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

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

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My 10 cents worth: If you divide the total annual Internet usage 
worldwide (a ballpark figure at best) by the total number of users 
worldwide (another ballpark figure) and then by 365*24*60*60, you get a 
rate of (ballpark) 1 Mb/s. b as in bits not bytes, M as in Mega not m as 
in milli (someone needs to tell Starlink that or are they promising 
people a lot less than we think: 
https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1002-69942-69?regionCode=US?). 
That means each Internet user generates, on average, 1 Mb/s of traffic 
on a 24/7 basis. Of course, we'd expect them to generate at little less 
off-peak and a little more during peak hours. But it's a handy rate to 
compare other numbers to.

So if you then consider the 15 Gb/s that Nathan quoted earlier on, 
that's really only about 15k users, if averaged. If it's a peak figure 
(likely if Elon shouts about it) then that's likely a lot less than 15k 
users. Now just a gentle reminder that Elon's still having trouble 
provisioning to all of Montana, and there's just over a million folk 
there. Ukraine has over 35 million - even if you take all the refugees 
that haven't returned out - and it's not orders of magnitude larger than 
Montana either.

So it's plain obvious that Starlink is not carrying most of the Internet 
traffic from/to Ukraine. Far from it. I don't think Elon has claimed 
this anywhere, either, but the fact that this claim is making it on this 
list just goes to show how effective he is at getting people's attention 
(and leaving such false impressions uncorrected). That said, it's 
probably carrying a fair amount of Ukraine's frontline unit traffic now. 
In fact, Starlink's probably exclusively mil/gov use in Ukraine right now.

Fibre seems to be what is propping up the rest - and quite effectively 
so. But not as glamorous. Who'd want to know about low power fibre laser 
diodes when you can have space lasers next year?

On 17/10/2022 8:03 am, Brandon Butterworth via Starlink wrote:
> On Sun Oct 16, 2022 at 08:44:12PM +0200, Sebastian Moeller via 
> Starlink wrote:
> > > and it's worth remembering that it's not just being used for 
> military C&C, it's being used for (almost) all Internet access through 
> the country, normal telcom, Hospitals, community access, etc.
> >
> > Do we know this for sure? As far as I know (so not very much, one of my
> > colleagues in the early 2000s was Ukranian and told me about their figer
> > optics telephony system) Ukraine might have some fiber infrastructure
> > that should make at least the west not fully reliant on Starlkink.
>
> They have loads of fibre like most countries, there were many reports of
> them repairing it after was damage, a few sumarried -
>
> https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbapv/diy-volunteers-are-repairing-ukraines-destroyed-internet-infrastructure 
> <https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjbapv/diy-volunteers-are-repairing-ukraines-destroyed-internet-infrastructure>
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/03/22/while-russians-bombs-fall-around-them-ukraines-engineers-battle-to-keep-the-internet-running/ 
> <https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2022/03/22/while-russians-bombs-fall-around-them-ukraines-engineers-battle-to-keep-the-internet-running>
>
> loads more on twitter.
>
> For c&c and the front line they can't depend on that especially as
> they regain areas where Russia has has time to infiltrate/redeploy
> the existing infrastructure, and which may now be the target of
> their own attack. One of Russias weaknesses was depending on the
> local infra for their own operations.
>
> brandon
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-- 
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel

School of Computer Science

Room 303S.594 (City Campus)

The University of Auckland
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz  
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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