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.
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]
Really? It's what he did after he spent nearly a third of a billion dollars to influence an election (which doesn't include the incalculable value of his influence via Twitter!) that makes him a Bond villain.
It's Chesterton's Fence[0] in action - Elon took a self-proclaimed woodchipper to the United States government without understanding what he was destroying and without concern for the repercussions to society. He used that influence to benefit himself and his companies directly. It's not sharks with laser beams, but it's far more impactful and the world will living with it for decades to come.
If you think that was Elon's doing, read up on Stephen Miller^, who was talking about what he'd like to do to the federal bureaucracy even before Trump won a second term.
Elon has some racist and oligarchical views, but was also a convenient, socially-awkward autistic guy to brand as the face of DOGE (and stupidly fell for that) while Miller et al. rolled out their preexisting plans.
Then knifed him in the back and tossed him overboard when public opinion soured on DOGE's excesses, since Elon never developed a political base.
Miller is the Antichrist, but I don't buy Elon as a victim for a second. I suspect he'll be spending some of that wealth on image rehabilitation and political influence though as the turns tide. The retcon will be entertaining at least.
Trying and helping to incense violence surely counts. He is one of the most harmfull men in the west. It is tight competition, sure, but he is there among the worst.
Backing fascist parties actually do make you a villan, regardless of whether they win or not.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Imagine having an entire worldview that boils down to which of two buttons you push and whether someone else pushed the same one. Elon musk has a rich tapestry of reasons he's a shitbag, that's not even near the top of the list.
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.
It had turned into a state department front that was getting people killed by interfering in domestic politics. Even Mexico’s President, who is one of Trump’s strongest critics, agreed with that move: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-musk-unexpected-ally-push-shu...
“During a press conference on Tuesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for shutting down USAID, criticizing the agency's role in funding organizations she described as working against Mexican interests.
‘It's involved in so many things that, honestly, it's better if they just shut it down. If there's going to be aid, it should come through other transparent channels—that's the real issue,’ Sheinbaum said.”
Like I said, the world is a lot more complicated than you learned about in elementary school. Your teacher taught you foreign aid workers selflessly help starving kids in poor countries. But interfering in domestic politics gets kids killed. My dad worked on USAID’s maternal health and vaccine programs in Bangladesh. But if it contributed in any way to the destabilization of Bangladesh in 2024, then it will have killed far more children in the long run than it saved. The math is brutal: in a poor country like Bangladesh, GDP growth directly drives down child mortality. Anything that sets back economic growth even a few years translates to hundreds of thousands of dead children.
You can make all the excuses you want, it doesn’t change the truth. He illegally cut food aid and directly killed vulnerable people around the world.
It is that simple.
> My dad worked on USAID’s maternal health and vaccine programs in Bangladesh.
Your dad seems like a much better person than you, spending his time helping people while you spend your time here carrying water for a fascist. Maybe you should try being like him, instead of whatever it is you are doing here.
> My dad is sad that USAID got shuttered, but his hatred is directed to Antony Blinken and Samantha Powers for how they politicized the agency and interfered with other countries’ domestic politics.
That's idiotic, his anger should be directed at the people who took a chainsaw to the agency.
> So maybe sit the fuck down and educate yourself
Take your own goddamn advice, you're talking about things you don't even understand and defending actions that have killed thousands just because you want to defend a billionaire against any and all criticism. It's sycophantic and beyond pathetic. So basically exactly in line with your behavior here.
Edit:
You might even have a point if any of the criticisms about USAID being a soft form of imperialism had been why it was shut down, but it was shut down by drooling idiots angry about "muh tax dollars" going to "dirty foreigners". Every justification you offer is posthoc - just whatever comes to mind to try and defend indefensible actions. You're a liar and continue prove it every time you post something contradictory like this.
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.
