[Starlink] Starlink for Tonga?

[Mike Puchol]

Thank you for the great detail on the situation!

On link budgets, we are talking about a delta in slant range at minimum elevation of 15° of ~900 km, compared to 25°. SpaceX already stated that they would operate gateways above 60° latitude at elevations as low as 5°, so they have plenty spare in terms of gateway to satellite. The biggest rain fade impact would be on the service links, as the UT cannot increase power that much, no matter how much the satellite increases its side. Still, the biggest impact on Fiji and Tonga is the GSO protection, which takes out 36° of usable sky, all the way from East to West.

As for banning Dishy, the difference with satellite TV is that you can detect the uplink at 14-14.5 GHz and home in on “violators”, you can’t just hide it under some tarp ;-)

Best,

Mike
On Feb 8, 2022, 09:22 +0100, Ulrich Speidel <ulrich at cs.auckland.ac.nz>, wrote:
> 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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