I worked on the Starlink program in the Redmond facility during the growth from a couple sats as proof of concept to thousands of sats regularly providing internet. I’ve since moved on to other ventures, but I’m still incredibly proud of what I did there. Mostly because it brought internet to those unserved and those who no one was ever going to serve, at least any time soon. I believe the internet and access to the same knowledge and tools as everyone else is such an equalizer. My favorite was getting the monthly emails with stories from rural areas or countries with spotty to no internet and how many of those folks could now commune with the rest of the planet and take full advantage of the wealth of knowledge provided by the internet.
I have a Starlink shout out! My brother in law worked on a salmon fishing boat in Alaska a couple of summers ago. They are at sea for weeks and keep fishing until the boat is full. He's done crabbing trips before and was basically out of communication for a month. On this trip, they had Starlink and were able to send us pictures and even FaceTime. Starlink delivered a huge quality of life improvement to guys who work a hard, dangerous job. They really appreciated it!
Ontario ended a $100M contract with Starlink to help connect 15k rural and first nations households because Elon was connected with the US administration when tariffs were announced
Tax payers are already responsible for the fees paid to cancel the contract early, but won't tell the public how much it cost. They also already paid for a test run with a first nations community in 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/spacex-deal-ontario-s...
I personally see more value in connecting poor and isolated rural communities. Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
> Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
I don't think the decision was meant to influence, rather, it's self-defense against said "Elon's dumb Twitter politics."
Americans having challenges conceptualizing how problematic Starlink is to non-Americans: imagine the same satellite service was provided by Huawei - but helmed by Chinese Elon.
Bond Villian phase is such a dramatization and inaccurate, If you're gonna throw wild accusations at least feel free to back it up with evidence. Backing a political party that won doesn't make him a bond villian.
The primary purpose of Starlink and SpaceX was from the start to support military goals, civilian goals were never the primary purpose. SpaceX and Elon Musk claimed that reaching Mars was a primary goal, but these are blatant and repeated lies, also by shills in this comment section, as is evident by Michael D. Griffin, under secretary of defense for research and engineering from 2018 to 2020, being involved from the beginning. Strangely enough, no comment in this Hacker News section seem to discuss the role Starlink plays in Ukraine currently.
> In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia, where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.[8] The decision to found the company SpaceX was made on the flight home, and Griffin briefly considered serving as chief engineer,[9] but eventually he instead became president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.[10]
My wife and I live in Japan, and her job is in a very, very rural area, while I am able to work remote. Before I moved into her house, we checked her local internet, it was 11mbps with a wired connection. yikes. On top of that there are often landslides and other connection issues. Starlink saved the day.
Rightly so, subscribing to starlink is giving money to Heilon Musk, one of the worst people alive (he’s in very good company though there are many like him)
I get that he is an ignoble dude, and I dislike him as much as anyone, but why do we judge an entire company by the largest shareholder's personal scruples?
There are likely thousands of hardworking people making that ship sail, and it's really short sighted to just write them all off because he is a dumbass.
We are SO ready to judge but so unwilling to THINK. Why?
Why do we judge an organization by their leader and head executive who has complete control over direction and operations? Who individually has a controlling interest which can and has been used to elect himself the leader? Who regularly, openly, and publicly talks about how he needs to have control over the operation of the organization to be willing to run it?
You would be hard pressed to find a person who is more responsible or more representative of their organization than that.
Most judging isn't anything more than parroting other people, a mimetic reflex to help you fit in with the people around you.
Thinking risks you forming an opinion that might not align with the zeitgeist.
There was a student newspaper editorial not too long ago... I think maybe it was at Harvard?... the crux of the piece was there's no reason to debate or engage, because we know we are right. Having independent thought risks putting you in a position of staying silent, or publicly disagreeing with people who have this kind of mentality.
On one hand Elon Musk and JD Vance supported far-right German party AfD, a party with strong links to Russian. On the other hand Starlink helps Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
i think its become a meme that someone who leans heavily far left would label any of their opposition as far right, nazi, russian linked. Republican party, conservative party, now the party that won majority of UK are being accused of being far right, nazi, russian.
i've even seen the same claims for Sanae Takaichi being bank rolled by Russians as well as former president Yoon was in Putin's pockets too.
I think you should be aware of how this looks when you keep parroting unsubstantiated talking points from the opposition party.
I personally don't care much about politics but I note this constant fabrication against any sort of nationalistic movements anywhere in the world not just in the West to be automatically Russian bank rolled and linked to nazism is not only tiring but rather silly.
Hm. Unfortunately, nationalistic movements and nazis objectively have share some common ground. If the basic premise of your political movement is “I hate foreigners,” you’re inviting a level of hateful thinking and on some level inciting & encouraging some very raw and aggressive emotions among people who also hate foreigners deep down. Nazi Germany is a deeply sad example of what happens when that kind of thinking gets normalized for too long, and the right people figure out how to manipulate a divided society to assume absolute power.
So tell me, why shouldn’t we call out political movements that on the surface, appear to be heading down a path that leads to deeply sad situations? We should absolutely not assume that humans are all better now and could never become that hateful again.
Are they Russian linked? Well, I’d love if there was some good investigative journalism about it, because I’m not very familiar with European politics. Just responding to the generalization you’re generalizing about. But don’t forget that Russia has been caught many times trying to destabilize western societies by inciting divisive movements, even just with social media bots. And it works, which is also sad.
Claiming that its 'especially Starlink' is just not true. I heard lots of discussion about Musk but very little about Starlink. Starlink mostly gets discussed in terms of space policy and people who care about that.
That said people are somewhat right that in most of Western and Central Europe there isn't a huge need for Starlink, it will be quite niche. But I have not heard any 'vitrol' against Starlink.
Agreed on both counts. Elon is less than dirt in my eyes as an American. He is an ignorant person who is ungrateful of the opportunities he has been presented as an immigrant and subsequently he has become a racist that strongly opposed immigrants to have the same opportunities he himself was awarded.
I don't care what tech he creates. He is a piece of shit. Any tech he creates is inherently corrupt by his own distorted ideals. I would _never_ run data through starlink.
Literally the people who know the most about immigrants and immigration—cultural insight you don’t have because you don’t see inside our families and you don’t know how our countries function—have a robust debate amongst themselves. My dad and I got on Google Maps today and it has Street View of one road through his village in Bangladesh, and it turns out to be the one he walked down to get to school as a kid in the 1960s, when it was a dirt road. We then got to talking about Little Bangladesh in NYC, and he noted with concern that, according to his friends, “people are living there just like they’re in Bangladesh.” He thinks 2/3 of them are illegal and any country would be upset if immigrants came and built enclaves like that. Everyone is entitled to their view on issues that affect the society and culture in which the live, including immigrants.
