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.

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Zigurd 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	kibwen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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dools 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> jump technology generations

Satellite internet is not a “generation above” fibre internet

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Polizeiposaune 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Once the birds are in orbit, satellite internet is vastly superior to fiber in speed of deployment.

Fiber requires custom engineering at the city block level and a single rotten utility pole can block deployment.

I say this as someone who waited for fiber and is happily using it now.

	▲	uxhacker 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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willy_k 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Nor did they claim that.

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dools 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> When you don’t have an established wired infrastructure, it becomes significantly easier to jump technology generations

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willy_k an hour ago | parent [-]

> As others mentioned, It's a very similar situation for rural American

That’s a seperate anecdote about his dad in America.

If you’re going to nitpick irrelevant inconsistencies, at least be right.

	▲	dools an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Et tu dufus

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TacticalCoder 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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blacksmith_tb an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Africa isn't a country? There are 54 countries in Africa, and it has almost twice the area of all of North America, not just the USA [1]

1: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/continent-size-comparison/no...

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yieldcrv 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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

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kevin_thibedeau 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

They are not a uniform monolithic people, regardless of outside interference.

	▲	yieldcrv 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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

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ladberg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Where did the parent commenter imply Africa is a country?

EDIT: I can't read, sorry all!

	▲	jayGlow 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		right here "But then there's a reason why a country with more than 3x the number of people in the US".

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HWR_14 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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TMWNN 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.