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

[David Lang]

If spacex is providing the high-end/business grade service to all terminals 
that they normally charge $4500/month for, reimbursement should be based on 
that.

Base it on the normal service pricing, not on cost-plus (if it were based on 
cost-plus it would be an utter windfall for SpaceX as they are still in the 
stage of building the service, and so there is a much higher spend rate to 
expand the service at this point than the ongoing maintinance of it)

while the satellites do support that area, they also support the rest of the 
service, and if they weren't supporting Ukraine, there wouldn't be any fewer 
satellites launched.

I've seen too many games played with 'fully loaded costs' (sometimes backfiring 
on the people tinkering with the numbers), and so it's something I watch out 
for.

lies, damn lies, and statistics, 'fully loaded costs' tend to be heavy on 
statistics ;-)

David Lang

On Fri, 14 Oct 2022, tom at evslin.com wrote:

> Putting aside the timing of Elon's complaint about cost right after the spat over his Ukrainian "peace plan", It is certainly reasonable for Starlink to get paid like other weapon suppliers who didn't give out free samples to prove their usefulness, Given that they should be reimbursed based on loaded cost plus profit like anyone else. I'm sure the other suppliers allocate their overhead costs when pricing weapon systems. They'd be out of business otherwise. The satellites are part of Starlink's fixed overhead so a portion of their costs should be allocated to service provided in Ukraine.
>
> All that being said, it would be terrible if Ukraine got less than the best support that can be provided.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Starlink <starlink-bounces at lists.bufferbloat.net> On Behalf Of David Lang via Starlink
> Sent: Friday, October 14, 2022 1:28 PM
> 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://twitter.com/dim0kq/status/1580827171903635456)
>> 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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>