Problem in Africa is that the Chinese will sail in with their alternatives at the first sign of trouble. Right now, we can’t have games like that in Africa. We’re in an almost daily grind trying to counter Chinese influence as it is. The last thing we need is Elon sailing in torpedoing our efforts.
We need to be cognizant of the fact that we’re no longer the only game in town, and act accordingly when using power. Soft or hard.
Well if the point is that Zimbabwe starts playing games and corruption starlink can ignore them. Sure the Chinese could play Zimbabwe’s game, but then they’d likely be more expensive and worse quality by blocking things the government doesn’t like. If people can still access starlink why would they use the state sanctioned but crappy provider?
Because China isn't exactly famed for its corporations' market clearing prices being expensive, and most people would rather buy legal satcomms equipment (and VPN in, if they really need to access something the Zimbabwean government doesn't want them to see or the Chinese government cares about Africans seeing) than jump through hoops to get the equipment and subscription payments to the American service, bandwidth which Starlink has minimal motivation to give away cheaply anyway.
The Chinese don’t have sth similar right now, right? Also at this point tbh would prefer Chinese whatever over us/starlink. At least it will be more rational.
They've already started launching their own satellite internet constellation. It will likely be less capable once completed and take longer to complete, but they are aiming to have that capability.
It is the case in Iran, India, China, South Africa, Russia, North Korea, Ghana, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Occupied Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, Sudan, Myanmar, ... a hell of a lot more countries than people seem to realize in this thread.
Almost explains why Musk bought the US government.
I believe that easily totals up to that for more than half of the human population connecting to Starlink is illegal.
Many of these examples are wrong, or essentially wrong. For example it does not work in 99% of India. There are just a few border areas where the geofencing doesn't work.
Same with Occupied Ukraine. It's difficult to pin the area of control down precisely, given that Ukraine uses Starlink for combat capability.
Also, only using allocated spectrum. Starlink Direct-to-Cell requires partnership with mobile providers that hold that spectrum, like T-Mobile. Terrestrial network using those frequencies would probably swamp the signal from space. Legally, Starlink can't use those frequencies without permission from each country.
India sees the ability for anyone to anonymously post things on the Internet as all kinds of stupid, and heavily regulates the access to the Internet so any in-country activity can be tracked back to an individual.
There's no way to put the smartphone genie back in the bottle and there's no way to visually differentiate satelote capable phones. It's going to be easy to smuggle them across borders.
Maybe, but would you currently like to go to india with a satellite capable device?
And in the future I can imagine mandatory software that needs to be installed in many countries, to be able to do any buisness there.
Not specifically against satellites - but for using the bus, paying the hotel, getting a appointment at the police, ... and that app would make sure, you only connect to authorized means of communication.
The hard part will be preventing that shit to become universal.
