Saint Helena Island Communications

http://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm

by kickofline • 3 years ago

223 141 3 years ago

sainthelenaisland.info

whalesalad• 3 years ago

relevant documentary video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-QejUTDCWw

Aachen• 3 years ago

Content behind the random google video ID

"The World's Most Useful Airport [Documentary]" —Wendover Productions, 2019-12-31

rwmj• 3 years ago

Why does Saint Helena have import duty, or are they talking about packages not coming from the UK?

jseutter• 3 years ago

Saint Helena has import tariffs like other colonies do. They used to have preferential rates for commonwealth countries but I'm not sure if that still exists. I guess my response would be they have import duties for the same reasons other colonies do. Why wouldn't they tax imports?

edit: found an updated tariff document https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/ST... . I don't see anything special for commonwealth countries so it's probably a thing of the past.

wizerdrobe• 3 years ago

Note that the postcode (‘zip code’) ‘STHL 1ZZ’ applies to the entire island, and also that the ‘South Atlantic Ocean’, while strictly unnecessary, does seem to help prevent letters being routed to California, South Carolina or Australia!

Took me several paragraphs to realize this wasn’t invoking my beloved Beaufort County

miohtama• 3 years ago

Seems that the post codes of British colonies follow a pattern.

Gibraltar is GX11 1AA (the whole country).

NeoTar• 3 years ago

I believe postal codes for the British Overseas Territories (etc.) were adopted in early 2000s to allow for more convenient online ordering since for the remaining British territories postal codes are probably overkill (having about 80.000 residents at most).

AlbertCory4• 3 years ago

I (sorta) know the author of a self-published book, Finding Napoleon which I think covers his time on St. Helena.

It's funny that they don't much mention the main reason anyone's heard of it.

avgcorrection2• 3 years ago

You mean the epic steps?

AlbertCory4• 3 years ago

I did a find on "Napoleon." what did I miss?

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Anyone's heard of what? St Helena? I think it is pretty well known in its own right so I don't see reason for a site about telecoms on the island to reference someone who was on the island hundreds of years ago ?

kickofline• 3 years ago

It has come to the attention of the St Helena Government that members of the public may have acquired, imported and be currently using terminals, such as Starlink, for the purposes of internet connectivity. Using such terminals is in contravention of the exclusivity of current telecommunications licencing arrangements made under section 3(4) of the Telecommunications Ordinance 1989. From 1 November 2023 anyone using such a terminal will be liable to be subject to a ‘ceaseand desist’ order issued on behalf of the Government. A cease and desist order is an instruction to stop using terminals, and continue to refrain from using terminals, whilst the exclusivity of the current telecommunications licencing arrangements remain in force. Any breach of such a cease and desist order may result in the confiscation of the equipment.

Starlink seems to be illegal to protect the government’s investment in a monopoly on the main satellite.

nycdatasci2• 3 years ago

Relatedly, it's worth watching the entire Bill Gurley talk at the recent All-In Summit.

Edit: Updating link to jump to the relevant section of the talk. https://youtu.be/F9cO3-MLHOM?t=397

syndicatedjelly2• 3 years ago

What's the connection?

greg_gorrell• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing! I haven't come across this podcast yet and it looks like some great content.

alejohausner• 3 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for the link. Ending regulatory capture is the main plank in RFK Jr's presidential campaign. He's mentioned the FDA, NIH, EPA, the CIA and the military industrial complex, but I haven't heard him talk about capture of the telecom regulators.

Sorry for the political ad, but I'm frustrated by news articles that say "voters don't want Biden or Trump", but fail to mention RFK's campaign.

(stepping off the soapbox)

Oh, and did you hear that neither New Hampshire's nor Iowa's delegates to the Democratic national convention will be counted? Or rather, they'll automatically go to Biden. I kid you not.

(I'll just show myself out)

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

Alternate take: "the current licensee will sue us if we allow Starlink".

Scoundreller5• 3 years ago

It’s sad how $$$ legacy satellite services worked almost everywhere (Inmarsat, iridium, globalstar, even ham/hf), but now that it’s within reach of the poors, they get heavily regulated to oblivion.

mcv3• 3 years ago

That could mean they don't plan to strictly enforce this ban, but are merely contractually obliged to officially ban it.

wffurr3• 3 years ago

Why bother with Starlink if the fiberoptic subsea cable is live now?

