I dunno how true this is but my african friends have told me that telecom in africa is extremely expensive and calling someone the next village over can have huge charges. So african countries under the African Union created the African Telecommunications Union to send out an african owned telecom sattelite instead of having to pay for western owned telecom sattelite usage.
Again this is second hand info and I don't know much about African politics but telecom is clearly one important reason.
I included the data from 2011 because it includes mobile services cost whereas the other is newer but on data costs.
Not sure what your point is at all other than to be pedantic and obfuscate the general point to be honest. The point being that african telecom costs are some of the highest in the world and this would be one use for a satellite...
My point is that "it's too expensive for Africans (from an unspecified country, because of course the entire continent of 1.3 billion people has the same socioeconomic status everywhere) to call people in the next village (and it being the next village is somehow relevant because mobile call rates are tied to literal physical distance, obviously)" is exactly the kind of poverty porn nonsense that Westerners lap up about SSA without thinking, and I make an effort to call it out everywhere I see it.
I am curious about your thoughts on satellites as a particularly cost-effective way to improve mobile telecoms, considering that cellular networks are largely driven by masts that are very much on the ground and (in West Africa for instance), backed by submarine fibre-optic cables.
As an aside, it's extremely interesting to me that in most of my interactions with Westerners they seem rather incapable of finding very easily discoverable primary sources on living conditions in Africa. It would take maybe ten seconds to pull up actual December 2019 call rates and tariff plans from telecoms companies in Ethiopia or Nigeria or Rwanda or Botswana or wherever, but I instead get linked to data that aggregates mobile device and data plan prices from years ago. Then again I suppose that if one unironically believes that people here are stuck unable to call people in the next village it wouldn't occur to them that this sort of information is widely available from Africans themselves.
For example, I use MTN and pay a flat rate of (the equivalent of) $0.0003 per second for calls and $0.011 to send texts. I'm on a 15GB data plan that costs $13.83, and the monthly plans go down to $2.77 for 1.5GB. There are also plans that will give you access to certain social media (Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) for a month for less than a dollar.
I think the other poster is trolling and intentionally strawmanning against your mild embellishment you used to make a point. It's not worth continuing a discussion with that person.
5 seconds on Google reveals that, surprise, you're right[1]; mobile data in Africa (as an example) is more expensive than elsewhere especially when considering relative income versus other regions, and there are few providers with limited competition. I think most readers understand what you're getting at, so it's better to disengage if another poster is being impolite!
> The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, climate, mining and environmental observations, allowing the Horn of Africa to collect data and improve its ability to plan for changing weather patterns for example.
I guess the real question is whether this is cheaper than to just license these services.
And a second question: how much power do others have over you? I'd your agricultural output or tax system becomes dependent on a certain provider/country they have a lot of leeway over you. Same reason Europe and Russia and China built their own satellite-based positioning system: can't trust the US to keep GPS accessible.
On the other hand any satellite built for you might have the same issue through some hidden software-based off switches.
I wouldn’t underestimate the political value of a satellite launch. There is a lot of propaganda value, both domestically and internationally, to entering the “club” of space-faring nations. Not to be crass, but “launch a satellite” is literally an achievement in the Civilization games. The very act of launching it means something, even if only symbolic.
Each satellite is launched into an orbit that has it fly over certain areas more than others. Most satellites are stationed over the richest countries, so there is very little satellite image coverage of many parts of Africa. These images help monitor everything from weather to crop health. Just like building a road, buying a satellite for your country provides critical infrastructure which can boost an economy.
But is this true? Sure if you want coverage of Siberia you may need your own, but doesn't every orbit cross the equator? I would have thought plenty of satellites cross Ethiopia every hour, although perhaps not bothering to run all their cameras without a customer?
I’m by no means an expert on satellite orbit selection, but from my experience as a consumer the quality and frequency of imagery for an area has to do with a variety of factors - how often the overhead pass occurs in daytime vs. nighttime, how much data capacity they will devote to downloading the imagery, and what angle they point the sensor at.
Here’s a real world coverage map from a European earth observation mission, you can see they were able to select and orbit that gives them daily coverage of Europe but only biweekly coverage of Africa: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Slater12/publicat...
Thanks, nice to see a map. But all those lines which stop at the mediterranean coast... those satellites surely cross north africa at almost the same time of day, it's just not marked because they are turned off? As you say, perhaps limited by daily bandwidth (or perhaps power?)... but that sounds like a commercial consideration.
I'm reasonably sure satellite imaging happens pretty far below geostationary, though. It'd be interesting if we could someday park satellites in geostationary and just stare at a given spot continuously, but lens technology just ain't there yet, last I checked.
Yes, they will. The only place you can put a geostationary satellite is on the equator. In theory, they stay in position above the selected point on the equator. In practice, they aren't perfectly stationary, and they will move around the designated point, which will, of necessity, cross the equator.
The same reasons any country needs satellites. Telecommunications, resource monitoring, science, weather... Sorry, but unless you believe that satellites are superfluous in general, why are you asking if these countries need satellites? Are they something only rich/western countries need? Or should other countries simply be dependent on the countries that already build/launch them?
Bolivia bought a communication satellite from the chinese to provide TV and Internet to the entire country - which is mostly rural areas that are difficult to reach (think the Andes). The other countries use multi-spectral and radar-based satellites to do several things like:
Again this is second hand info and I don't know much about African politics but telecom is clearly one important reason.