Comment by bryanlarsen
2 days ago
Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink.
See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen
India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara).
Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Very different case from India.
How much is a Starlink setup? They are pretty expensive in Europe, are they cheaper in Africa?
I checked a random Kenyan address on starlink.com, and it would be around 386 USD for the dish there (with service for 50 USD/mo), so not cheap. In Poland I see that they're giving the dish for free with some 1-year contract (58 USD/mo). Maybe it'll become cheaper, they're making millions of them. And you could share it with neighbors - if you can get 300 Mb/s, you could connect like 5 families if the alternative is nothing.
I found a nice website with prices by country: https://www.starlink-prices.com/personal/residential/usd/low
But it may be outdated, because it shows $90/mo price in Poland, while it's much cheaper as I said, even with the free dish.
And some recent articles about Starlink prices in Africa:
https://techlabari.com/average-starlink-prices-across-all-af...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-starlink-vs-lead...
Anyway, Starlink is mostly for places where you have no ISPs or cell service (or they are very bad), so not for 95% of Europe, and probably not for most of India, especially in the future.
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I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems.
The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.
Yes indeed.
All those unfortunate children will be introduced to the toxic, horrid internet.
They'll be addicted, have no attention span, have their own data used against them to exploit and track them, and end up with their political system reeling under manipulative AI and generic bots.
Far better to just give them books for their educarional system, and leave the evil Internet out of it.
So how many books have you given to kids in remote places in the 3rd world?
This sort of arrogance where suddenly everyone remembers all reasons why some technology is bad once the "poor masses" get it (while they themselves had the technology for years), is hypocritical and frustrating.
The reality is that getting online makes a massive difference for someone in some remote poor area. Not just in terms of education but also economically.
Wow. Everything in life has good and bad consequences. It is important that we remember to look towards the light.
What you describe at its worst is still better than the exploitation many of the children in the Philippines endure today by westerners. Hopefully, being able to communicate on the 'evil Internet', the rest of the world, like you, can truly understand what they endure.
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He says, on the internet.
Nah books distract kids from reigning their horses and crop in fields.
The one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.
That is a lot cheaper than it would cost in a developed country, but is not more affordable.
For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.
I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.
Communications and electricity aren't just luxury goods, they're also critical inputs to work. There are lots of anecdotes of one or both of these increasing income by substantially more than their costs.
Yes, I do realise that, which is why I recognise it makes a huge difference, I just want to put it into context as not being very cheap.
> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?
> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.
There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.
And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.
So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.
Can you help me understand. Is Starlink, or satellite enabled wifi really the only solution here if you're 10-15 min away from a populated area?
Yes unfortunately.
My parent's in law live on small farm 10 minutes out of a small town in NSW and on the best days, when the sky is clear, they get 1 bar of phone reception on their cell phone and they have to stay within a 10 sqm perimeter within their house in order to make phone calls otherwise calls drop out.
Video chat is basically out of the question unless you want to talk to pixelated blobs on a screen.
After waiting 10 years for the NBN to be rolled out to their property, they decided to bite the bullet and bought a Starlink terminal and now we can have normal conversations on the phone and they can use streaming services whereas that would have been impossible before.
But it is not just them that have issues. When I was living in Brisbane many moons ago, I remember how pitiful the internet speed was so much so that I ditched my home internet and started hot-spotting from my phone instead.
Things have improved in the cities since then I am sure, but for the people out there living in the country side, not much as changed.
Meanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres
Not literally no signal/service, right? More likely “I have a few bars but data doesn’t seem to work… calls often won’t initiate unless 911?” thing you get when there’s too many devices connecting to an overburdened tower, in a network that needs more cells or something, and QoS/qci says no?
If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
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