So get off your high horse and stop smearing people with magical incantations like you’re Harry Potter or something. The world is a lot more complicated than the platitudes you learned in elementary school. It’s certainly not so simple that you should bring this crap into unrelated discussions about tech.
Elon musk is a fascist and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
He has also literally killed more people in Africa via his illegal self-enriching actions at DOGE than he has provided internet service to. So you can take this stupid hero worship and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
With the massive bot networks shoving misinformation and propaganda, it's also a new infrastructure that will destabilize a lot of countries unfortunately.
I mean yeah, it’s a ton and totally a topic worth discussing on its own. Those aren’t the only options though. There is still plenty of available data out there for people to access and do practical and educational things with outside of purely entertainment. That’s a choice anyone accessing the internet has to make, and I was able to help give them that choice. Better to have a choice to learn and grow vs scroll than have no choice at all I’d say.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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
> 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.
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).
> 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.
I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo.
It’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday.
The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.
I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?
>Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations.
You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean.
Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it.
Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.
The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
>The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher
You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength.
>And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
The parent is correct. Look up have many antennas are on each Starlink sat. There are multiple dedicated antennas for customers and ground stations. There isn’t just one antenna or beam per satellite.
Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.
There's only 7 ground stations (or points of presence, I'm not sure what the difference is but they list them separately) or so in Africa, with Nigeria, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa being the ones that are known and confirmed.
Not many people live inside 15 miles of those stations, but Starlink is active in 23 countries.
Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.
If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
> even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop?
I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet.
A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.
I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.
Starlink is manufacturing the satellites at scale. They’re likely to cost not much differently from large ground based 5G towers at some point. The antennas are “digital” so no expensive mechanical systems needed.
My parents in rural America had a local ISP that did long distance wireless (highly directional antenna mounted on the house pointed at the top of the grain elevator a few miles away) but it was an unreliable 20 Mbps because the ISP wasn't interested in upgrading their equipment.
This could have been a revolutionary way of accessing the internet before Starlink. Grain elevators are everywhere in the US Midwest. Can’t believe it wasn’t capitalized on
I'm in the desert in utah right now, i drove two hours offroad from a small town, turned on starlink, and got faster internet than my office in NYC. Incredible. I can run the whole starlink off a small battery pack ($100), dont even need the car on.
I can bring it on long hikes, and be sure ill have internet access if i need it. completely changes the risk profile of remote outdoors activity
I’m not sure regular internet access is changing the risk like you say, but I agree that people like connectivity and hence will do more risky things because they think it’s safer.
This seems like a crazy position to me. In what world is someone with connectivity not significantly safer in remote areas? Obviously doesn't help with immediately fatal scenarios (falls, drowning etc), but there are whole classes of getting-lost or losing-mobility disasters that just don't exist anymore with connectivity.
this is an absurd thing to say, there are so many situations that are way safer with more information. alot of bad situations happen when people make the wrong decision under uncertainty, or they are in over their head. access to the internet, and increasingly claude, is incredible and changes alot of outdoors risk for the right users
How is it not safer to have access to information and be able to contact people from your remote location?
Does it make you absolutely 100% safe? No. Does it suddenly nullify any potential risky scenario? No. But it is pretty idiotic to say that it doesn't change the risk. It very clearly changes the risk and reduces it drastically.
I want to clarify that no, Starlink _really_ does not "drastically reduce the risk" of remote outdoor activities. Looking it up, Starlink doesn't even provide it's gps location to connected devices. And regardless, actually rugged communication capable handheld gps units already exist and have for a while. And they don't require that you bring a whole satellite dish and some kind of battery pack with you on your wilderness expeditions. What's actually idiotic, and getting lots of people in serious trouble these days, is going out unprepared. Don't risk your life, or search and rescue workers lives because you think you'll use Claude or whatever to figure it out while you are out there.
Things can go very wrong very quickly. If you go do risky activities far from help you should be prepared and know what you are getting yourself into and how to get yourself back out of it ahead of time.
Could you actually explain what you disagree with? In my opinion, everything in the comment you're replying to is obviously correct.
If you're going somewhere where there is a chance you might get lost, injured or trapped by weather, and need rescue, you should already be bringing something like a Garmin inReach. That's a highly ruggedized device with a battery that lasts for over a week without recharge, is small enough to keep in a pocket, provides two-way messaging and weather reports, can track your position at regular intervals so your family can see where you are, and can, without any setup and even when you're seriously injured, be used to directly send out an SOS with automatic reporting of your position and two-way voice communication.
As excellent as Starlink is, it is nowhere near a substitute for those capabilities. And the inReach has existed for longer than Starlink, ergo Starlink doesn't change the risk profile. The only real argument that Starlink changes the risk profile is if you're comparing Starlink vs nothing, or Starlink + PLB vs just PLB. And sure, in those cases Starlink is a significant improvement, but it's still inferior to something like an inReach.
The second part of the argument is that having better connectivity is no substitute for fundamentals, which is overwhelmingly, obviously correct. Yes, bring all the connectivity you want, the more the better if you're willing to carry it. But your plan shouldn't be built around the assumption that you can be rescued if things go wrong. If you get complacent due to having better connectivity it's entirely possible for it to worsen, rather than improve, your risk profile.
Right now I am in an overlanding vehicle, but I'm not an expert in offroading. I drove down a 5 mile trail that was very technical. The car can handle it, but it needs caution and the way back is much harder. I was extremely hesitant about going back up that way. If I get stuck, I am solo and I am hours from town via driving. So I just pulled out starlink, and with a combination of claude, off roading websites, and google maps, found an easier, roundabout, and more off the grid way back.
At every step I can use available information to put myself onto safer routes, I can research every decision before I make it. Where is the safest place to sleep, etc.
Pre internet people are out there just winging it in the back country
Worth remembering that many African telcos are not just mobile phone/data providers but also digital wallets (mobile money) - much of the GDP flows through them. Companies like Safaricom are the de facto financial utility of the country, so they are not going anywhere any time soon. That said Starlink is forcing the telcos to innovate and expand footprints. They’ve held very comfortable politically protected monopolies for far too long.
> Starlink ... is much pricier than mobile internet, and often costs more than even fibre broadband. The service ... halted new subscriptions for seven months to maintain connection quality. ... [T]he weather can mess up the signal: "You need a backup in those heavy months of rain."
