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 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.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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