Well in that case however it’s anything but silly, with AfD chapters being classified as confirmed extremist right[1], holding its party congress on this very day, exactly 100 years after the NSDAP held an important congress focusing around Hitler and introducing the hitler salute[2], holding meetings to make plans about expelling German citizens[3], had an employee convicted of being a Chinese spy[4] just to cite a few.
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.
Yeah, I dont care about politics, therefore conservatives cant be fascist. I dont care the label fits perfectly, I dont care they have similar goals and values.
Important is, important is not to call them that.
> I think you should be aware of how this looks when you keep parroting unsubstantiated talking points from the opposition party.
They are well substantiated at this point. What is unsubstantiated is knee jerk "their opposition must be wrong, I dont care what is going on".
It perfectly fits the current timeline that the top 'feel good success anecdote' for this is about Starlink making raping the most remote areas on earth more enjoyable.
These guys get paid outsized rewards for exploiting our/everyone's oceans. Imagine a giant blimp getting paid outsized pay hovering for days over national forests hauling in every last animal they could get until the blimp was overflowing with dead creatures leaving behind a biologically weakened forest. We wouldn't hype them as working hard/dangerous jobs, we'd label them as crappy people/a crap industry. So glad we're making them more comfortable.
With the massive bot networks shoving misinformation and propaganda, it's also a new infrastructure that will destabilize a lot of countries unfortunately.
That just feels like status quo bias. Consider the reverse: should we cut off people's internet access because "that will destabilize a lot of countries"?
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.
> 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).
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.
I suspect that has a lot to do with still needing a ground station in the same hex as the signal. Presumably, there's limited bandwidth at wherever that ground station is.
Once the satellites are linked, I bet that improves.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not talking about day to day living. Talking about activities like hiking, mountain climbing etc and people perception of safety because they have a phone signal.
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
The track you chose has always had the same risk, you did it anyway even with all that technology beforehand. Congrats, you are the example I’m referring to.
I meant rebuild civilization for myself, say lost in Alaska or something. Though maybe there's a market for tablets with all the youtube survivalist, building, and technology re-creation out there. ;)
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.
> The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.
You will be shocked to discover that most ethic cleansings were among people who looked similar. And that include nazism in Europe which did not divided world into black and white either. It includes arab world and hostilities there too.
Like, for christ sake, you could have used the names of those ethnic groups.
Why don't you guys ever acknowledge that the law is an attempt to correct the racism of the apartheid government by distributing economic opportunities to those who never had them?
Economic opportunity isnt zero sum. The 'opportunity' the ANC is 'redistributing' is neglect and mismanagement of infrastructure. Kneecapping starlink doesn't do anything for blacks.
I might suggest a basic course in economics. The fact someone else gets all the profit of the price paid for a service doesn't mean you dont also gain from what you received.
This is the problem of looking at intent in law. Plenty of racist law had the intent to improve the country. But is in fact often economically illiterate for helping the populace.
Again, I never said it was zero sum, but thanks for being condescending. I said it was close to zero sum. Black south africans may get some jobs, maybe some internet, but the profit entirely goes to foreign entities and white south africans (in a theoretical model).
The law's intent was never to be racist, and while outcomes vary, the effect does not actually harm white south africans on average. So both the intent and the effect is non-racist.
OK so it might be positive sum for blacks if South Africans buy internet from South African Musk (even if Musk vacuums the price as profit) but we can't have that because Musk 'hates' them in your estimation and you've decided individual black people can't decide what that they think about that for themselves even if they might be better off?
But the law criticized had nothing to do with hate or spying, so really you've done something sly and shifted the posts once we called bullshit as an out for a clearly illiterate policy.
Black people decide every few years by voting for representatives who uphold these policies. There has never been a motion supported by the majority of black south africans to get rid of B-BBEE, only foreign people like you seem to have a problem with it and that is because you don't understand what it is trying to do and you (probably) hate the idea of reparations for apartheid. Or at the very least you support aggressive pro-market policies that south africans do not want.
