Starlink in the Falkland Islands – A national emergency situation?

£110 a month for 100 GB is actually less than I would have expected for a really remote place like the Falklands. As a point of comparison, I used to pay something like 10 USD per GB on flexiroam while traveling, though I think it's a bit less nowadays. Now that's what I call extortion. And it's still 100 times less than the roaming data rate on my standard mobile subscription.

As for Starlink, keep in mind that you are piggybacking on a humongous satellite network that has tons of unused capacity in remote areas. Now that it's available, it's cool to have it, but the previous provider had an exclusive contract for a reason. And presumably it's still binding, so I imagine the Falklands government is in a bit of a bind over this.

And by the way, Starlink itself is not above price gouging where they have no cheaper alternatives. Look at Starlink Marine pricing for example, which is I think 2500 USD / mo, down from 10000. So there is no actual guarantee that £60 per month unlimited usage will still be be there if Starlink is allowed to operate officially.

If this is the caliber of internet people are dealing with, I really hope some kind local techies are helping to set people up with uBlock Origin (ideally on Firefox), ClearURLs to skip unnecessary redirects (I'm assume GEO latencies here), and LocalCDN or DecentralEyes to avoid re-downloading the same libraries and assets over and over. Probably good to add something that defaults Youtube to 360p, and use Pihole for mobile/smart devices.

There are many addons, but I find these are the minimal "set it and forget it" set that makes the most difference.

Personally I would run uBO in at least Medium Mode[1], but I expect that's probably too much for most non-technical users.

Source: I suffered through metered satellite internet for many years.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

It’s only 110 pounds a month? I figured it would be much more, given that ~3,500 people live there. That gives a customer base of ~1,500 or so.

There aren’t exactly many places to run a fiber connection to, Uruguay being the closest friendly neighbor (aside from the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego), I assume the current internet connection is a satellite link?

Before starlink, the only way to get a private company to offer internet service to a tiny island with less people than my neighborhood is a monopoly, the economics simply don’t work if there is competition.

Isn’t that how Uber came to exist? Undercut pricing until you amass users then return to profit once the competition is extinct. I would love to believe the starlink price is real but history says otherwise.

pure nitpick:

  - lowercase b implies bits, which is (0|1).
  - uppercase B implies Bytes, which is* 8 bits(1100 1001). 
  - "ps" stands for "per second" and is typically used for bits.  
  - "/s" stands for "per second" and is typically used for bytes. 
  - realistically, context suggests 5120 bit per seconds, which is rather slow.
  - 5MB/s is 40Mbps, 8 times over 5Mbps, enough* for couple 4K H.265 streams.

It’s $4-600/month for 10mbps. And that’s before line rental, equipment deposit, installation charges, and the various other surprise fees they hit you with. I know Falklanders and to say that they hate Sure would be an understatement.

https://www.sure.co.fk/broadband/broadband-packages/?utm_sou...

Honestly with those numbers, I'm pretty surprised it's even an independent company. Wouldn't such a community of 3-4k people in a very remote location be a prime example where providing internet could just be a gov/municipal service, subsided by an extraordinary tax if needed?

And this might be the big issue with solar power and also EV's. If enough people switch to solar and are no longer paying into the grid at a certain point it will become unprofitable to maintain a large grid. The same is true at this point for EV's. Buying gas we pay road tax. So not buying gas is going to reduce that tax collected. At a certain point they will need to change the way that tax is collected. Probably some sort of tax on the distance an EV drives or perhaps some other method.

Yeah, the only real solution here feels like paying off the monopoly, a cost which in the end is likely going to need a handout from the UK. It’s tough to identify anyone who’s done anything explicitly wrong in this story, or a solution that doesn’t end up shafting someone. Perhaps a negotiated tax on non-monopoly users there that goes to the monopoly to help defray their investment is the only sensible solution.

Their revenue is north of £100M p.a., and they are owned by batelco. They are not hurting for cash.

This is the most sensible comment in this dumpster fire of a thread.

> Ahh, that explains it. Mafia in power, essentially.

It's not so cut and dry, really. Imagine you're an ISP - and you want to set up infrastructure to about 3600 people. Really, it's actually 1200 - many people live in a single household.

