> 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.

▲

blacksmith_tb 2 hours 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...

▲

yieldcrv an hour 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

▲

kevin_thibedeau 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	yieldcrv 31 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

▲

ladberg an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Where did the parent commenter imply Africa is a country?

EDIT: I can't read, sorry all!

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

▲

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.