There are really no shortcuts to the immense goal of covering the African continent with reliable internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 example in the article is contrived. Not many people can afford to pay for Starlink in rural Nigeria. You can also take a look at MTN Nigeria coverage map to see their Fibre and wireless deployments at https://coverage.mtn.ng/. (Yes, service isn’t yet in Ekiti, but will eventually get there as it’s already in neighbouring states). Compared to a few years ago, fibre penetration is ramping up from tier 1 and tier 2 service providers.
Also, fibre services (when available ) typically start at about $20 per month compared to Starlink at $50 and you need an upfront investment of around $400 to buy the kit.
Before Starlink was official in Nigeria you had to import and pay $150 a month. By the time it was official there were already thousands because people are already paying more for FWA.
I am not sure how to write this without it sounding like an ad for Starlink. It definitely isn't. Just trying to add an anecdote to the conversation. I live in Canada and there are a small number of people that I know that have given up faster, cheaper internet from Telus/cable/etc for Starlink. I think what it comes down to is people are tried of the two year contracts and having to negotiate a better rate and never being able to get the same deal as a new customer. Loyalty is punished.
Having competition is important, and Starlink, being what it is, can compete with everyone everywhere at all times.
Starlink is a natural fit for sparsely populated underserved rural areas. But if going with Starlink begins to make economic sense in city centers, local ISPs have failed very hard. And Starlink is always there to punish them for it.
From a pure competition standpoint, Starlink existing puts pressure on the entire industry all at once. No longer are so many people bound by a sole supplier in certain communities and now actual competition will eventually forced these companies to start fighting hard for customers. If there is one thing Elon is good at it’s scaling and that pressure should mount pretty quickly
Unfortunately it can’t since their cell size will never be sufficient for more than a small number of customers in an urban area. Mobile data cells here are a few blocks radius rather than the 10-20 miles in rural areas where Starlink really shines.
I had the same problem in San Francisco with Comcast. The only alternative was wireless service (which was somehow much slower than my iPhone) or slow fixed wireless as my street doesn’t get fiber. Ended up getting my partner to resubscribe to Comcast as a new customer.
Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.
They eventually will but there is also coming competition from satellite providers as well to suppress prices long term. Those ground based providers will still have a lot of infrastructure in the ground and they won’t go down without a fight.
They aren't thinking that far ahead. It is just the immediate rate they are on. If it doesn't work out, they can always go back to Telus, etc at a way better rate than they had as an existing customer.
I've lived in SA for about a year. I would have paid a lot of money for something like Starlink a couple of years ago.
Where you have internet it does not work while the local power is out. And it was not that stable and at times we were sitting 10 hours without power a day. And that's in Joburg. And 5g was hard to come by.
So I can only imagine that locals are happy to see such a thing. Especially if you can run it from a car charger or something.
In South Africa we are not allowed to make use of Starlink. The reason: our government insists that the owners of Starlink give > 50% of ownership of the contract exclusively to black people (our discriminatory BBEEE that explicitly states, openly, in any advert in public, that a company is allowed to ONLY EMPLOY black people and not white people), which Elon Musk and his company refuses to do (good for them). That is the reason we can't have Starlink.
Remember the US backlash against Huawaie over 5G towers?
African nations should have the exact same sovereignty/national security concerns regarding US tech, specially given the well documented history of the NSA and CIA leveraging their digital platforms for intelligence/spying
It's actually funny how the discourse is never the same when it come to US interests vs sovereign nations
There are lots of white South Africans. I believe musk is one. Starlink is majority owned by a South African.
The law isn’t about foreign/doneatic. It’s about black/white.
Increasingly this state authorised racism is now extending to black people. The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.
As expected one can work around dysfunctional state trlcos but the base problem remains- the culturally caused taxation of entrepreneurs by leeching families snd communities. This dysfunctional culture is the single thing that is holding africa back. Same as with the middle east islamis inability to form working states because the biggest social unit the culture allows to form is the family clan. Even where oil money or trade taxation allows for western/eastern success cosplay, the ministries and armies are filled with family at the highest ranks. One does not have a nation, a meta family. And all the cofabulayions about past injustices, do not help these stuck cultures.
Starlink is going to completely gut the local telcos, terrestrial fiber is never going to have the $ to achieve critical mass. So when, eventually, SpaceX or the US Govt wants to apply leverage over Africa, they will have to bend the knee. Or we'll have a hiatus in launches or a space war, and as they constellation burns up so will internet access. Africa will be in the dark.
The problem of it not working well during the rain is a huge issue in countries where cloud cover can last days, and 3-5 months of the year has regular rain fall.
Just for interest's sake and so this continues to be visible in the world: In South Africa we are not allowed to make use of Starlink. The reason: our government insists that the owners of Starlink give > 50% of ownership of the contract exclusively to black people (our discriminatory BBEEE that explicitly states, openly, in any advert in public, that a company is allowed to ONLY EMPLOY black people and not white people), which Elon Musk and his company refuses to do (good for them).
That is the reason we can't have Starlink.
I read these Starlink hope stories and get inspired now and then. But the truth is:
I've bought a mini and standard, and on my mini I've got maybe a couple of good anecdotes in it. But the rest of it? The 97%? Pure fucking hustle to work. A crying sham of a service. I cannot rely on this thing to save my life for a single zoom call at work.
tldr; Starlink doesn't work in South Africa, Elon's home country, because the ANC and its lawfare arm ICASA demands they hand over 30% to the State because of BEE laws.
This is misleading, Starlink does not need to provide "30% to the state", they only have to give 30% ownership to a local company with historically disenfranchised owners providing real economic value to South Africa. This can be a private company.
In South Africa I would be very surprised if that ever happened. This is a country that went from exporting electricity to daily blackouts because of corruption.
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.
I keep a Starlink subscription as my WAN2, after someone started a fire in a nearby fiber cabinet and managed to knock out Frontier and Spectrum at once. It’s worth it to me as a bullet-proof WAN2, especially working from home.
Starlink is a massive national security risk, and that is one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
It's also why Starlink has pushed so aggressively to establish itself in South Africa, going as far as to hold private meetings with the Democratic Alliance and even spamming their customers with emails urging them to put pressure on the government.
>one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
That's just nonsense. The regulator has been very clear on what the hold up is. A ECNS license is needed, which in turn requires 30% black ownership which musky boy isn't willing to do and isn't likely to change his mind on given his stance on DEI.
That's why the communication minister tried to create an alternative pathway around the 30% requirement
The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.
Requiring SpaceX to set up a token reseller just to meet the the ownership requirement does exactly nothing for "national security". It's pure graft for whoever gets handed ownership of the reseller and nothing more. In fact if blatant enough it could be illegal under the FCPA.
