Comment by oskarkk
3 months ago
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.
High density -> large populations.
Density, generally, makes service provision easier.
Contrarywise, Starlink (or other broadcast-based services) perform poorly in high-density areas, where there's high bandwidth contention. Building out to serve such locations, which are by definition few and fairly sparsely distributed, as your map indicates, increases total system costs markedly.
Starlink at scale is optimised for sparse, low-income populations, rather than dense, high-income ones. That's probably a significant liability eventually, though for now I'll have to note I'm impressed with the technical accomplishments, regardless of reservations on persons involved.
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But it may be outdated, because it shows $90/mo price in Poland, while it's much cheaper as I said, even with the free dish.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.
In NZ it is cheaper than broadband.