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.
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 live in a rural neighborhood with fiber. Multiple neighbors go with Starlink because it’s cheaper and good enough.
Starlink is also satellite internet, right?
Starlink satellites are ~500 km in altitude. Regular satellite internet is in geostationary orbit at ~35,000 km in altitude.
The difference in latency is massive. 3ms vs 220ms roundtrip time at the speed of light.
Yes, but the low altitude of the satellites makes a big difference.
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.
Same, except I had DSL--the local provider 'guarantees' speeds of 10Mbps to my house.
So, needless to say, starlink has been amazing.
Is it really $55 a month?
Why would he give an incorrect figure?
Typos can happen.
Lies
Residential 100 mbps (which these days actually delivers pretty well) is $55/mo
https://starlink.com/service-plans
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.
> 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.
> jump technology generations
Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet
Nor did they claim that.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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'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.
Rescues even with EPIRB’s can still be difficult.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do they know Starlink isn't going to jack the prices up?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why copper? Heavy, thick, expensive, attractive for thieves. Lay fiber: thin, lightweight, less expensive per Gbps, future-proof, corrosion-resistant, lighting-resistant, worthless for thieves.
Worthless for theft, but subject to ransom and destruction by your local warlord.
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.
Is anyone actually running new telecom copper these days? I’d be surprised if so.
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.
https://archive.ph/eVaPb
Doesn’t work for me
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248231
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.
Does ownership ever get assigned to people who aren't political cronies of the current government?
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.
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
https://www.businessday.co.za/companies/2025-12-12-starlink-...
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.
> requires 30% black ownership
What an absurd 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.