ZeWaka• 3 years ago

It's not rolled out yet: http://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm#maestrotech...

fidotron• 3 years ago

You still have to run the cable the last mile, even on an island.

lxgr4• 3 years ago

Redundancy is also nice – given how remote Saint Helena is, I could imagine repairs taking quite some time.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

Because the government seems highly regressive and is almost certainly controlling and monitoring the one cable they've allowed?

jimkleiber• 3 years ago

I wonder if other countries will (or have) ban Starlink for censorship reasons. Or frankly, lack of censorship control.

So much of our governance, if not all, is based on geographic sovereignty, and satellites can supersede that.

I hope we finally get more global governance to deal with more and more global issues.

Tijdreiziger5• 3 years ago

I remember reading that Starlink routes traffic via base stations in the subscriber’s own country, in order not to anger regulators.

If you think about it it makes sense; otherwise governments could just ban the sale of Starlink equipment for violating the law.

legitster• 3 years ago

There was a line, I believe in the Machineries of Freedom, that says the goal of "effective" libertarian politics is not to change laws - it's to design disruptive technologies that make existing laws irrelevant.

We saw one version of this with Uber and Airbnb, essentially blowing up taxi and rental regulations, respectively. This is happening with AI, where regulation is hopelessly lost in its current state. We have seen this (unsuccessfully so far) with finance and the blockchain. And arguably this is a legacy which traces its way through industrial revolution (which saw the breakup of monarchy's monopoly on labor and land) or even the stirrup or the sword.

Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

GolfPopper• 3 years ago

"This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?" -A Man For All Seasons (1966)

lxgr4• 3 years ago

Breaking existing rules and being unregulatable is probably an intentional point of Starlink.

Looking at Starlink's coverage map (for stationary service at least), they seem to very much be playing by the rules (i.e. international laws and regulations regarding satellite communication services): https://www.starlink.com/map

A "break rules and become unregulateable" approach would not have service boundaries corresponding to political borders.

plaguuuuuu• 3 years ago

And we can see the effects of bypassing laws in stark relief - the erosion of decades-fought labor laws with the gig economy, the rent spikes from AirBnb forcing scores into homelessness.

This is the problem with deregulating businesses (as opposed to deregulating people).

yieldcrv2• 3 years ago

This is a good reason for the new King of the UK to override that territory’s law

teh_klev• 3 years ago

The new King has no powers to do anything like that. It'd be up to the British government to stick their noses in, if at all possible.

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

Does a monopoly make sense here? Pre starlink, there was probably a huge cost to bring internet to the island, and those doing so wanted to have some form of protection in order to confidently invest the capital to do so.

lxgr4• 3 years ago

Yeah, I could totally imagine some long-term bandwidth lease funding the launch of a geostationary satellite.

But enforcing that monopoly against private users, i.e. not resellers/ISPs, seems somewhat extreme.

hinkley• 3 years ago

A number of years ago NYC decriminalized ownership of beehives, and a journalist interviewed a bunch of people who had them anyway. They all had schemes to hide their hives. One guy made it look like an AC condenser, and went so far as buying himself work clothes to make him look like a repairman.

If you make it out of the right materials, it shouldn’t be too hard to conceal a starlink antenna without destroying the gain.

quercusa• 3 years ago

The Mystery of Red Brooklyn Honey:

https://us.latinhoneyshop.com/blogs/news/the-mystery-of-red-...

russdill• 3 years ago

Direct link:

https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2023/news/use-of-unlicenced-t...

yencabulator2• 3 years ago

It's extra delicious when read in context of these quotes:

In the summer of 2016, the United Nations declared access to internet is a human right. While we are just beginning to realize the internet’s potential for our island and with the prospects of a high speed cable arriving on our shores, perhaps now is the time to re-evaluate the importance of information technology for EVERYONE. Can we truly reach our fullest potential if access to the World Wide Web is available only to those who can afford it?
Inhabitants of the tiny tropical island of St Helena pay through the nose for an internet service that mainlanders would have considered painfully slow even during the pre-Netflix era.
St Helena’s isolation and reliance on satellite technology, means that internet services are limited and expensive compared to many countries, and are a major barrier to development. The top residential package offered in St Helena provides 13.3 megabytes of data at a speed of 1.5 megabits per second, and costs £180.50 per month.

syndicatedjelly2• 3 years ago

There is something to be learned from the simplicity and quaintness of this site - the information density is much higher than 90% of modern web sites. In a single page, by simply scrolling I learned so much about the communication infrastructure of a British island outpost.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

There's a meme-like website that demos this very concept. Then there's a v2.0 or some ++ type versioning where they use very minimal CSS to actually improve the readability. I'm a fan of the use of the minimal CSS to add margins and widths as it improves readability for me.

