Raptors return on investment is the real dealMLS Cup the winning goal in record-breaking season for soccer in North AmericaNorth America’s oldest sport catches momentum in new professional localesCanadian Football League fanatics fuel financialsCanada’s Davis Cup team finding loveThe Starlink kit comes with a dish, dish mount, and a Wi-Fi router base unit.
“It is deeply concerning because it’s unregulated and headed by a private company,” Emma Shortis, a senior researcher in international and security affairs at the Australia Institute, an independent think tank in Canberra, said of the Starlink system. “There’s no accountability on who has access to it and how it’s being used.”
New from Bloomberg: Get the Business of Space newsletter, a weekly look at the inside stories of investments beyond Earth. In many ways, it’s Starlink’s effectiveness as a communications tool that has made it such a sensitive matter. The US military is a customer: The Air Force has been testing terminals in the Arctic, calling them “reliable and high-performance.”
Starlink kits are being sold for use in Venezuela, where individuals and entities have been subject to US sanctions for almost a decade, most recently under President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian rule. A map of coverage areas on Starlink’s website shows the South American nation blacked out. Yet social media ads promote package deals for Starlink equipment, which is widely available and admired for its reliability and portability in a country of isolated cattle ranches and gold mines.
There has been no internet in Sudan since early February. Both the Sudanese Armed Forces and Rapid Support Forces have blamed each other for cutting the service while the CEO of Zain Sudan, a mobile operator, said his company’s engineers had been prevented from reaching parts of the country to reconnect the network due to insecurity and a lack of fuel.
In South Africa, where Musk was born, the government hasn’t yet approved Starlink’s application to operate. But that hasn’t prevented a flourishing trade in terminals there. Facebook groups feature providers that offer to buy and activate the kits in Mozambique, where it is licensed, and then deliver them over the border to South African customers.
Countries have different reasons for declining to cooperate with Starlink, including stipulations that it have a local partner and concerns around data use.