Aakash GuptaLead source
Bolivia's government spent two years treating Starlink dishes as contraband, and people smuggled them in from Peru anyway. This week the president started putting 4,700 of them in public schools. The reason goes back to a $302 million satellite China built for them. Back in 2010, Evo Morales's government signed a deal with the China Development Bank to give Bolivia its own satellite. The bank covered 85% of the cost. It went up in December 2013, got named after an 18th-century Aymara rebel, and turned into a real source of national pride. The whole point was bringing internet to rural towns that had never had it. The problem is where it lives. Túpac Katari sits 35,786 km above the equator, which is how high a satellite has to be to hover over one spot. So when a kid in a mountain village…Read original on X