Fiji's connected to the Southern Cross cable, one of the main transit routes between Australia and the US, running from Sydney to Oahu/Hawaii. Plenty of capacity for a bit of island Starlink there.

It is in fact time that the world started thinking a bit about better connectivity in the Pacific islands. People like David Lassner from UHawaii have argued this for a really long time.

It's not just because of the locals. The Pacific is where your weather is made and where a lot of your fish comes from. It's where things happen at a big scale that are interesting to watch, from stars to volcanic eruptions, climate and so much more. Geopolitics play out here, often out of view.

But it's also because of the locals. It's a fascinating cultural space, too. Did you know that Tongans are part of the Polynesian family, and Polynesians can communicate with each other in their languages from NZ in the southwest to Hawaii in the north and Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the western Pacific? Hawaii is a ten hour flight from New Zealand, but they knew how to navigate back and forth between these specks of land in a vast ocean for many centuries. Yet many Western countries don't as much as mention this in their school curricula, giving instead wide space to the vastly more compact Mediterranean or the not-quite-as-big Atlantic.

Nowadays, the Pacific is the scene of one of the world's trickiest and most cruel digital divides. Anyone chipping away at this is welcome. 

On Tue, 8 Feb 2022, Dave Taht wrote:

> What I don't quite understand is why a full-fledged ground station is
> needed to get dropped. (in a day after they have laser links)
>
> A simple dishy can do 300mbit down and over 20Mbit up. using a 32k
> codec that's quite a few voice calls, or cleared transactions.
>
> The difference between zero and some connectivity is quite a lot.

They don't have enough laser equipped satellites to provide coverage yet (Elon
commented that providing coverage is quite hard because of the lack of enough
laser satellites right now). They don't currently do dishy-to-dishy
communications.

So, long term you are right, a new ground station there wouldn't be needed (and
adds additional load to the Fiji underwater links, not desirable in the long
term), but in the short term, it's what's needed to provide service in the area.

David Lang
_______________________________________________
Starlink mailing list
Starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net
https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/starlink

-- 
****************************************************************
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/
****************************************************************