> 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.

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pempem 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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?

	▲	rdm_blackhole 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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maccard 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Meanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres

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floam 3 days ago | parent [-]

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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mschuster91 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Not literally no signal/service, right?

Come to Munich, go into any of the large old buildings, the central stairwells usually are phone dead zones. Truly dead.

Or try to go and hike in the Alps. Shit service, but as soon as you walk into Austrian territory, you'll suddenly have service.

Or try taking a train from Munich to, say, Landshut. You'll lose signal about 5 minutes after the train passes through the outskirts of Feldmoching.

Or try driving a car on the A8 highway to Salzburg in Austria. You'll lose signal about 5-10 minutes after passing Holzkirchen.

Or try taking a train from Passau to Wels in Austria. Passau is directly near the border. You will have a shit service right until the train passes the national border and Austrian towers take over.

The reason isn't technical. The Passau and Alps example shows it - identical geography, identical mountainous areas with about zero population... but wildly different attitudes in regulation.

> If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll

Here, you get death threats if you even propose putting up a tower on your land [1], in the UK nutjobs set a 5G tower ablaze [2].

[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/wolfratshausen/icking-5...

[2] https://www.blick.ch/ausland/grossbritannien-handymast-eines...

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floam 3 days ago | parent [-]

I stand corrected. I didn’t realize you could be a MIMBY for cell towers and also not currently have service.

Any organized resistance I’ve witnessed myself in the US has been something like an HOA saying no not tucked right here where our home values could take a hit or a view obstructed, please put it down the street or … anywhere else.

But if you had no cell service and your call dropped as you backed out of your garage or you tried to sell your house and the buyers phones suddenly had no service or they couldn’t get on the Internet at the open house, that’d feel like pretty concerning missing infrastructure.

I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing.

	▲	mschuster91 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I don’t think anti-5G wackos have dented a thing. They have, at least here in Germany. We have a shitload of what we call "weiße Flecken", zones with zero service, of about the size of half of Schleswig-Holstein [1]. While a lot of these is in forests and mountainous areas, the zones in settlements are mostly due to the whackos and their organized campaigns. [1] https://bmds.bund.de/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/detail/mob...

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jimnotgym 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

911 would get you nowhere in the UK;)

I have no phone signal in my village, a few miles from a major town. I have to use WiFi calling to talk on the phone. Our local politician campaigns against it, it is such an issue. Especially since analogue phone lines are due to be turned off soon. We still have a working red phone box though!

I travel around a bit in the area and blackspots are very common

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maccard 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes.

In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.

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dylan604 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> unless 911

Probably not that even since it's UK. Isn't it 999 in the UK? Has the UK started accepting 911->999 for the tourists?

	▲	ImJamal 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		According to Wikipedia > 911 redirects to 999 on mobile phones/public phonebooths[citation needed] and on telephones used in USAFE bases. So maybe? But without the source who knows.