Starlink begins or expands service in three more countries
Starlink this week officially began service in both India and the African country of Guinea-Bissau, while expanding its service in the Ukraine to include phone-to-satellite texting.
In India the final licensing approval came through, and the service is now available to customers through two different Indian telecommunication platforms.
The deals consists of selling Starlink’s equipment through Jio and Airtel’s retail networks, while Jio will also offer customer service, installation, and activation support. It will emphasise on providing high-speed internet to businesses, healthcare centres, schools and remote communities across India, according to reports.
SpaceX also begain to offer its services in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony located on Africa’s northwestern coast and the seventh African country to approve Starlink. Its license had been approved in April, but the service wasn’t available apparently until now.
Finally, regulators in the Ukraine have now approved the use of Starlink’s phone-to-satellite service by the Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar. The program will at present be limited to texting and emergency alerts. This expands Starlink’s already extensive internet availability there.
In every case, Starlink will act to decentralize control of communications aware from the government, as its sells terminals to ordinary citizens.
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Starlink this week officially began service in both India and the African country of Guinea-Bissau, while expanding its service in the Ukraine to include phone-to-satellite texting.
In India the final licensing approval came through, and the service is now available to customers through two different Indian telecommunication platforms.
The deals consists of selling Starlink’s equipment through Jio and Airtel’s retail networks, while Jio will also offer customer service, installation, and activation support. It will emphasise on providing high-speed internet to businesses, healthcare centres, schools and remote communities across India, according to reports.
SpaceX also begain to offer its services in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony located on Africa’s northwestern coast and the seventh African country to approve Starlink. Its license had been approved in April, but the service wasn’t available apparently until now.
Finally, regulators in the Ukraine have now approved the use of Starlink’s phone-to-satellite service by the Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar. The program will at present be limited to texting and emergency alerts. This expands Starlink’s already extensive internet availability there.
In every case, Starlink will act to decentralize control of communications aware from the government, as its sells terminals to ordinary citizens.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
India is a big deal. Ukraine is at least a moderately big deal as that country has a sizable population for a European country, every one of them seems to carry a cell phone and one can think of few large populations more likely to want full-coverage no-fail texting service more than theirs – a possible recent exception being Iran which can’t have it yet except on a black market basis.
Guinea-Bissau won’t be a big deal for SpaceX, at least financially. The country has a population of only about 1.75 million and a GDP-per-capita of about three bucks a day. But Starlink will likely be a pretty big deal for Guinea-Bissau, or at least for that portion of its population able to access it in any fashion.
Guinea-Bissau, by the way, cannot be fairly described as being on Africa’s northern coast. It’s located at about the 8-o’clock point on the generally partial-circular south and west coastal crescent of the West African bulge. It is toward the northern end of a string of ten small coastal savannah and jungle nations I tend to describe collectively as Grasshutistans that run from Senegal to Benin. There are a few much larger landlocked West African nations to which this honorific also applies as well as both coastal and interior nations in the southward-pointing portion of Africa. Truth to tell, based on per capita GDPs, most of Africa qualifies including most of the Mahgreb and even the “resource-rich” nations of Nigeria and South Africa.
Mr. Musk’s continent of birth, even in its entirety, is unlikely to prove much of a market for Starlink services compared to other parts of the world. But that will be consistent with all of the other ways in which Africa seems destined to remain a mostly backwater fraction of humanity for the foreseeable future.
The great thing is that the system could be purchased by a school and powered by solar panels.
Now every school and internet cafe could be connected to the whole of the world. Bringing news in real time.
Add in the ability to directly use cell phone to satellite communications.
In the end this is more powerful than any Chinese belt and road plan.
And this has the ability to keep dictatorships from gaining or keeping power.