B-BEEE exists as a kind of "national security risk insurance", that is why it is only applied to sectors like Telecomms and Mining. So my statement is not incorrect.
Why would he give up ownership to someone who did absolutely nothing of value? That's a shakedown. It's like the laws that keep Tesla from selling cars in some states because they require a stealership as middle man.
Starlink is allowed to choose who they partner with. They will go through a lengthy process to pick partners that align with their business, including value propositions.
I worked on the Starlink program in the Redmond facility during the growth from a couple sats as proof of concept to thousands of sats regularly providing internet. I’ve since moved on to other ventures, but I’m still incredibly proud of what I did there. Mostly because it brought internet to those unserved and those who no one was ever going to serve, at least any time soon. I believe the internet and access to the same knowledge and tools as everyone else is such an equalizer. My favorite was getting the monthly emails with stories from rural areas or countries with spotty to no internet and how many of those folks could now commune with the rest of the planet and take full advantage of the wealth of knowledge provided by the internet.
I have a Starlink shout out! My brother in law worked on a salmon fishing boat in Alaska a couple of summers ago. They are at sea for weeks and keep fishing until the boat is full. He's done crabbing trips before and was basically out of communication for a month. On this trip, they had Starlink and were able to send us pictures and even FaceTime. Starlink delivered a huge quality of life improvement to guys who work a hard, dangerous job. They really appreciated it!
man I am happy to hear that. in Europe there is still widespread cynicism and vitrol against anything Elon Musk especially Starlink.
I think that many people appreciate Starlink in rural parts but your story is one of many that are just amazing
Ontario ended a $100M contract with Starlink to help connect 15k rural and first nations households because Elon was connected with the US administration when tariffs were announced
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/starlink-deal-void-on...
AFAIK there has been no replacement contract since it was killed in 2025
Elon has total control of Starlink and he’s currently enjoying his bond villain phase.
I am very happy my tax dollars are not going into his pockets.
It’s not a crusade. You send him your money if you want. It’s none of my business.
Pretty sure they are doing a bunch of AI training with your data now too. Opt-in by default. So yeah, no thanks.
Tax payers are already responsible for the fees paid to cancel the contract early, but won't tell the public how much it cost. They also already paid for a test run with a first nations community in 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/spacex-deal-ontario-s...
I personally see more value in connecting poor and isolated rural communities. Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
> Plus I highly doubt a provincial government contract in Canada will be a major influence on a Elon's dumb twitter politics.
I don't think the decision was meant to influence, rather, it's self-defense against said "Elon's dumb Twitter politics."
Americans having challenges conceptualizing how problematic Starlink is to non-Americans: imagine the same satellite service was provided by Huawei - but helmed by Chinese Elon.
You might be right, SpaceX and xAI are merged. Starlink users better read the policy documents very carefully.
Bond Villian phase is such a dramatization and inaccurate, If you're gonna throw wild accusations at least feel free to back it up with evidence. Backing a political party that won doesn't make him a bond villian.
Someone did not follow the news last year.
Does a nazi salut make him one?
Regardless, the technology itself is amazing, and eventually should (will) be common infrastructure
The primary purpose of Starlink and SpaceX was from the start to support military goals, civilian goals were never the primary purpose. SpaceX and Elon Musk claimed that reaching Mars was a primary goal, but these are blatant and repeated lies, also by shills in this comment section, as is evident by Michael D. Griffin, under secretary of defense for research and engineering from 2018 to 2020, being involved from the beginning. Strangely enough, no comment in this Hacker News section seem to discuss the role Starlink plays in Ukraine currently.
> In early 2002 he met entrepreneur Elon Musk and accompanied him on a trip to Russia, where they attempted to purchase ICBMs.[8] The decision to found the company SpaceX was made on the flight home, and Griffin briefly considered serving as chief engineer,[9] but eventually he instead became president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a private enterprise funded by the CIA to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve national security interests.[10]
Would you prefer that it weren’t used in Ukraine? I believe they find it rather useful.
There is no replacement because the pockets of Canada's political inner circle hasn't be lined yet with someone that can match Starlink
I think that a more expensive and crappier version of Starlink is going to be offered to Canadians , looking at how its run as an outsider.
My wife and I live in Japan, and her job is in a very, very rural area, while I am able to work remote. Before I moved into her house, we checked her local internet, it was 11mbps with a wired connection. yikes. On top of that there are often landslides and other connection issues. Starlink saved the day.
Rightly so, subscribing to starlink is giving money to Heilon Musk, one of the worst people alive (he’s in very good company though there are many like him)
I get that he is an ignoble dude, and I dislike him as much as anyone, but why do we judge an entire company by the largest shareholder's personal scruples?
There are likely thousands of hardworking people making that ship sail, and it's really short sighted to just write them all off because he is a dumbass.
We are SO ready to judge but so unwilling to THINK. Why?
Why do we judge an organization by their leader and head executive who has complete control over direction and operations? Who individually has a controlling interest which can and has been used to elect himself the leader? Who regularly, openly, and publicly talks about how he needs to have control over the operation of the organization to be willing to run it?
You would be hard pressed to find a person who is more responsible or more representative of their organization than that.
Most judging isn't anything more than parroting other people, a mimetic reflex to help you fit in with the people around you.
Thinking risks you forming an opinion that might not align with the zeitgeist.
There was a student newspaper editorial not too long ago... I think maybe it was at Harvard?... the crux of the piece was there's no reason to debate or engage, because we know we are right. Having independent thought risks putting you in a position of staying silent, or publicly disagreeing with people who have this kind of mentality.
Elon Musk is quite cotroversial figure for Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy
On one hand Elon Musk and JD Vance supported far-right German party AfD, a party with strong links to Russian. On the other hand Starlink helps Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AfD_pro-Russia_movement
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2025/02/24/germany-...
i think its become a meme that someone who leans heavily far left would label any of their opposition as far right, nazi, russian linked. Republican party, conservative party, now the party that won majority of UK are being accused of being far right, nazi, russian.
i've even seen the same claims for Sanae Takaichi being bank rolled by Russians as well as former president Yoon was in Putin's pockets too.
I think you should be aware of how this looks when you keep parroting unsubstantiated talking points from the opposition party.
I personally don't care much about politics but I note this constant fabrication against any sort of nationalistic movements anywhere in the world not just in the West to be automatically Russian bank rolled and linked to nazism is not only tiring but rather silly.
> won majority of UK are being accused of being far right, nazi, russian.
Labour? I don’t think many people call Starmer any of those things..