Searching for it with only the vagueness of what I can think of right now returns nothing useful, and that's with not using Google. Maybe my vague description will be enough with someone with better recall than I have.

johndotsun• 3 years ago

The original (I think): https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

First improvement: http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

Later iterations: https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/

ta1243• 3 years ago

https://bestmotherfucking.website/ perhaps, which I have to admit improves on http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Searching for "the best fucking website" is not fruitful though.

KennyBlanken2• 3 years ago

There's nothing to be learned from the site's terrible organization, navigation, layout, or extreme density which makes it difficult to read. Density is not necessarily good; have you noticed that most hardcover and paperback books have pretty limited line length? Fairly generous inter-line spacing? Indented paragraphs?

There's so much "cruft" scattered around, too - tiny text "explaining" things. You shouldn't have to explain how to use your site's UI to visitors. And that UI incorporates incredibly tiny buttons that are impossible to use on mobile.

And then there's this absolute dumpster-fire: https://sainthelenaisland.info/communications.htm#q_navigati...

The author stopped learning about web design in the late 90's and seemingly doesn't give a damn about making his site actually useful and easy to navigate. It also doesn't come remotely close to passing HTML validation.

wantlotsofcurry• 3 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't use the .sh domain for the website.

MichaelAza• 3 years ago

Under Telephone History it says:

The current PABX-based system went live over the weekend of 27-29th July 1990

A PBX serving a whole country, even a small one, is wild. From what I could find [1] the system used was a UXD5 exchange [2] which is technically a PSTN exchange intended for rural areas and based off the Monarch 120 PBX [3].

The architecture of the UXD5 is common to a lot of telephone exchanges of the time (possibly modern ones as well?) with actor based message passing, actors running on different levels (more real time vs less real time) and a combination of assembly and a high level language (in this case, Coral [4]). Fascinating stuff.

[1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/cable_wireless_has_contrac...

[2] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/uxd5-...

[3] https://sites.google.com/site/monarchcallconnectsystem/monar...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORAL

ithkuil• 3 years ago

Population <5k people

craig_s_bell• 3 years ago

If you want to learn more about life on St. Helena, I recommend a blog called What The Saints Did Next: https://whatthesaintsdidnext.com/

My favorite posts are the trip reports... They have hiked to every corner of the island. Great photos, and lots of history.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

The beauty contest winner doesn’t have an impossibly thin body. Already looks like an interesting place…

mikeortman• 3 years ago

The fact there is an internet monopoly barring residents to use other internet providers is sad, especially given the impact on the GDP of the island if proper high speed internet and technological resources are available.

I have a feeling the government is doing the cease and desist as a hand wavy thing to make the internet company happy, but will put little if any effort in actually enforcing it (if there is even something that could be done legally). From what I understand, the Saints are an incredibly kind and chill group of people, just living life without much worry. I can't imagine the government giving a shit

gambiting• 3 years ago

>The fact there is an internet monopoly barring residents to use other internet providers is sad

I guess the deal was that if this company brings internet connectivity then they get exclusivity on the island for X number of years. I wish the article would get into more details about this deal.

Edit: on second read, the article does actually. It mentions the exclusivity deal was meant to expire in 2022, but because of lack of suitable replacement or alternative solutions it was extended to 2023 and it was just extended again to 2024.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

u/skrause mentions in another subthread that the government has commissioned a fiber optic network going live at the end of the year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37651113

https://web.archive.org/web/20230925221524/http://www.indepe... (page 3)

JetSetWilly• 3 years ago

A search on Google™ for ‘Saint Helena’ will bring up many sites that are in California, which has a town called ‘Saint Helena’, or South Carolina, which has an area known as ‘Saint Helena Island’. For this reason it is best when using Google™ to append to your search ‘-napa -carolina -california’, which will remove many of these irrelevant results.

Not any more! Since google "enhanced" their search to remove such operators. I just tried searching in this way for eg some restaurants and there was indeed a bunch of irrelevant results even with the exclusions. I wonder what they do now.

beowulfey• 3 years ago

When did Google do this?

tomcam• 3 years ago

At least five years ago. Drives me crazy.

warkdarrior• 3 years ago

The operators work for me. I get different results with and without '-napa -carolina -california'.

dekhn• 3 years ago

Truly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"

hutzlibu2• 3 years ago

I also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.

mavhc• 3 years ago

Depends where you live, for me in UK it brings up a) a location in uk, then the rest are about the island.

