Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this very interesting topic!
Did you consider the impact that companies like or in particular Elon Musk’s Starlink is going to have on the situation? Starlink seems to be focusing their efforts exactly at countries like those studied here, countries with high entry-costs for cable-bound telecom means which they don’t have since they already largely invested in their now existing satellite fleet and a significant remaining gap in the population without access to telecoms.
Without knowing much about it, it seems to make much sense to run a business model that is based on either very low prices for those that weren’t able to afford telecoms before Starlink and/or heavy advantage over the existing (weak) competition in terms of quality. Looking at Starlink’s current activities, they could change the situation in many LMICs drastically within a few years.
That being said, I have also heard that Starlink seems to be quite expensive to deploy atm (but as before, I’m no expert on the topic).
Starlink is AFAIK a much discussed topic at least in Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe atm.
It looks like my footnote on Starlink didn’t make it over the forum version; will fix that! In the interim, these are my thoughts: “in the near future, satellites in low orbit will make it possible to access broadband in almost all parts of the world in the near future. However, satellite internet is quite pricey. Starlink terminals are currently $500 loss-leaders for the company, plus a monthly cost of $99. While this makes coverage possible throughout the world, it does not mean that this is actually useful to the majority of the world (let alone the ~7% of the world that does not have access to mobile broadband yet).”
Most experts we talked to were skeptical on Starlink for the average person in a LMIC, just because of the cost.
I think the relevance of Starlink here is not for serving individuals in LMICs, but for providing backhaul for towers in places too remote to easily backhaul via fiber or line of sight microwave links.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this very interesting topic!
Did you consider the impact that companies like or in particular Elon Musk’s Starlink is going to have on the situation? Starlink seems to be focusing their efforts exactly at countries like those studied here, countries with high entry-costs for cable-bound telecom means which they don’t have since they already largely invested in their now existing satellite fleet and a significant remaining gap in the population without access to telecoms.
Without knowing much about it, it seems to make much sense to run a business model that is based on either very low prices for those that weren’t able to afford telecoms before Starlink and/or heavy advantage over the existing (weak) competition in terms of quality. Looking at Starlink’s current activities, they could change the situation in many LMICs drastically within a few years.
That being said, I have also heard that Starlink seems to be quite expensive to deploy atm (but as before, I’m no expert on the topic).
Starlink is AFAIK a much discussed topic at least in Mozambique, Nigeria and Zimbabwe atm.
It looks like my footnote on Starlink didn’t make it over the forum version; will fix that! In the interim, these are my thoughts: “in the near future, satellites in low orbit will make it possible to access broadband in almost all parts of the world in the near future. However, satellite internet is quite pricey. Starlink terminals are currently $500 loss-leaders for the company, plus a monthly cost of $99. While this makes coverage possible throughout the world, it does not mean that this is actually useful to the majority of the world (let alone the ~7% of the world that does not have access to mobile broadband yet).”
Most experts we talked to were skeptical on Starlink for the average person in a LMIC, just because of the cost.
I think the relevance of Starlink here is not for serving individuals in LMICs, but for providing backhaul for towers in places too remote to easily backhaul via fiber or line of sight microwave links.