10/13/2023 - Written By Caleb Henry
Earlier this month the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena got access to fiber, ending its long-standing reliance on GEO satellites for internet access. The results? An instant tenfold increase in broadband usage. The obvious lesson? More bandwidth equals more usage and happier customers.
In fairness, St Helena was served by an aging wideband Intelsat GEO satellite, not a modern HTS system like Eutelsat Konnect or a software-defined GEO satellite. Furthermore, new LEO broadband systems like Starlink, have proven their ability to compete with terrestrial systems on bandwidth and latency.
It is clear that past adoption of satellite-based internet does not provide a precedent for future uptake when new systems can offer order of magnitude increases in capacity. As a former Cloudflare engineer pointed out, St. Helena’s subsea cable showed overnight how induced demand (more supply + lower price = higher consumption) plays out in telecom. If satellite operators can meaningfully improve on capacity and price, demand has proven to be elastic.
Amusingly, St. Helena has crossovers with OneWeb and Starlink, though neither is apparently authorized by the local telco monopoly, Sure, South Atlantic. OneWeb has a gateway located on St. Helena to support traffic regional coverage but no clear landing rights. Meanwhile, unlicensed Starlink terminals have found their way to the island to the consternation of Sure which has threatened to confiscate the contraband equipment.
SOURCE: https://www.kentik.com/blog/ending-saint-helenas-exile-from-the-internet/