[Saint Helena Island] brings up only results about the island

EA-31672• 3 years ago

I switched to Kagi and never looked back, it's like Google was before a decade of enshittification.

vjulian• 3 years ago

How curated and censored are the search results with Kagi? As someone involved with Tantra, for example, I rely on sites that are niche and not always SFW.

rafram• 3 years ago

Kagi uses the Google Search API. Its results are largely Google results.

scottlawson• 3 years ago

I typed St Helena island which worked grest

scroot4• 3 years ago

I took one of the last voyages of the RMS St Helena (the only way to get there prior to 2016) and stayed on the island for 10 days. AMA

higeorge13• 3 years ago

How did you spend your 10 days? Were the locals friendly to you?

scroot4• 3 years ago

I stayed in several guest houses during my time there. I also took some tours around the island. Wandering was probably the best part. The locals were extremely friendly and helpful, not to mention a riot during late nights at the pub...

bibstha• 3 years ago

What made you choose St Helena for your travel? Did you feel like you got to see most of the island in 10 days?

scroot4• 3 years ago

Way back in 2006/2007 I worked a severely boring, soul draining desk job. I cruised Wikipedia deeply and often. On one of these online excursions, I came across the article for St Helena -- by some measure the most remote inhabited island at the time -- and read more. I learned about the RMS St Helena and how it was the only regular way to get to and from the island. I knew at some point in my life I had to make the journey by sea and check it out for myself.

In grad school I also became acutely obsessed with the (poorly documented) voyage of Edmond Halley to the island in order to observe a transit of Venus. I spent hours in the British Library/Kew looking for anything that might mention what he got up to during that time (apparently the British Governor was replaced for sketchy reasons, etc etc).

A decade later, I got the news that the long-awaited airport was complete and would open in 2016, and that the RMS would be decommissioned. I was in a weird position between jobs and fortunate enough to have the means to book the travel for what was supposed to be the penultimate voyage of the RMS. I had grand visions of interviewing people about what they thought of the airport opening and such (some of which I conducted and wrote about [1]).

The passage I took was 5 days by sea from Cape Town to St Helena, with 10 days on the island. After that, the voyage continued north (which was unusual) to the UK, stopping at Ascension Island en route. That leg of the trip was 14 days at sea.

So really, it was kind of a daydream that turned into a real dream that turned into a lived experience. Wouldn't trade it for anything.

[1] http://www.homoridiculus.com/blowout-on-the-island-of-furiou...

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Looking forward to the new cloud region!

In July 2019 the Government of St Helena announced that it has issued a letter of intent to connect the island to Equiano. The 1,140Km branch to Saint Helena was completed in 2021 so this cable will provide the first fibre optic connectivity from St Helena to the outside world through both Europe and South Africa.

Compared to the current satellite link the cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people{16} could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub, with satellites in space linking via groundstations on the island to the world via the cable. The Government of St Helena believes St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic and its political and physical stability make it an ideal and almost unique location for this use.

londons_explore• 3 years ago

Does it have reliable supplies of plentiful and cheap electricity and water?

Because without that, datacenters won't be showing up...

And even if it did, big US companies don't really like to have data centers in places that are too remote, if only because staff have to visit from time to time and don't want to have to take an 8 hour seaplane ride to get there...

njarboe• 3 years ago

Communication hub. Probably just a downlink for Starlink for most of the South Atlantic.

secalex• 3 years ago

They aren't talking about general purposed datacenters, but satellite uplink stations. These new constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) internet satellites (like Starlink) can network with each other but eventually need to downlink into a big terrestrial dish where the traffic meets a fiber backbone. It's position in the southern hemisphere, middle of the Atlantic and political stability (still part of keeping the sun from setting on the British Empire) would make this an interesting place for downlink stations.

Not a ton of jobs, but some CapEx for construction and probably a couple dozen people year-round.

cbsks• 3 years ago

Yikes! Internet is expensive! And there is only a single provider legally allowed to operate.

18£: 30GB. 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up

36£: 60GB. 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up

67£: unlimited. 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up

120£: unlimited. 20Mbps down, 1Mbps up

https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/Residential-Broad...

coryrc2• 3 years ago

Wait until you hear about what it costs in regular parts of the US...

aquaticsunset• 3 years ago

Umm... significantly less than that? US telecom isn't a shining star of good value and fair pricing, but a median speed of 210 Mbps with a roughly $75/mo bill is a lot better than Saint Helena Island.

