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<p>Fiji's unwritten government policy for a long term has been that
the Internet exists as an income source for the government.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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? <br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 8/02/2022 8:49 pm, Daniel AJ Sokolov
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:8b7fd197-777d-e963-628d-4cdff7c04380@sokolov.eu.org">
On 2022-02-08 at 00:30, Ulrich Speidel wrote:<br>
> They're not the only place in the Pacific to have these sorts
of <br>
> problems, so seeing Starlink show any interest at all is a
good thing. <br>
> They might want to start with providing service to all of
Fiji.<br>
<br>
Maybe, but my feeling is the local authorities don't want them in
their <br>
market?<br>
<br>
What are the chances that the 6 month emergency license Fidschi
has <br>
granted to help Tonga will be turned into a normal license that
allows <br>
Fidschi residents to use Starlink?<br>
<br>
Cheers<br>
Daniel<br>
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</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
****************************************************************
Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
Ph: (+64-9)-373-7599 ext. 85282
The University of Auckland
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:ulrich@cs.auckland.ac.nz">ulrich@cs.auckland.ac.nz</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/">http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/</a>
****************************************************************
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