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Comment by cupcake-unicorn | Hacker News Reader

Can you answer more questions about the state of the infrastructure there like electricity and internet? On Wikipedia it says there's only one person in charge of the electricity and it goes off every night.

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When I was there the power operated until 10pm at night. From that time homes would either run from personal generators, or batteries - to power refrigerators, lights, routers, etc. These days the homes have or are getting solar panels.

Internet was terrible at the time. I wrote about it here: https://bluishcoder.co.nz/2012/05/29/pitcairn-island-and-slo...

It has improved but is still relatively slow and expensive.

Starlink seems perfect for this island.

Absolutely! The cost might be prohibitive for the Pitcairners salary though.

I suspect that price will be adjusted depending on target market.

Won’t cost spacex anything to provide Internet to tiny islands like this

Yep. They will charge much more in such remote areas with almost no competition.

Except that in non-remote areas, there will be greater demand per area, and stations per area is the limiting factor. So I'm not sure they'd charge more in really isolated places than in places with higher density and bad service.

Can you just use one dish and then connect everyone to this one dish? Costs 100$ a month divided by all inhabitants. It makes sense to setup one dish and connect a couple of people to it. It does not make sense to setup one dish next to another.

Remote areas = Mostly people, that can't actually afford it.

Does Starlink support this or is it against their interest?

Will be great once they get the laser links working.

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