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

[Steve Stroh]

I’m speculating, but given that Starlink is THE communications
infrastructure for much of Ukraine, then the scaling of the ground stations
to provide that level of service must be a significant expense. To provide
that much bandwidth would require deploying a lot of ground stations, each
with expensive hardware, power infrastructure (including backup), fiber
backhaul, skilled labor, and no small amount of fiber bandwidth that SpaceX
has to pay SOMEONE to provide.

Not to mention that anything SpaceX deploys to support Ukraine is a
resource that it could have used for speeding up revenue generation in
lucrative markets like the US.

On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 12:41 David Lang via Starlink <
starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> 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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> >
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-- 
Steve Stroh N8GNJ (he / him / his)
Editor
Zero Retries Newsletter - https://zeroretries.substack.com
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