Additionally, the owner of Starlink hates South Africa (I never said black south africans, but you know), because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here.
1) Majority of blacks and SA have been polled as not supporting (or reforming against racist elements of) current bbbee, including citing it being used instead as a vehicle of corruption.
2) You are rebutting a straw man. I said individual blacks deciding on starlink for themselves, not supposed collective decision of some against others via (corrupt) "representatives", precisely because I knew you'd try such deception of arguing a representative means an individual black person who wants internet must agree with it.
3) Representatives != public opinion. Most people can't be single issue voters. See also, medical marijuana was illegal in US during long periods of supermajorities disagreeing with their reps on the issue.
4) "only foreign people like you seem to have a problem with it." LMAO, LMFAO even, there are other SA posters (and Musk) here with a problem with the circumstances, its not a foreigner conspiracy. You can't fool us this easily coming in telling us youre the South African here and you'll tell us its only foreigners when it's South Africans who disagreed with the situation from which many of us first found out about this.
5) "because he has spread lies about genocide occurring here." Curious to see what specifically this refers to. I did see him advocating against promoting genocide through songs calling for the genocidal act of killing of the Boer, which has been chanted in some stadiums and political rallies.
You can easily look up the lies he has made about white genocide, which even white south africans have debunked.
You accuse me of deception for arguing that, in a democracy, the law must be written by averages and not by a few individuals who want starlink. Ok.
I'm only addressing those points because you're showing some signals of bad faith conversation and general meanness so I don't want to respond to anything until I know you are good faith.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although your claim is literally untrue as the grid has been upgraded, the answer is: mostly the apartheid government. They left the ANC with a grid that served only 10% of the population, which makes it very difficult to upgrade, especially in a country with rampant poverty leading to cable theft, corruption, and general lack of infrastructure.
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 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.
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.
And most of those unofficial terminals were in the big cities by upper middle class folks and not rural areas. As at the end of June 2026, Starlink had just about 90k subscribers in a country of over 200 million people after over 40 months of official operation.
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.
It hedges national security risk by having 30% of the profits stay within South Africa, so that if the foreign company decides to use their company to, say, spy on South Africans, they at least have to fund our key industries to do so. That is why B-BBEE applies to Telecomms and other key industries.
It hedges national security risk by saying "well, there's a national security risk here, and we really can't do anything about that, but we can make them pay us off for taking that risk"? You're really stretching on this one.
No you misunderstand severely, some risks are unavoidable and unknowable. You need a telecommunications industry, you can't just eliminate all risks associated with it. So instead you make them pay a kind of insurance to operate in it, just in case the leader of the country you're allowing in one day decides to target your country (sound familiar?).
Of course, another goal is just to empower previously disenfranchised groups and contribute to the economy of South Africa.
I agree that lack of a domestically controlled satellite communication service is a national security concern. If SA had a domestically controlled service and required citizens to use that instead of Starlink that could be a real national security measure. But a reseller of telecom services is not a telecom industry any more than a car dealership is an automotive industry. The actual owner of the satellite constellation can cut off access at will regardless of the domestic reseller's objections.
Furthermore this arrangement does not contribute to the economy of SA. It just makes Starlink services more expensive for SA consumers. The reseller is not really doing anything to develop an industry, but rather taking a skim. If the government actually wanted to develop the economy they would just let Starlink in for any real entrepreneur to use the internet access in remote areas to potentially expand business services into areas that previously lacked communication.
We barely have a space industry, how are we meant to compete with starlink? We need foreign investment. We also need protections against foreign investment. We also need to uplift south africans left behind by apartheid. That is the purpose of the law.
You are just wrong, the law says the local partner must be economically productive, and starlink is allowed to choose them, so if they don't contribute to starlink's business, that is starlink's fault. This is now the second time I have told you this, so you are wilfully misunderstanding me. Conversation over.
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.
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.
