The point of my comment isn't to defend the satellite launches, quite the opposite.
It's saying that even as somebody that would be in favor, not carefully considering the trade offs before giving permission to permanently alter the night sky is not acceptable. This is exactly the kind of thing that bureaucracy should make painfully slow.
When was the last time that you were in Africa? And in which country, because it's an entire continent.
EDIT: So I guess HN doesn't like being called out on https://africasacountry.com/ issues? Well sorry not sorry, but as someone born in Ghana I'm more a little tired of the sentiment on display in the cited part of comment I'm reacting to, which is the implication that Africa as an entire continent is inherently and forever will be a place too poor to have proper infrastructure.
North America and Australia (where I'm from) have the exact same issue. No country is going to spend a million bucks to lay fiber to ten person towns in the middle of nowhere.
Why not? It has been done before. Every developed country went through a period of rural electrification whereby schemes were developed to encourage and/or force electric companies to run wires out into the rural farmland. Internet is the modern analogue for electrification. Those same approaches would work equally well for fiber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification
The American approach: "The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was created by executive order as an independent federal bureau in 1935, authorized by the United States Congress in the 1936 Rural Electrification Act, and later in 1939, reorganized as a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. It was charged with administering loan programs for electrification and telephone service in rural areas. Between 1935 and 1939 – or the first 4½ years after REA's establishment, the number of farms using electric services more than doubled"
I am talking about money already spent and delivered, not future project that will probably be delivered on.
EDIT: Wow, you guys are really bad at admitting your own blatantly obvious biases, aren't you?
There are equivalent places in central Australia, but even though I grew up here I haven't been more than a few hours drive away from the coasts.
I haven't been to North America. Russia didn't cross my mind, but I haven't been there either.
This isn't to say I don't have warped perspectives or prejudices about Africa. I didn't realize the population density is that high in the south, where I haven't been.
Western media only discusses African countries when things go wrong. The only people I know from there are three white families who left South Africa. If you asked me to draw a map of the countries it would be my worst continent.
The original post though really was just based on my personal experience with remoteness.
For what it's worth an initial rush of downvotes (or upvotes) is fairly common on HN; I'd ignore them for the first hour or so. After that you'll probably have a fair idea of the HN consensus (fickle as it is).
People that really care about an issue will sit there and refresh a thread constantly, so in the short term you're mostly knowing what they think about your comment. But they can't vote more than once.
My first comment in this tree was downvoted to -3 within two minutes of posting, but now sits at +40. I actually wasn't sure at first whether it was being downvoted by people for or against Starlink et al. Maybe both.
Except they could have been referring to the continent. "some of the places" could refer to different places in different African countries, hence "some"; and doesn't imply all, everywhere, or "forever" in Africa.
Perhaps you are. I'm from the same country, and I couldn't be happier :).
I mean, LEO Internet constellations are awesome for providing access (not just in rural areas, but also in remote areas and at sea). But more than that, we're talking Starlink here in particular. The problem it's solving isn't (just) how to improve Internet access for some people. The main problem it's solving is how to fund SpaceX's R&D on Starship. Which translates to dropping another order of magnitude from the cost of access to orbit. Which will, longer-term, translate to a boon for astronomy.
The North Slope Borough in Alaska is nearly the size of Romania, but has only about 9,000 people living there. The state as a whole is larger than all of Western Europe, but has only about 700,000 people.
Much of Canada is the same, only more so.
If we are just going to completely ignore costs, then I can say that getting great astronomical observations is solved as well, since we can just launch satellites to take the observations instead of doing ground-based observations. So it's not clear what the big deal about these satellites is anyway.
No it isn't. Just because it works for you it doesn't mean the same solutions can apply everywhere.
But I know people from rich countries like UK, US, Germany with download speeds under 5 mbps paying more than you would pay for the most expensive line on Romania.
I've gotten decent internet speeds in one place that looked pretty wild, therefore worldwide internet access is a solved problem.
So it's not exactly a good potential userbase for starlink. However, most of South America, Africa and Central Asia could benefit massively from Starlink and start participating in the global digital economy
I've had faster Internet than the average Starlink speedtest says, in rural Romania, at the foot of a mountain, wild bears and all: https://twitter.com/q3k/status/1172621386977861632 . Internet access in rural areas is pretty much a solved problem, it just now hinges on enough of a societal push to apply this solution where needed.
Starlink is yet another SV-style attempt to solve (US) societal problems by blindly applying technology. Except this time, this also affects other countries, and we're furious.