We already know what StarLink can and can't do. It's public knowledge and
there's no need to insinuate nefarious motives. Musk won the Thailand case.
He was trolled by a spelunker who I don't believe was involved in the
rescue operation. Musk was asked to do the R&D for the submarine and was
encouraged to continue by the lead cave diver.

On Sun, Mar 6, 2022, 01:39 David P. Reed <dpreed@deepplum.com> 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.
>
>
>
> 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 .
> I hope he learned something when he was sued.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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