Re: [Starlink] Starlink for Tonga?

[Ulrich Speidel <ulrich@cs.auckland.ac.nz>]

On 8/02/2022 9:47 pm, Mike Puchol wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Indeed, in a big country, you could do this, but in the Pacific, very 
few island states would have the resources or skills to enforce this. 
They'd probably try and stop dishys at the border but once inside, it 
very much depends on who the offender is and what local support they can 
wield as to what action might be contemplated.

I spent a week in Niue a few years ago on holiday. Niue's a rock with 
about 2000 people on it and a much larger diaspora in NZ, around 600 km 
east of Tonga. Internet there was pioneered by an enterprising local who 
got the right to market the .nu domain and in exchange provided free 
WiFi island-wide. As it so happened he was on our flight up, and I 
bumped into him the next morning when he gloomily told me that the 
Niuean government had revoked his license and had declared itself the 
only ISP on the island, with its only customers being a small number of 
businesses (mostly government owned/related) along the main drag, so he 
had to shut down the next morning. They didn't want any competitors, though.

This drastic action led to almost every other business on the island 
losing electronic payment capability (they use the NZ dollar there) and 
the few we dropped into were a bit peeved, to put it mildly. By 10 am, 
they had mounted a delegation to the NZ High Commission (NZ had been 
bankrolling the government and its Internet activities). By 8 pm that 
night, the existing outfit was back on air.

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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@cs.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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