Re: [Starlink] Starlink deplyment in Ukraine

[Larry Press <lpress@csudh.edu>]

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Ground stations in Turkey, Lithuania, and Poland are reachable from Kyiv. https://circleid.com/posts/20220301-spacex-starlink-service-in-ukraine-is-an-important-government-asset. The one in Turkey is often out of range.


________________________________
From: Starlink <starlink-bounces@lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of David Lang <david@lang.hm>
Sent: Saturday, March 5, 2022 5:02 PM
To: David P. Reed <dpreed@deepplum.com>
Cc: starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Starlink] Starlink deplyment in Ukraine

On Sat, 5 Mar 2022, David P. Reed wrote:

> 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.

I actually doubt that the ground stations are in Ukraine, that would require
much more significant setup (think about the engineers flown out to installa
ground station to support Tonga) and would be extremely vulnerable to
disruption.

Remember, service was turned on and dishys delivered in < 48 hours.

disrupting the ground stations in adjacent countries is a rather significant
escalation.

We don't know the full reach of a ground station, but I suspect that some of the
limitations that people have been talking about are as much software/regulations
as RF/hardware, and I would not be surprised if such restritions are being
relaxed a bit there.

> 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.

So far he has not said anything about the use of them, although some people in
Ukraine had said they have them and are prepared to use them when the wired
Internet is disrupted. I would not expect to hear that much about people using
them in remote areas yet. We'll probably hear more about that weeks to months
later.

David Lang

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