> 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
36 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 67.1 ms ] threadThere are really no shortcuts to the immense goal of covering the African continent with reliable internet.
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 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
Rescues even with EPIRB’s can still be difficult.
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.
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.
Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.