Now, you want to get internet TO the island. How do you do that? Easy! Point to point from the nearest terrestrial base. Oops! That's too far! Also, that's Argentina and they hate you (long history).

Okay so, that leaves satellite - famously historically affordable. That requires a lot of bandwidth from satellite and this requires some pretty expensive infrastructure. By the way, it's a lot cheaper if you set up multiple "streams" and distribute them - versus everyone having their own dish.

And we haven't even gotten to the cost of laying out the cable, cell service, etc.

So if this sounds all really expensive - and it is - you better have an agreement from the government that your huge up front investment won't be ruined by some competitor which causes a collapse of both parties. That sounds unreasonable, but honestly, it isn't - this stuff is expensive!

Anyways, they got completely wrecked on the math by Starlink, and so it's probably time for them to go away. But honestly, considering how remote they are, it wasn't really that bad of a deal for quite a long time!

Prior to Starlink, the Falklands had two choices when it came to internet service: no internet at all, or sign a monopoly agreement that allows a private ISP to make a profit. The UK government could’ve provided internet as well, but that’s unlikely, leaving the two options on the table.

It’s not mafia in power, it’s simply the economics of providing internet service to a tiny population of ~3,500 living on an island that is almost a thousand miles away from friendly allied nations.

Just about all radio communication is illegal until licensed. Starlink had to get approval from the FCC in the US even before the first satellites went up, to provide fixed broadband service, and before allowing it to be used on mobile vehicles.

Starlink gets licensed in different countries to use specific frequencies to avoid congestion/interference with other services

The problem is more musk, to anybody outside US he is potentially an enemy, a self-made one but thats irrelevant.

Internet access is a strategic resource to certain extent, you dont want to pay your enemy for such service. Europe also doesnt want puttin's gas and oil

At least Saint Helena recently got a submarine cable. I wonder if part of that deal was exclusivity for the operator(s) funding it (hopefully for a limited time).

It would obviously better to make that happen without government restrictions on individual usage, but I can see how recouping a significant private investment for a few thousand people is harder than Starlink just providing services using the satellites that are overflying all of Earth anyway, whether they get used in a given region or not.

This is what everyone said he’d do in Ukraine (after he spoke against expanding the service into Russian controlled Crimea) yet the service continues to be a critical part of their military and Russia is still excluded from using it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...

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Interestingly Frank Herbert wrote about the hidden value of slow and measured bureaucratic processes. His essential argument was that a slow bureaucracy has time to review not just the letter of laws and policies, but the impact that they will have after enacted which may not be part of the conversation to get them passed. The story he writes on this is borderline satirical with a government agent called a saboteur, whose sole job is to slow down and muck up an incredibly efficient future government which is able to pass laws which have sweeping impact across the nation in hours, and in some cases seconds.

While most of us corporate drones often laugh at the speed of government, considering the lightning fast decision-making often made in the world’s top companies, that book always made me think about the fact that government operations often have far more riding on them than any private enterprise ever will. So maybe that time is being spent more effectively than you assume.

Personally, this whole scenario makes me very wary. Though I understand the complexities of the infrastructure we’re discussing here, I’d be super nervous to have my Internet lifeline to the rest of the world governed directly by Elon Musk.

The proposal could be the other way around. You'd ideally want some time to protest a proposal.

> The cruise companies hate it and prohibit it

The prohibition on all and sundry on using their own radio trancevers (yes, that includes satellite transceivers) is to prevent the risk of causing RF/electrical interference with the ships systems. The use of low power Wi-Fi and cellular phones is fine, but poorly set up directional VSAT terminals can play havoc with ships navigation and comms kit. This is historically the reason for banning their use without explicit permission in writing from the ships master.

Source: Marine engineer.

Some cruise lines like Oceania use Starlink for their own wifi.

No, they don’t. They’re just going to charge you an insane price to use it, other than that they all know the service is better.

I pay a hundred bucks for 1GBit/s and unlimited data, how is that comparable to Falkland Islands where it’s more expensive, much slower and has data caps?

I'm guessing they deal with it at the citizen level. Just investigate, raid the property and confiscate all the equipment.