Though the article you linked to says, “Subscribers will have to pay a whopping amount of ₹37,500 (USD 500) for getting the dish antenna and Wi-Fi router and need to spend an additional ₹7500/month for recharge. Mr. Bhargava acknowledged that most rural households will not be able to afford such high costs and believes that the community places where hundreds of people visit daily will immensely benefit from the high speed (up to 300 Mb/s) of Starlink broadband.”
So there’s no expectation that individuals will be paying that much.
The most impressive advances are still in flashlight technology. Mine comes with a camera, calculator, browser, email, and all sort of other features. I think it has a telephone also. Nothing else comes close to the advanced technology packed into that little device.
That’s correct. Starlink terminals are being used for schools in poor or remote communities, or one Starlink terminal might be shared by a small village.
In a digital, online world, Starlink can level the playing field between rich and poor. I’m surprised so many people on thr left are opposed or indifferent to it. A poor kid in Zambia can do gig work or learn or be entertained just like his counterparts in thenwest. Biggest boon to the third world in a long time.
I’m always a little bemused by people who value a cellphone mostly for being a phone. I live in a cell desert and still have a landline that i use at home. But i use my gadget for everything. I read the dope and play Wordle on it. I originally bought one as a portable email device. (And the first email gadget i bought didn’t have a phone function.) It’s my address book and my calendar and my calculator. And yes, i routinely use it as flashlight, too. There are lots of places where i used to bring flashlights and just don’t bother any more, because i always have this handy flashlight in my pocket.
I’m not just talking about individuals. See my example of Indian schools in the other thread - I’ve already addressed the idea that even most groups or community spaces will have the spare cash for this. The only ones you see in online articles are funded pilot projects.
And of the ones that do have actual cash, do you think they’re going to just give their bandwidth away? So individual people are still going to need cash.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the other issues I raised in the other thread:
You haven’t even looked at the Dollar Street link I provided in my last post, have you?
Do so now - See a lot of internet-capable devices in those homes? Hell, see much electricity?
So you oicked the poorest possible people, decided they can’t affors it, and therefore it’s of no help to anyone, is that it?
I think we can stipulate that there are some people in the world who cannot afford food, much less Starlink. But there are plenty more places where the people are poor and have no decent internet, but not so poor that a school or a village can’t cough up $100/mo.
500 schools in Rwanda will have high speed internet, and that’s just a pilot program. Starlink is going to do more for poor people in Africa than most NGOs have managed in the past 50 years.
Jokes aside, I bought a $4 USB-rechargable flashlight from Temu and it destroys the massive Six D-Cell beasts of my youth. Plus with features like a side light/lantern mode. The only place where it’s inferior is as a clubbing weapon.
I know that’s not “last five years” but LED tech is pretty remarkable.
My local surplus store recently got in some “baseball bat” flashlights. Perfectly innocent heavy aluminum LED flashlights for the dedicated baseball fans, any possible secondary use is merely incidental. They are similar to this (but look more like a baseball bat).
Oddly, our landline became so unreliable that we dropped it. But, a big reason it became so unreliable is that only 3-4 houses where on that trunk. Every winter county snowplows would make quick work of the pedestals that fed just a few people. I would take ~ 2 weeks to get it fixed. And then it would happen again.
Soooo… I put up a small cell phone antenna on the roof, that has a repeater/signal booster (?) inside. Works quite well. It’s best if you don’t walk and talk though. So it has it’s limitations. We don’t use our phones that much anyway. But if you need to make a call the landline might be down for a week.
As others have said, I use the other features of the ‘phone’ more than the phone. For instance I always have the current book I’m reading on it and it tethers to what I’m reading on my kindle. Most of the pictures I have are of whatever thing I’m working on so that I can re-assemble it, or whatever. That can be a lifesaver.
But, this tech has been around for longer than 5 years, so I will discontinue my own hi-jack.
This is probably going to make some people’s eyes roll…my robot vacuum.
First, it works almost perfectly. My model has the rotating laser navigation on top and it does an astounding job of mapping the house. The speed and efficiency really surprised me. You ought to see the way it handles a dining room table with six chairs.
Second, it was cheap. Less than $300. I’ve paid more for stick vacs.
Finally, it actually met a need I had, rather than creating some need through marketing and then convincing me I ought to meet that need. With 160 pounds of dog living with us, the fur-and-dust bunnies were getting totally out of hand.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that it would have been worth $1000 to me at the time of purchase if I had any idea how much I’d like and use it.
I expected this to be the case, not to mention a higher cost.
The results have been remarkable. I used to keep a stick vac at each end of the house and hit the worst areas every 2-3 days or when we saw piles of fur and dust in the hardwood floor rooms. No more.
It runs automatically for about 50 minutes every night after my wife and I go to bed.
Voice recognition, specifically to look for something online, although I think it’s been around for more than five years. I’ve always been a few years behind the technological forefront, but I somehow missed this one completely, and it really took me by surprise when I first saw it a few years ago at a bar with a friend. We were talking about a specific recording, he pulled out his phone and started talking to it: “Please, Mr. YouTube, I want to listen to (whatever the title was).” He was a nutty, fun-loving guy, and I thought he was just clowning around.