Hm. Unfortunately, nationalistic movements and nazis objectively have share some common ground. If the basic premise of your political movement is “I hate foreigners,” you’re inviting a level of hateful thinking and on some level inciting & encouraging some very raw and aggressive emotions among people who also hate foreigners deep down. Nazi Germany is a deeply sad example of what happens when that kind of thinking gets normalized for too long, and the right people figure out how to manipulate a divided society to assume absolute power.
So tell me, why shouldn’t we call out political movements that on the surface, appear to be heading down a path that leads to deeply sad situations? We should absolutely not assume that humans are all better now and could never become that hateful again.
Are they Russian linked? Well, I’d love if there was some good investigative journalism about it, because I’m not very familiar with European politics. Just responding to the generalization you’re generalizing about. But don’t forget that Russia has been caught many times trying to destabilize western societies by inciting divisive movements, even just with social media bots. And it works, which is also sad.
Claiming that its 'especially Starlink' is just not true. I heard lots of discussion about Musk but very little about Starlink. Starlink mostly gets discussed in terms of space policy and people who care about that.
That said people are somewhat right that in most of Western and Central Europe there isn't a huge need for Starlink, it will be quite niche. But I have not heard any 'vitrol' against Starlink.
>in Europe there is still widespread cynicism and vitrol against anything Elon Musk especially Starlink.
European Tesla sales are rising yoy again. <https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tesla-sales-q2-20...>
Elon musk is a scumbag and starlink is very useful. Both things can be true.
I will say having the world ISP run by a man with his ... proclivities is less than optimal.
Agreed on both counts. Elon is less than dirt in my eyes as an American. He is an ignorant person who is ungrateful of the opportunities he has been presented as an immigrant and subsequently he has become a racist that strongly opposed immigrants to have the same opportunities he himself was awarded.
I don't care what tech he creates. He is a piece of shit. Any tech he creates is inherently corrupt by his own distorted ideals. I would _never_ run data through starlink.
Elon voted the same way as 51% of naturalized citizens like himself: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Our best estimate is that immigrant voters swung from a Biden+27 voting bloc in 2020 to a Trump+1 group in 2024.”).
Literally the people who know the most about immigrants and immigration—cultural insight you don’t have because you don’t see inside our families and you don’t know how our countries function—have a robust debate amongst themselves. My dad and I got on Google Maps today and it has Street View of one road through his village in Bangladesh, and it turns out to be the one he walked down to get to school as a kid in the 1960s, when it was a dirt road. We then got to talking about Little Bangladesh in NYC, and he noted with concern that, according to his friends, “people are living there just like they’re in Bangladesh.” He thinks 2/3 of them are illegal and any country would be upset if immigrants came and built enclaves like that. Everyone is entitled to their view on issues that affect the society and culture in which the live, including immigrants.
So get off your high horse and stop smearing people with magical incantations like you’re Harry Potter or something. The world is a lot more complicated than the platitudes you learned in elementary school. It’s certainly not so simple that you should bring this crap into unrelated discussions about tech.
>Elon voted the same way as 51% of naturalized citizens
Doesn't make him right.
Elon musk is a fascist and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
He has also literally killed more people in Africa via his illegal self-enriching actions at DOGE than he has provided internet service to. So you can take this stupid hero worship and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
If it hadn't been for Starlink I wouldn't have been able to work remotely from my parents house during covid.
You also brought internet to the long range kamikaze drones enabling hunting mode there.
With the massive bot networks shoving misinformation and propaganda, it's also a new infrastructure that will destabilize a lot of countries unfortunately.
> take full advantage of the wealth of knowledge provided by the internet
Seems like a bit of a stretch in modern times. Do you have any idea what percentage of traffic is TikTok/YouTube/Facebook?
YouTube has excellent creators for almost any topic you can think of and for almost any video style you can think of
Hi, I'm a Youtuber.
I talk about computer history. Is my knowledge not valid just because I'm "on youtube" ?
I mean yeah, it’s a ton and totally a topic worth discussing on its own. Those aren’t the only options though. There is still plenty of available data out there for people to access and do practical and educational things with outside of purely entertainment. That’s a choice anyone accessing the internet has to make, and I was able to help give them that choice. Better to have a choice to learn and grow vs scroll than have no choice at all I’d say.
All places laden with useful information.
Ahh yes, the ole throw the baby out with the bathwater retort.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
One starlink receiver, a router, and some CAT-5 wire run through the village? Seems like an opportunity for local would-be ISP entrepreneurs.
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.
> 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.
> jump technology generations
Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
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.
His post was about speed of deployment, not internet speed.
Only in Kenya.
Nor did they claim that.
> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations
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.
Starlink is letting them skip dial-up and ADSL.
> 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.
> 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.
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
> 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?
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
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
> 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.
I live in rural America. The story is quite similar here. My options were (a) cellular hotspot, which is slow and expensive, or (b) satellite internet, which is also slow and expensive. Despite government programs, there are no cable/fiber/DSL options in my area. Starlink fills the gap nicely; it's not blazingly fast, but pretty much meets FCC broadband definitions for $55/mo.
It’s also surprisingly reliable given the physics of it all. I built a house out in the country in 2007 and 10Mbps DSL was all that was available for terrestrial connectivity up until literally yesterday.
The DSL would go down for hours a couple of times per month. I got on an early starlink pilot program and had a dish up in early 2021. Aside from momentary blips on the leading edge of a stormfront and occasional network issues a couple of times per year, it’s been rock solid with half the latency and 20x the bandwidth.
I live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough.
I don't understand. Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations. Why are there no wired connections available? Do the connections not reach the famous last mile?
>Starlink satellites are just routers to ground stations.
You are very out of date on your knowledge here. When it first launched yes, Starlink sats purely acted as "bent pipes" so you needed a ground station within 300-400 miles or so. But inter-sat optical laser links went online quite awhile ago so now data can go from a terminal through the orbital network to ground across the planet. That of course was required for them to offer air/maritime global service (as well as extremely remote areas like polar), can't put a ground station in the middle of the ocean.
Incidentally that should allow them to beat the latency of standard fiber by quite a bit over a long enough distance, there was speculation it might become quite popular for HFT for example, but I haven't tried it.
Edit: So I went ahead and checked, and interestingly at least via a v1 land based terminal on a basic plan they don't make use of it. So must be a higher end option or something? Picking a random top 50 site in Japan tbs.co.jp (163.45.254.1), a streaming TV site iirc, I got around 186ms ping on a fiber connection in rural New England, and 192ms via Starlink, almost exactly the difference one would expect for adding purely a LEO leg up to the nearest ground station. Maybe they want to charge for that, or maybe they're still fleshing out bandwidth on the intersat network. If anyone has a maritime or portable terminal or something it'd be interesting to see some comparisons. In principle on a great circle the distance for me should be something like 10600km, so maybe 12000ish including sats, 24k rtt, which at the speed of light should be more like 80ms. Even with some routing lag that's a big enough difference seems like it'd be noticeable if it was going via orbital mesh instead of ground and kind of fun to test.
