs to cabinets and they run those cabinets over to get the metal they are made of.

The question is if they can tell it's fiber _before_ cutting through it and damaging it. This seems way easier with PVC pipes than with fiber cables.

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