[Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?

[David Lang]

some interesting tidbits in that article

1. 25k dishes rather than the 15k I had heard befor
2. they are providing full business rates rather than consumer rates
2a. it's interesting that they can do this with the consumer dishes, although a 
lot of what I saw shipped were the gen1 (round) dishes, which may be better than 
the gen 2 consumer dishes.

yes, the companies who manufacture the weapons have been paid in full.

I think it's worth pointing out that Starlink was never intended to be the 
entire communications infrastructure for a country. I think it would be a very 
interesting thing to investigate what the actual density of users and data usage 
is (there is a graph posted, but I haven't tried to get a good enough copy of it 
to see the units). It could confirm/refute the "starlink can't scale" argument

David Lang

On Fri, 14 Oct 2022, Larry Press wrote:

> SpaceX has given a more detailed statement of expenses to the Pentagon:
> https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex-starlink-ukraine/index.html
>
> They have been "paid" in favorable publicity and have tested/refined things like mobile connectivity.
>
> Aren't the companies that supply weapons, ammunition, etc. paid?
>
> Larry
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Starlink <starlink-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of David Lang via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Sent: Friday, October 14, 2022 10:28 AM
> To: Kurtis Heimerl <kheimerl at cs.washington.edu>
> Cc: Starlink list <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink no longer available to the Ukrainian army?
>
> Having now read more info on this, less significant than the $80m total figure
> is the $20m/month figure he quoted. With 15k dishes as the figure that they sent
> (separate from whatever has been purchased on the commercial side), that works
> out to 1.3k/dish/month, which is very high.
>
> now, not being able to deploy reliable ground stations inside Ukraine could be
> driving up costs, plus the ongoing battle against jamming. But in his tweet he
> also cites satellite costs, which should not be allocated as "Ukraine related"
> costs (and I don't think the cyberdefense and jamming defense work should be
> either)
>
> David Lang
>
> On Fri, 14 Oct 2022, Kurtis Heimerl via Starlink wrote:
>
>> This thread (https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://twitter.com/dim0kq/status/1580827171903635456__;!!P7nkOOY!reUDfoQpkbJ6YAQ6h436UHdL9D0lnxDeqlc29JPUsrl8V_02dlWYYFi4zfQ-CCRLKetEGxza7FjOyJDcUURE6WtPnA$  )
>> strongly argues that Starlink is largely paid for their service, at
>> least on the consumer side. I imagine there are significant
>> operational expenses in dealing with the various actors involved but
>> not on the basic model.
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 9:06 AM Juliusz Chroboczek via Starlink
>> <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> In essence, once you give something away for free, not even setting the
>>>> expectation that it’s a “freemium” model, it’s very hard to get out of it. If
>>>> you then claim your costs are way higher than what analysis work out, eyebrows
>>>> raise way above the hairline.
>>>
>>> Uh.  Hmm.
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>