Starlink right now only uses lasers where terrestrial paths aren't available.
I'd have thought they'd sell a different product with lower latency over Ku band by now
There are only 170 ground stations (about 100 in the US).
So for someone living in rural america, it's really "famous last 300 miles".
That can't be right. The satellites can only cover a diameter of 15 miles. Anyone living any further from a ground station is still SOL.
The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher, the diameter is at least 10x what you say. And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
>The max steering angles of the phased arrays are much higher
You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer. What the steering may get you is increasing the coverage of an area currently underserved by the constellation, and maybe a slight increase in diameter of ground covered due to the geometry, at the cost of lower signal strength.
>And for the last few years, lasercoms can route traffic inside the constellation so a given sat doesn't need to be within sight of a ground station.
Did they finally implement satellite-to-satellite links? Fine, if that actually works, they can indeed extend the range much further. I don't know if I believe it, though.
https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...
You can read this article. The lasers worked before February 2022, but you don't require them to have multiple spot beams.
The parent is correct. Look up have many antennas are on each Starlink sat. There are multiple dedicated antennas for customers and ground stations. There isn’t just one antenna or beam per satellite.
Also, lookup the number of ISLs in orbit. Starlink has been providing coverage for the middle of the ocean for years now. They have provided coverage to Pacific Islands that have lost their undersea cable connections.
> You can't steer the antenna back and forth for every exchange between station and customer.
Even ignoring that they have multiple arrays, they use separate antennas to talk to the base stations on a different frequency band.
There's only 7 ground stations (or points of presence, I'm not sure what the difference is but they list them separately) or so in Africa, with Nigeria, Botswana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa being the ones that are known and confirmed.
Not many people live inside 15 miles of those stations, but Starlink is active in 23 countries.
Ground station is an antenna connected to Fiber. POP is a router/server in a DC (usually) connected to an IX
South Africa has a POP but no ground station.
The individual satellites can cover thousands of miles and use multiple spot beams of 15 miles each.
Yes. The last mile problem is legitimately so difficult in rural areas that it is more cost effective to launch a constellation of 10,000+ satellites than it is to run the wires.
If you happen to live within line of site of a cell tower buying a MIMO antenna and beaming internet off of a data plan is also somewhat viable, but Starlink is probably better on bandwidth and packet loss
I wonder about the economics, though. Intuitively it doesn't seem like it can be more efficient to launch constellations of satellites than run kilometers of cables, even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop? So around two orders of magnitude cheaper than a satellite? Something isn't adding up for me.
> even if you have to run 20 km for each customer. That's, what, $10k a pop?
I don't know if we're still talking Africa or in general, but $10k doesn't get you anywhere near 20 km around me. I got municipal fiber recently, and our agency passes through the costs. On a 7 drop project of about 1 mile, aerial on existing poles, my share was $5k; plus I had to pay my own way to get conduit installed from the pole to my house, that was nearly $7k. Underground utilities are expensive!
The pre Starlink and pre AI estimate in the US was $20k per mile excluding terminating equipment and right of way and assuming regular soil.
Now everything costs more and they'd rather build AI DC's
Starling is 10k satellites shared across the entire planet.
A satellite will serve thousands of customers, whereas a fixed line only serves one. I think 10k is also severely understating the cost per customer. There's like hundreds of metres between these houses at a minimum, and in some areas possibly Kilometers from house to house.
Intuitively, what's the cost to get to orbit? SpaceX's Falcon reusable rocket lowered the cost to get to space by an order of magnitude or so, so you have to factor that in.
From the S1 satellites are $600k and launch is under $20 million
I only counted the cost of the satellite itself. I assumed you can get it into orbit for free, so if it costs a cent more than that, it's a further argument against.
Starlink is manufacturing the satellites at scale. They’re likely to cost not much differently from large ground based 5G towers at some point. The antennas are “digital” so no expensive mechanical systems needed.
Even if I grant that, radio towers don't deorbit after a few years. I have no idea what you mean by antennas being digital.
Older sats (and OneWeb) use parabolic dishes. Some fixed, some steerable.
Apart from being SDR's, Starlink and its newer competition use phased array antennas. So they can provide extra capacity to denser areas.
Same, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house.
So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
My parents in rural America had a local ISP that did long distance wireless (highly directional antenna mounted on the house pointed at the top of the grain elevator a few miles away) but it was an unreliable 20 Mbps because the ISP wasn't interested in upgrading their equipment.
This could have been a revolutionary way of accessing the internet before Starlink. Grain elevators are everywhere in the US Midwest. Can’t believe it wasn’t capitalized on
It is indeed all over the place, they just didn't want to upgrade equipment once it was there.
Probably margin issues.
Starlink is also satellite internet, right?
Starlink satellites are ~500 km in altitude. Regular satellite internet is in geostationary orbit at ~35,000 km in altitude.
The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light.
Yes, but the low altitude of the satellites makes a big difference.
Is it really $55 a month?
Residential 100 mbps (which these days actually delivers pretty well) is $55/mo
https://starlink.com/service-plans
Why would he give an incorrect figure?
Typos can happen.
Lies
I'm in the desert in utah right now, i drove two hours offroad from a small town, turned on starlink, and got faster internet than my office in NYC. Incredible. I can run the whole starlink off a small battery pack ($100), dont even need the car on.
I can bring it on long hikes, and be sure ill have internet access if i need it. completely changes the risk profile of remote outdoors activity
I’m not sure regular internet access is changing the risk like you say, but I agree that people like connectivity and hence will do more risky things because they think it’s safer.
Rescues even with EPIRB’s can still be difficult.
This seems like a crazy position to me. In what world is someone with connectivity not significantly safer in remote areas? Obviously doesn't help with immediately fatal scenarios (falls, drowning etc), but there are whole classes of getting-lost or losing-mobility disasters that just don't exist anymore with connectivity.
this is an absurd thing to say, there are so many situations that are way safer with more information. alot of bad situations happen when people make the wrong decision under uncertainty, or they are in over their head. access to the internet, and increasingly claude, is incredible and changes alot of outdoors risk for the right users
One one hand I understand. On the other, the idea of bringing Claude as a companion on a hiking trip makes me incredibly sad.
