So right now Starlink won't work in Tonga since the nearest base station (Boorowra, NSW) is over the horizon for satellites visible to people in Tonga.

The base station in Fiji means that Starlink can work in Tonga.

Note that Inmarsat, iridium, etc. work just fine in Tonga in the meantime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#V1.5_(operational)

While this will likely not be the case within another year, what matters in relation to this is what they can do right now, not in another year. This shouldn't be taken as criticism of Starlink, but rather an example of the possibilities as the fully featured constellation starts to become ready.

Eventually they wouldn't need to send over engineers to setup a base station, they'd just send over some dishes and adjust routing priorities.

Musk himself says there's not enough laser-capable satellites yet. This is why they're setting up a ground station in Fiji (because it has internet), to act as the relay.

Fiji is nearby so can act as a ground station for the satellites as it has internet.

Nobody (I hope) is trying to use the other options to stream Netflix at the moment.

Would a Starlink setup be better? Absolutely, but that has also had issues, which meant that it wasn't an option at all. Hopefully are now addressed and Tonga will have better communications options. I'm pretty impressed by their ability to get a new ground station up and running so quickly.

Side note, it's really incredible that an entire island got by on 10 Gbps of bandwidth.

Then you also have to realize what is the most consumption and usage - unlike most countries it is not streaming in general.

That fibre is a dogleg from Fiji to Tonga - and will get repaired relatively quickly so I'm not sure about "outlives" - certainly there will be people in Tonga who may choose to continue with starlink but it may prove to be too expensive for most people (one the other hand the govt may choose it for some outlying islands)

No.

People trying to stuff everything under the sun into the human rights label are to a large part to blame for public disillusionment with the term.

Non sequitur. I believe in many things that make a society good and better which do not reach the standard of a human right.

This is my personal litmus test: the deprivation of a human right should create a legitimate claim to be violent. If your human rights are being denied, you have the right to take up arms. (My theory being the state, at that point, has lost the legitimacy of its monopoly on violence.)

Blood has been spilled over slavery. Starvation. Torture and free speech. Blood is not owed because someone didn’t pay their Comcast bill.

If you re-read my comments you'll see that I don't mention it anywhere.

Blackout is unintentional. Unless it is the result of infrastructure mismanagement stemming from politicians' ineptitude. In any case, it is not an acute malicious action, and quite the strawman argument.

I don't think you're taking my statement in good faith and so I won't expand on it - since you don't seem interested in discourse by offering your thoughts instead of flatly questioning mine.

The internet is simply the means of the day.

Look at it this way, if the government stopped all paper from being delivered to newspapers, would that have been indirect, but nonetheless a very effective means of restricting the press?

TV was always creepily restricted, although restricted bandwidth did need regulation.

If violence is your standard, I don't want to live in your utopia. Like, what if I just pollute the hell out of your property from afar, and you get cancer five years later. Is that... VIOLENT?

But not be entitled to it. People don't need to be entitled to everything. There are very few true fundamental human rights in this world. All of them are raw primal needs. Food. Water. Air. Not being killed or tortured. What else really?

Someone has to provide that for you. If someone has to provide it for you, who is going to be forced to do so in the absence of such? What right do you have to force them into labor if they choose not to provide it? How does your fundamental right exist then - you'd have to enslave someone/s to enable it.

And thus, it's not a fundamental right. It has to be provisioned to you by someone's efforts, often at significant effort and cost overall.

Material goods that have to be produced by someone's labor inherently can't be fundamental rights (what right do you have to their labor?), even if some silly societies wish to label them under that for propaganda purposes.

It is much more expensive to provide wideband connections to isolated islands in the middle of the ocean than to a condo in the middle of Tokyo.

In a similar way, monolingual speakers of tiny languages will necessarily be limited to a subset of the world's knowledge that was translated into their language. And it is no one else's fault.

https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

Take it up with them if you want the internet on this list

Belief has little to do with this, legally speaking.

I think the engineers who work there would jump at the chance. :)

I've lived in NY, Boston, DC, Cali, Florida, NC, London, AZ, WA.... nothing beats Redmond!

Personaly preference of course :)