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

I pay roughly 50 pounds for 300 mbps down and 20 up. That seems pretty typical for parts of the US without gigabit availability, sans rural areas that depend on satellite connection. I think if you want to shit on a devloped country with slow and overpriced internet, Australia is still the gold standard (not that the US is perfect by any means)

jakub_g• 3 years ago

Sounds like a better and cheaper deal than in Berlin!

(Semi-joking. Never lived in Berlin, but the mind-blowingly bad infra for such a big EU IT hub is a recurring meme).

mhh__• 3 years ago

IT hub isn't exactly the vibe you get from walking around Berlin IMO.

jackson1442• 3 years ago

Notably you’re looking at the _enhanced_ packages, available starting next month. The current packages available are significantly worse! https://www.sure.co.sh/broadband/broadband-packages/

The highest tier offers a whopping 31GB of data at 2mbps for the low low price of £160

ketralnis• 3 years ago

From TFA:

Currently Sure has a monoply contract with the Government of St Helena for the provision of Internet services and under this it is not clear whether it would be legal for a consumer to use Starlink. Examination of the SURE exclusive licence suggests that, if an offence is committed by somebody using Starlink, it is Starlink that commits it (by providing the service), not the consumer who receives it, but this has not been tested. It is also possible that the Government of St Helena, to protect its investment in Maestro, might outright ban the use of Starlink systems, though exactly how this might be enforced is not clear. At the time of writing it is believed that some individuals and businesses are already successfully using StarLink on St Helena{18}.

It's illegal to use the only alternative, so they can charge whatever they want.

jedberg• 3 years ago

The most interesting part (to me) is buried in the middle:

"Compared to the current satellite link the [undersea, Google owned fiber-optic] cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub, with satellites in space linking via groundstations on the island to the world via the cable. The Government of St Helena believes St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic and its political and physical stability make it an ideal and almost unique location for this use."

thefz2• 3 years ago

In July 2019 the Government of St Helena announced that it has issued a letter of intent to connect the island to Equiano. The 1,140Km branch to Saint Helena was completed in 2021 so this cable will provide the first fibre optic connectivity from St Helena to the outside world through both Europe and South Africa.
Compared to the current satellite link the cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people{16} could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub
[...]
A route survey was conducted in August 2019 and at the end of the year the Government of St Helena announced that it had signed an agreement with Google™ to land the cable at St Helena, aiming to commence service in 2022.
On 6th February 2020 Sure announced that it had no plans to upgrade domestic and small-business Internet connections to Fibre-Optic when the Equiano Cable arrives in 2022, meaning ordinary users would not see the full benefits of the new system.

Screw this ISP, man.

skrause• 3 years ago

However it seems that they are now building an island wide fiber network owned by the government and not by an ISP, and will end the current monopoly as soon as this network is ready: https://openfalklands.com/st-helena-plans-for-an-island-wide...

thefz2• 3 years ago

Good for them. Imagine living in a natural paradise with high speed fiber at home.

realo• 3 years ago

Apparently Sure is based in Bahreïn ... quite a few kilometers from the island. So why would they care about anything other than money?

Tijdreiziger5• 3 years ago

Looks like service was upgraded after all, though: https://www.sure.co.sh/assets/Banner-Links/PRESS-RELEASE-Con...

antiviral• 3 years ago

For those of you interested in reading about work being done to start a new city (1) or new semi-autonomous country (2) where people can plan something new, St Helena Island sounds like a good candidate- remote but can still in the middle of several trade routes.

(1) https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-tech-investors-new...

(2) https://www.wired.com/story/itana-binance-charter-cities-ins...

maximilianburke• 3 years ago

Given their current slow satellite internet uplink I'm surprised they don't call it Saint Helena Island Telecom.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

On 6th February 2020 Sure announced that it had no plans to upgrade domestic and small-business Internet connections to Fibre-Optic when the Equiano Cable arrives in 2022, meaning ordinary users would not see the full benefits of the new system.

Having their ISP refusing to connect customers to the long awaited fiber is the most Telco thing ever.

inemesitaffia2• 3 years ago

They changed their minds, will offer unlimited data. But the down/up isn't quite there

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

That's good news. I've been cheering for them since the 1st undersea cable deployment was announced (the one that fell through).

Saint Helena Island Communications

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