As a former SAR technician, connectivity is a massive, massive game changer.
How is it not safer to have access to information and be able to contact people from your remote location?
Does it make you absolutely 100% safe? No. Does it suddenly nullify any potential risky scenario? No. But it is pretty idiotic to say that it doesn't change the risk. It very clearly changes the risk and reduces it drastically.
I want to clarify that no, Starlink _really_ does not "drastically reduce the risk" of remote outdoor activities. Looking it up, Starlink doesn't even provide it's gps location to connected devices. And regardless, actually rugged communication capable handheld gps units already exist and have for a while. And they don't require that you bring a whole satellite dish and some kind of battery pack with you on your wilderness expeditions. What's actually idiotic, and getting lots of people in serious trouble these days, is going out unprepared. Don't risk your life, or search and rescue workers lives because you think you'll use Claude or whatever to figure it out while you are out there.
Things can go very wrong very quickly. If you go do risky activities far from help you should be prepared and know what you are getting yourself into and how to get yourself back out of it ahead of time.
this reads like angry old man shaking his fist, obviously theres truth in it, but its too one sided to be taken seriously
a major part of outdoors risk is the uncertainty, which by definition, you cant look up ahead of time
Could you actually explain what you disagree with? In my opinion, everything in the comment you're replying to is obviously correct.
If you're going somewhere where there is a chance you might get lost, injured or trapped by weather, and need rescue, you should already be bringing something like a Garmin inReach. That's a highly ruggedized device with a battery that lasts for over a week without recharge, is small enough to keep in a pocket, provides two-way messaging and weather reports, can track your position at regular intervals so your family can see where you are, and can, without any setup and even when you're seriously injured, be used to directly send out an SOS with automatic reporting of your position and two-way voice communication.
As excellent as Starlink is, it is nowhere near a substitute for those capabilities. And the inReach has existed for longer than Starlink, ergo Starlink doesn't change the risk profile. The only real argument that Starlink changes the risk profile is if you're comparing Starlink vs nothing, or Starlink + PLB vs just PLB. And sure, in those cases Starlink is a significant improvement, but it's still inferior to something like an inReach.
The second part of the argument is that having better connectivity is no substitute for fundamentals, which is overwhelmingly, obviously correct. Yes, bring all the connectivity you want, the more the better if you're willing to carry it. But your plan shouldn't be built around the assumption that you can be rescued if things go wrong. If you get complacent due to having better connectivity it's entirely possible for it to worsen, rather than improve, your risk profile.
There are infinite examples.
Right now I am in an overlanding vehicle, but I'm not an expert in offroading. I drove down a 5 mile trail that was very technical. The car can handle it, but it needs caution and the way back is much harder. I was extremely hesitant about going back up that way. If I get stuck, I am solo and I am hours from town via driving. So I just pulled out starlink, and with a combination of claude, off roading websites, and google maps, found an easier, roundabout, and more off the grid way back.
At every step I can use available information to put myself onto safer routes, I can research every decision before I make it. Where is the safest place to sleep, etc.
Pre internet people are out there just winging it in the back country
One would argue that pre-Internet people prepared more, started on easier trails or went out with experienced people first.
My generation would prepare in advance for outing. We’d print the route from MapQuest. ;)
I agree with your attitude. Technology can give false confidence.
Self-rescue, and self-sufficiency are priority, not some sense that someone will come save you if things go wrong.
With Starlink, a smartphone, and a solar charger I’d have access to enough YouTube videos to rebuild civilization. Literally.
There’s enough to go from building any type of housing to building your own steel forge. It’s amazing.
Worth remembering that many African telcos are not just mobile phone/data providers but also digital wallets (mobile money) - much of the GDP flows through them. Companies like Safaricom are the de facto financial utility of the country, so they are not going anywhere any time soon. That said Starlink is forcing the telcos to innovate and expand footprints. They’ve held very comfortable politically protected monopolies for far too long.
> Starlink ... is much pricier than mobile internet, and often costs more than even fibre broadband. The service ... halted new subscriptions for seven months to maintain connection quality. ... [T]he weather can mess up the signal: "You need a backup in those heavy months of rain."
There are really no shortcuts to the immense goal of covering the African continent with reliable internet.
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.
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.
No short cuts but it’s an amazing service that’s benefiting millions of people already and will likely start to benefit millions more in africa
The example in the article is contrived. Not many people can afford to pay for Starlink in rural Nigeria. You can also take a look at MTN Nigeria coverage map to see their Fibre and wireless deployments at https://coverage.mtn.ng/. (Yes, service isn’t yet in Ekiti, but will eventually get there as it’s already in neighbouring states). Compared to a few years ago, fibre penetration is ramping up from tier 1 and tier 2 service providers. Also, fibre services (when available ) typically start at about $20 per month compared to Starlink at $50 and you need an upfront investment of around $400 to buy the kit.
The example isn't contrived.
Before Starlink was official in Nigeria you had to import and pay $150 a month. By the time it was official there were already thousands because people are already paying more for FWA.
I am not sure how to write this without it sounding like an ad for Starlink. It definitely isn't. Just trying to add an anecdote to the conversation. I live in Canada and there are a small number of people that I know that have given up faster, cheaper internet from Telus/cable/etc for Starlink. I think what it comes down to is people are tried of the two year contracts and having to negotiate a better rate and never being able to get the same deal as a new customer. Loyalty is punished.
Whenever landline ISPs fail, Starlink swoops in.
Having competition is important, and Starlink, being what it is, can compete with everyone everywhere at all times.
Starlink is a natural fit for sparsely populated underserved rural areas. But if going with Starlink begins to make economic sense in city centers, local ISPs have failed very hard. And Starlink is always there to punish them for it.
From a pure competition standpoint, Starlink existing puts pressure on the entire industry all at once. No longer are so many people bound by a sole supplier in certain communities and now actual competition will eventually forced these companies to start fighting hard for customers. If there is one thing Elon is good at it’s scaling and that pressure should mount pretty quickly
Unfortunately it can’t since their cell size will never be sufficient for more than a small number of customers in an urban area. Mobile data cells here are a few blocks radius rather than the 10-20 miles in rural areas where Starlink really shines.
I had the same problem in San Francisco with Comcast. The only alternative was wireless service (which was somehow much slower than my iPhone) or slow fixed wireless as my street doesn’t get fiber. Ended up getting my partner to resubscribe to Comcast as a new customer.
Unfortunately Starlink will never be able to make substantial inroads into urban areas since their cell size is far too large to serve a high of density customers well.
How do they know Starlink isn't going to jack the prices up?
