[Starlink] Starlink for Tonga?

[Ulrich Speidel]

Fiji's unwritten government policy for a long term has been that the 
Internet exists as an income source for the government.

When I was at the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva on a 
short secondment in 2001, you could pick a fresh bunch of tropical 
flowers for each short e-mail from overseas that arrived. This was just 
a couple of kilometres from the landing station of the very much 
operational Southern Cross cable, which had taken over as the main 
redundant US-NZ-Australia connection, with bandwidth to boot. I was told 
that USP, as a transnational organisation, had requested permission to 
connect, and was refused. They had access to a transponder on a Japanese 
satellite at the time to beam analog video of classes to their 
"satellite" campuses around the Pacific, and they weren't allowed to use 
that for Internet either.

It's not changed all that much since. I'm told that there's a wall in 
the cable landing station, and every bit that crosses the wall has a tax 
slapped onto it.

Other countries have similar sensitivities, sometimes because they want 
to protect a monopoly telco, sometimes because local society doesn't 
want real Internet (many places are very much church-driven, and I 
suspect some pastors fear that they might lose the narrative, or people 
have heard about all the horrible things on the Internet and just don't 
want it in their village). Sometimes it's because their current 
satellite provider has them in a stranglehold - they love long-term 
contracts for little service at exorbitant fees, and some small footnote 
in the contract says that this special price is only available to them 
if the island nation shall not buy from anyone else during that period. 
Typical satellite contracts in the Pacific run for 5 years minimum. Yes 
that sounds as crook as it is.

Note that there are in principle two issues with a LEO provider 
accessing a country: Providing service there and running gateways there. 
To prevent Starlink from offering service once they're able to route 
between satellite, you'd have to ban dishys, and if you want to know how 
well that works, ask the Iranians for their experience when they wanted 
to ban satellite TV. Running a gateway is another matter, of course.

There's always hope that the Fijian government will eventually 
understand that the Internet will make it richer if it doesn't try to 
take a cut, and that more of it is better for them. But they'd like a 
bit more Internet on the outlying islands as is, and maybe Elon can sell 
the idea to them?

On 8/02/2022 8:49 pm, Daniel AJ Sokolov wrote:
> On 2022-02-08 at 00:30, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
> > They're not the only place in the Pacific to have these sorts of
> > problems, so seeing Starlink show any interest at all is a good thing.
> > They might want to start with providing service to all of Fiji.
>
> Maybe, but my feeling is the local authorities don't want them in their
> market?
>
> What are the chances that the 6 month emergency license Fidschi has
> granted to help Tonga will be turned into a normal license that allows
> Fidschi residents to use Starlink?
>
> Cheers
> Daniel
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-- 
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282

The University of Auckland
ulrich at cs.auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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