Nepal, April 4 -- For decades, Nepal's development has mainly been a strategy of 'catching up', a linear, exhausting struggle to replicate the infrastructure of the West. We measure progress in kilometres of blacktopped road and the sluggish expansion of fibre-optic lines across a vertical landscape designed to reject them. But as a new government settles into Singha Durbar, under a leadership that has promised to break with the inertia of the past, we must ask a simple question: Why are we still climbing a broken ladder when we could leap?

The most powerful tool for that leap is already overhead. Low Earth Orbit satellite internet, led by SpaceX's Starlink with Amazon's Project Kuiper close behind, offers Nepal an escape from the geogra...