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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

> 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

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