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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t this a similar argument to how Africa adopted mobile phones significantly faster than other regions? When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations. Especially if there’s no infrastructure needed to install.

As others mentioned, It’s a very similar situation for rural America. My dad lives in a rural setting, and for years could only get slow geostationary satellite Internet. As soon as he got Starlink, his connectivity improved dramatically. Only now that there was an established market for rural internet users in his area, are cable and fiber lines starting to get run.

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Africa is mostly on 4G networks, and while 3G isn't a majority of the connections, it's still the next biggest share of infrastructure, far ahead of 5G which is relatively scarce.

This is in the context of a population that really depends on mobile wireless for market information if they are farmers, and for payments. Having a mobile phone can take priority over having a flush toilet.

Starlink has both opportunities and challenges: 5G is faster and cheaper and more reliable. But mobile wireless revenue is low, so capex is low too. Combine this with a big rural population, and Starlink has a great opportunity, if they can find customers who can afford it.

> Combine this with a big rural population, and Starlink has a great opportunity, if they can find customers who can afford it.

This is the rub. The primary market here are people whose communities aren't wealthy enough to afford infrastructure that would provide superior service (5G being a step up from satellite, and wired being a step up from that). So Starlink depends on there existing a growing population of people who aren't too poor to afford internet service in the first place, while also relying on the hope that those people don't become too wealthy to afford long-term infrastructure investments.

Individually. A village municipal link is probably within reach, though.

Village sees increased productivity, raises the wealth of the region, suddenly surrounding villages can afford it. Or, individuals get their own. I don't like giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, but the Chinese/Sears/etc. model of catering to people no one else would try to service can certainly be lucrative.

One starlink receiver, a router, and some CAT-5 wire run through the village? Seems like an opportunity for local would-be ISP entrepreneurs.

Is this allowed in Starlink's terms of service? Building a commercial service by selling a part of your antenna connection?

Is anyone in Nigeria going to care?

The problem is that 5G needs fiber connectivity and electricity for the towers, and this is not easily achievable in rural areas.

You certainly can use microwave backhaul links between towers, but the existing solutions don't provide nearly enough capacity to justify the 5G upgrade.

To oversimplify, 4G works in the 1 Gbit world. 5G needs 10-25 Gb.

Starlink can also be used for cell tower backhaul.

> Especially if there’s no infrastructure needed to install.

I suspect this is important for two reasons..

First, because yes, it's magnitudes cheaper if you don't have to build and install the infrastructure.

Second, because now you're no longer dependent on your "local provider" which is likely to expect and deal in bribes, share info with local leaders, and generally be a potential risk to everything you want to do.

> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations.

Same with electricity: there are many rural places in Africa where solar panels + batteries are a revolution.

But then there's a reason why a country with more than 3x the number of people in the US was "missing" technologies: Africa is, overall, very poor (GDP per capita in Africa is something like 1/40th of the GDP per capita in the US: 1/40th!). So there's a limit to how far the jump is possible: as someone commented, most of Africa is still on 3G and it's not clear if StarLink shall be able to find customers rich enough to buy their services.

> it's not clear if StarLink shall be able to find customers rich enough to buy their services.

Of course they will. If the prices are too high they can just lower them to whatever people can afford. It's not that expensive to cover Africa's customers.

It is not expensive to keep a massive constellation of satellites in a rapidly decaying orbit?

I'm guessing the person you're replying to meant the incremental cost of serving African customers is low.

Not if your already expecting US/EU customers to pay for the whole thing already

They just need to price it more than the cost of the base stations and maintaining downlink sites. Any revenue above variable costs is worth trying to capture. The cost of keeping the constellation of satellites healthy will be borne by customers in richer regions.

Look at it this way - the satellites will be traveling over Africa no matter what. If no one in Africa subscribes, then that's a part of their orbit where they aren't earning any revenue. Assuming the rest of the costs are covered by subscribers in other regions, they can price service in Africa as low as they'd like (above hardware costs).

You can get $1 of margin in Africa and $100 in the US/Canada for the same product.

See medicine, for example

Africa isn't a country? There are 54 countries in Africa, and it has almost twice the area of all of North America, not just the USA [1]

1: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/continent-size-comparison/no...

Where did the parent commenter imply Africa is a country?

EDIT: I can't read, sorry all!

right here "But then there's a reason why a country with more than 3x the number of people in the US".

Sovereignty in Africa is a joke, the nation state concept shouldn’t have been applied there and the colonial work on imposing that is vestigial at best

And that’s the 99th percentile answer on that side of the bell curve

When people want to refer to a country on that continent, they do. There is little reason to refer to most countries on that continent because they are basically not separate administrative districts

Just fiefdoms that have nothing to do with the borders drawn and lots of area in between

They are not a uniform monolithic people, regardless of outside interference.

understood, I think there are some unique challenges on that continent to make referring to it amorphously to be rational and not merely ignorant

And the ways its being addressed domestically involve cross border supernational unions and economic blocs hoping to get the basic infrastructure of a single market, single defense framework

essentially the ground work to becoming exactly what everyone keeps saying

> they are basically not separate administrative districts

what are you talking about?

> jump technology generations

Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet

Nor did they claim that.

> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations

> As others mentioned, It's a very similar situation for rural American

That’s a seperate anecdote about his dad in America.

If you’re going to nitpick irrelevant inconsistencies, at least be right.

Starlink is letting them skip dial-up and ADSL.

For what it's worth, I was specifically thinking about DSL and 2000-2010s era DOCSIS technologies. The analogy is really that when mobile phones became popular in Africa, it was possible to skip the step of having wired landlines and cable TV. 3G/4G could be used for anything those would have provided. Starlink does the same thing, but it lets people skip DSL and cable modems.

However, I actually think that the main "benefit" you get by not having an extensive wired infrastructure is the lack of an incumbent provider. Centralized incumbents can put pressure on any new technology that puts their existing infrastructure investments at risk.

There’s also the issue of man made damage to infrastructure that is very difficult for Starlink.

Once the birds are in orbit, satellite internet is vastly superior to fiber in speed of deployment.

Fiber requires custom engineering at the city block level and a single rotten utility pole can block deployment.

I say this as someone who waited for fiber and is happily using it now.

So in Poland with Starlink I easily get 120 mbp/s but often in Kenya which I visit the maximum speed is just 10 mbp/s. Often the local 5g network is faster. The reason I believe that this is the case is dues to congestion on the Starlink network in Kenya. Ie. too many users in Kenya.

Only in Kenya.

His post was about speed of deployment, not internet speed.

I suspect that has a lot to do with still needing a ground station in the same hex as the signal. Presumably, there's limited bandwidth at wherever that ground station is.

Once the satellites are linked, I bet that improves.

> Isn’t this a similar argument to how Africa adopted mobile phones significantly faster than other regions?

You didn't read the article:

>Africa’s internet infrastructure is not fit for purpose. During a communications boom in the early 2000s, the continent eschewed fixed-line internet for cheaper mobile broadband; today more than 400m Africans, the bulk of the continent’s users, gain access to the internet this way.

>But the technology has not kept pace with the rapid increase in data demand from streaming and AI-powered applications.

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