Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- 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.by ultrahax
- The African diaspora is under-represented here! Or they (on the continent) are asleep.by tolerance
- 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.by dkobia
- 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.by warumdarum
- It's a honest company, delivers what promises, if you want to transfer the ownership, one click does it. If you want go to standby mode, one click, no tricks. I'm tired of companies tricking you everytime you need to change the service.by fabiovovola
- > 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.
by Exoristos - 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
- 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.by fragmede
- 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.
by IFC_LLC - 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 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.by robear
- How do they know Starlink isn't going to jack the prices up?by stevage
- 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.
by laurencerowe - 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 quicklyby Aboutplants
- 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.
by ACCount37 - 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
by mikert89 - 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.
by grebc - 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.by LorenDB
- Is it really $55 a month?by gonzalohm
- Starlink is also satellite internet, right?
- 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?by fluoridation
- Same, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house.
So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
by sejje - I live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough.
- 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.
- 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.
by jcims - 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.
by mbreese - > 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.
by TMWNN - > jump technology generations
Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
by dools - > 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.
- > 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.