[Starlink] Starlink deplyment in Ukraine

["David P. Reed" <dpreed@deepplum.com>]

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THis is a good discussion, and I hope for more.
 
1. I'm really curious how well Starlink's bent-pipe architecture actually works in a context like Ukraine where fiber and copper infrastructure are vulnerable and less redundant than in a place like the UK. I'm not so worried about the dishy's working or being targeted. They can be moved and disguised. What is not being discussed here (or anywhere) is where the ground stations that the traffic must *all* traverse are, and the fact that they are Single Points of Failure, and must be nailed down in places which are close enough to the dishy they serve, and also fiber-backhauled into the Internet. This is a serious technical issue that interests me, mostly because Starlink doesn't publish its technical specs.
 
So these ground stations for Ukrainian coverage are where? Ukraine is a BIG area. It certainly won't be covered by one ground station. And it certainly can't be just an 18-wheeler with a huge antenna on top, because it needs to be connected to a point-of-presence with lots of capacity - the sum of all the dishy's peak loads.
 
I'm suspecting that some ground station is actually in Ukraine itself, but putting it in Kyiv just makes it a tempting target (like a power station or water utility), and it is much more vulnerable and visible to Russian troops in the area.
 
Now Poland and Moldova are potential sites that might cover part of Ukraine, but certainly not that far into the country.
 
2. I hope that Starlink isn't just doing this to get Musk in the news, but actually wants to facilitate ongoing connectivity to the Internet, independent of "sides". (as others here have noted, communications control is a very imprecise instrument when it is a tool of aggression - "virtue signalling" by a billionaire who has been knowmid 1990's trying to bring Internet connectivity to poor people in Jamaica and poro people in the West Bank each partly caused the deaths of a few people we thought we were only helping. But that's a long story in each context).
 
More seriously, if Musk is not covering much of Ukraine at all, and just shipping dishy's there, that's good, but I hope he doesn't try to take credit for more than Starlink actually can do. I mean it would also be nice if Mikrotik shipped in meshable WiFi, but that's of limited utility, even if the most clever hackers tried to create an outdoor mesh of them. The coverage would be very limited, and you still need a non-WiFi path to the Internet to communicate over wide areas.
 
I'm still appalled by Musk's actions when the Thai boys needed to be rescued from a cave. [ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50667553 ]( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50667553 ) . I hope he learned something when he was sued.
 
 
 
 

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