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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if this is related, but my father told me about something similar. My father is from and lives now in Palau [1], and the typical internet connection there has a download speed of something like 20 kbps. My dad said something about a company deploying satellites seeking to service unconnected or poorly connected regions, and Palau wanted in.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palau

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Yikes,

An email only dialup account in Palau is $15/month. Unlimited dialup is $99.95.

64kbps DSL is $199.95 per month, going up to $759.95 for 320kbps...

I just wish they would give high-speeds at the last mile and ship in multi-TB drives for local access, while rate-limiting international (satellite uplink) access based on how much one pays.

edit: Palau internet access rate card: http://www.palaunet.com/view_pdf_file.aspx?field1=Palaunet%2...

You witness what happens when there is only one ISP with no competition (PNCC provides palaunet). A little example at a different scale of what could happen if comcast and time warner were to merge :)

>I just wish they would give high-speeds at the last mile and ship in multi-TB drives for local access, while rate-limiting international (satellite uplink) access based on how much one pays.

This idea has been around so long but no one has tried to actually tried to do something like this. Moreover, there isn't a lot of "local access" that I know since there arent't many websites on the island to begin with. Something like a local email service would make sense; palaunet's email service is so bad that people rather use services here in the US like gmail.

The funny thing is that PNCC and the Palau government had a chance to tap into AAG[1] when it was laid in the 2000s but Palau opted out of it because they thought it wasn't worth the investment. What a mistake...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAG_%28cable_system%29

In cases where Internet is service extremely expensive and difficult to provide broadband, satellite service can be a great solution. You use the hard wire connection to make the request (upstream) and download from the satellite.

Since it's expensive to transmit a signal and the amount people upload can be minimal for most requests, the hard line works great. Then, it's relatively cheap to receive the response with the satellite, which is usually a large payload that would benefit tremendously from the broadband connection.

It physically is the only method, as this is an isolated island in the pacific. As I mentioned in a reply to another person in this thread, there was a chance to tap into one of a fiber optic cable that was being laid nearby, but the monopoly corp that provides the internet service decided not to invest in it.

That is some slow internet. I am in a remote region of Hawaii with no public utilities. No water or electricity reaches here, no phone or cable lines either. Currently satellite is my only option, which is fine speed wise, but latency is quite high and the bandwidth caps are very restrictive.

I'd love to see what Google can offer in this space.

Sounds like O3b. I think they were mentioned in the article?

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