They eventually will but there is also coming competition from satellite providers as well to suppress prices long term. Those ground based providers will still have a lot of infrastructure in the ground and they won’t go down without a fight.
They aren't thinking that far ahead. It is just the immediate rate they are on. If it doesn't work out, they can always go back to Telus, etc at a way better rate than they had as an existing customer.
They just did a month ago, so it'll probably be a few months before they do it again
I've lived in SA for about a year. I would have paid a lot of money for something like Starlink a couple of years ago.
Where you have internet it does not work while the local power is out. And it was not that stable and at times we were sitting 10 hours without power a day. And that's in Joburg. And 5g was hard to come by.
So I can only imagine that locals are happy to see such a thing. Especially if you can run it from a car charger or something.
In South Africa we are not allowed to make use of Starlink. The reason: our government insists that the owners of Starlink give > 50% of ownership of the contract exclusively to black people (our discriminatory BBEEE that explicitly states, openly, in any advert in public, that a company is allowed to ONLY EMPLOY black people and not white people), which Elon Musk and his company refuses to do (good for them). That is the reason we can't have Starlink.
When Elon's dead this problem will go away.
And rightfully so
Remember the US backlash against Huawaie over 5G towers?
African nations should have the exact same sovereignty/national security concerns regarding US tech, specially given the well documented history of the NSA and CIA leveraging their digital platforms for intelligence/spying
It's actually funny how the discourse is never the same when it come to US interests vs sovereign nations
There are lots of white South Africans. I believe musk is one. Starlink is majority owned by a South African.
The law isn’t about foreign/doneatic. It’s about black/white.
Increasingly this state authorised racism is now extending to black people. The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.
Agreed
Just like the violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Jordanians by white Israelis is terrifying
As expected one can work around dysfunctional state trlcos but the base problem remains- the culturally caused taxation of entrepreneurs by leeching families snd communities. This dysfunctional culture is the single thing that is holding africa back. Same as with the middle east islamis inability to form working states because the biggest social unit the culture allows to form is the family clan. Even where oil money or trade taxation allows for western/eastern success cosplay, the ministries and armies are filled with family at the highest ranks. One does not have a nation, a meta family. And all the cofabulayions about past injustices, do not help these stuck cultures.
Starlink is going to completely gut the local telcos, terrestrial fiber is never going to have the $ to achieve critical mass. So when, eventually, SpaceX or the US Govt wants to apply leverage over Africa, they will have to bend the knee. Or we'll have a hiatus in launches or a space war, and as they constellation burns up so will internet access. Africa will be in the dark.
Sometimes cheaper, sometimes better, accessible everywhere.
The African diaspora is under-represented here! Or they (on the continent) are asleep.
The problem of it not working well during the rain is a huge issue in countries where cloud cover can last days, and 3-5 months of the year has regular rain fall.
works fine in the rain. source: oregon coast.
https://archive.ph/eVaPb
Doesn’t work for me
Try changing DNS. Works fine on att fiber after clicking through a cloudflare-like captcha
Just for interest's sake and so this continues to be visible in the world: In South Africa we are not allowed to make use of Starlink. The reason: our government insists that the owners of Starlink give > 50% of ownership of the contract exclusively to black people (our discriminatory BBEEE that explicitly states, openly, in any advert in public, that a company is allowed to ONLY EMPLOY black people and not white people), which Elon Musk and his company refuses to do (good for them). That is the reason we can't have Starlink.
The racism of south africa astounds me.
I read these Starlink hope stories and get inspired now and then. But the truth is:
I've bought a mini and standard, and on my mini I've got maybe a couple of good anecdotes in it. But the rest of it? The 97%? Pure fucking hustle to work. A crying sham of a service. I cannot rely on this thing to save my life for a single zoom call at work.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248231
tldr; Starlink doesn't work in South Africa, Elon's home country, because the ANC and its lawfare arm ICASA demands they hand over 30% to the State because of BEE laws.
This is misleading, Starlink does not need to provide "30% to the state", they only have to give 30% ownership to a local company with historically disenfranchised owners providing real economic value to South Africa. This can be a private company.
Does ownership ever get assigned to people who aren't political cronies of the current government?
In South Africa I would be very surprised if that ever happened. This is a country that went from exporting electricity to daily blackouts because of corruption.
It is easy to export electricity when you only need to serve 10% of the population.
Whose fault is it the electrical grid apparently, according to your thesis, hasn't been upgraded in the 30+ years since apartheid ended?
Yes, all the time, because it is a private arrangement between the foreign company and the local company. Private companies are in no meaningful sense "cronies" of the government, even if they were accredited by the formal regulating body. You cannot point to a single major case of B-BEEE favouritism, it is a legal framework that is almost always impartial.
Hitachi famously got caught doing exactly this: using b-bbee as a front to funnel bribe money to the ruling party.
I keep a Starlink subscription as my WAN2, after someone started a fire in a nearby fiber cabinet and managed to knock out Frontier and Spectrum at once. It’s worth it to me as a bullet-proof WAN2, especially working from home.
Starlink is a massive national security risk, and that is one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
It's also why Starlink has pushed so aggressively to establish itself in South Africa, going as far as to hold private meetings with the Democratic Alliance and even spamming their customers with emails urging them to put pressure on the government.
>one of the primary reasons it has not been allowed in South Africa.
That's just nonsense. The regulator has been very clear on what the hold up is. A ECNS license is needed, which in turn requires 30% black ownership which musky boy isn't willing to do and isn't likely to change his mind on given his stance on DEI.
That's why the communication minister tried to create an alternative pathway around the 30% requirement
https://www.businessday.co.za/companies/2025-12-12-starlink-...
> requires 30% black ownership
What an absurd requirement.
The goal is to hedge national security risk by giving ownership of key industries to native South Africans and especially those who have historically been denied economic opportunities by the apartheid government.
Requiring SpaceX to set up a token reseller just to meet the the ownership requirement does exactly nothing for "national security". It's pure graft for whoever gets handed ownership of the reseller and nothing more. In fact if blatant enough it could be illegal under the FCPA.
> requires 30% black ownership
Of SpaceX or of a special South African Starlink reseller that SpaceX owns 70% of?
B-BEEE exists as a kind of "national security risk insurance", that is why it is only applied to sectors like Telecomms and Mining. So my statement is not incorrect.
Why would he give up ownership to someone who did absolutely nothing of value? That's a shakedown. It's like the laws that keep Tesla from selling cars in some states because they require a stealership as middle man.
Starlink is allowed to choose who they partner with. They will go through a lengthy process to pick partners that align with their business, including value propositions.