Can someone explain to me why Ukrainians have to pay 2500 to 4500$ in monthly fee while normal consumers of the service are normally only paying around 100$?
Private companies will charge whatever they can. I never understood why people seek justification for a certain price. The bargaining power imbalance is plain to see.
When starlink charges you $100 it's because where it does so it has competitors that charge at that level. (Pendants will challenge this). In Australia where starlink is the superior satellite service there is an inferior NBN service and various mobile services if you can get signal. In Ukraine what do the alternatives charge that have consistent service?
Is not my model it's an observation. If you don't raise prices after hurricane or earthquake you run out, which is what usually happens. This is what happened at the start of COVID with masks and hand sanitizer. It is profiteering. Read your country's local news to see if anything was done about it at the time, in mine nothing was.
What network alternatives do they have in the combat zones? My understanding was that communication infra was taken offline in the first few weeks of the war.
It's only $20 mil. If I remember correctly Raytheon was awarded a $182 mil contract to develop 2x NASAMS for Ukraine. Just ask them for a slight price cut and voila, money for SpaceX.
What is the operational cost of a satellite? It's all upfront cost, there is no operational cost other than running uplink stations/bandwidth on the ground. Is there really significant opportunity cost for Spacex here? I fucking doubt it, the starlink satellites serve relatively small geographic areas. I very much doubt that satellites over the Donbass are in a position where they are not making money because all the traffic that would otherwise be paid for by a bunch of people is being clobbered by priority UA mil packets. I also can't imagine that the entire UA military is particularly significant on the backbone end of things when you have large metros etc mixed in, it just doesn't line up for me.
LEO sats have a lifespan (5 years IIRC), so you have to constantly refresh your constellation with new launches and sats. These launch and replacement costs will drop over time, but they aren't trivial.
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible business, but there are real operating costs to keeping the network alive.
As mentioned in the other comment and the parent, Ukrainian wartime demand is not relevant to that side of the business, there aren't satellites that are deployed specifically to serve Ukraine and I am informed guessing that there is no aspect of the network that is actually degraded in a customer-losing sense, and while there may be greater bandwidth costs I am unconvinced that the total cost to Spacex is particularly high.
(fwiw it would be chill of the US government to pitch them some money for the actual cost imo, but i think the actual cost to spacex (real and opportunity) is likely much smaller than the numbers being bandied about here)
“It's all upfront cost, there is no operational cost other than running uplink stations/bandwidth on the ground.”
Heh.
The thought that there is no overhead to such a complex system that is designed to continually fall out of they sky and self destruct every couple years.
They don't deploy satellites to serve Ukraine, they need those satellites anyway to run the constellation. Ukraine wartime use has no impact on this side of the equation.
It could rephrased as there is no marginal cost per bit assuming the bandwidth isn't saturated and no additional coverage area over other business operations is being offered.
1. Usage patterns being way different from normal customers, i.e. at max capacity nearly 24/7, whereas regular customers can be oversubscribed by as much as 50 to 1.
2. Cyberattacks requiring enormous effort to mitigate or block
3. More stringent and demanding requirements for customer support, etc., because of the military application.
Though on the other hand there should be economies of scale somewhere here, so 50x greater usage likely isn't a linear 50x increase in cost.
In not sure why cyberattacks would affect the price. For ISPs this is expected to be a dumb pipe. They don't care about the contents, just the volume. (ok, they kinda do, but not at a security level, they're happy for you to be pwned) But DoS protection shouldn't cost that much - you need the capacity to mitigate whether it happens or not. The cost of actually receiving that traffic shouldn't be 100x the normal price.
At some point during this whole thing, Musk tweeted a bandwidth usage graph that showed that all of the Starlink units combined (many thousands of them) were using a total of 7TB a day. Which is a minuscule amount of data and wouldn't be much of an issue even if it was for a single unit.
I got the impression that they were turning on the super expensive max unrestricted service (which has no incremental cost over the regular service) then pretending that the price of the service times the number of units was money that they were losing every month.
It is based on the higher performance of "Starlink Business" [0] that has more performant hardware, increased throughput, priority, and support and which, in the U.K., is billed at "... £400/mo for service and £2,410 for hardware." It presumably also has to be a hybrid with the roaming services such as RV and Marine which may imply having to dynamically adjust satellite and ground-link paths. With the number of terminals in operation inside UA it is also possible there is a dedicated ground station in, or close to, Ukraine which would also assure very low latencies.
As others have said, the demands of military use probably require 24/7 dedicated support and monitoring with real-time threat detection and evasion from skilled engineers at SpaceX/Starlink and actively monitoring the satellites passing over Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
I have a residential Starlink terminal in Ukraine, service costs $60/mo. I assume this higher fee is for a higher tier of service suitable for military use where reliability is mission critical.
The article has errors. UA pays $500 a month for the $5000/mo high bandwidth high priority mobile service tier which they need for their high bandwidth drone video streaming. SpX eats the rest of the cost. This does not mean either that "it costs $4500/mo" or that "they pay $4500/mo".
Someone on Reddit suggested that these are specific units that were acquired through a third party or something weird:
> Reading the article: what seems to have happened is that Ukrainian government bought a batch of 1300 Starlink units from some private company in UK, had them shipped to Ukraine and distributed among the military, then had a disagreement over actually paying for the service. As a result, those units were cut off the network.
> Literally no side of the dispute is commenting on the whole ordeal, so this is about the extent of information we have.
> Starlink clearly sold those units expecting to get paid. Then the terminnals got resold and shipped to Ukraine and it seems like no one is paying for them now.
one side is attributable to a senior official at the DoD:
>Negotiations between SpaceX and the Defense Department continue despite Musk’s claim that SpaceX withdrepw its request, according to a senior defense official.
>“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
The article ends with an implication that Musk's behavior is partly about impacting the actual conflict:
> As a result, Musk’s control of the signal gives him significant sway over the battlefield at a time when he has come under heavy criticism for arguing that Ukraine should sue for peace and give up some of its territory.
I wonder if really the play is less ambitious: press covering disruptions in the service, and quotes from military personnel about how critical or valuable the service is are bolstering the starlink brand more than providing uninterrupted service would.
I want SpaceX to continue to help Ukraine (and I loathed Elon's public crying about it), but I think it's a bit much to ask a private company to just eat the costs and not complain, especially when I don't think SpaceX has a lot of cash on hand. Hopefully there is a remedy, and this can quickly be resolved. $400M just today was added to aid to Ukraine, you'd think SpaceX and NATO/DoD could strike a deal, especially if these have been valuable battlefield tools.
I have no opposition whatsoever to paying for Starlink service - but how much can service actually cost? Transit for a few terabytes of data must be on the order of dollars per day. I guess if the terminal sales price was greatly marked down and they intend to make the rest up on service charges -- even then, this is more of an "opportunity cost" than an actual cost, no?
If you have a bank account with $100 in it, a $10 daily expense will deplete your account in 10 days. A $10 daily opportunity cost would never deplete your account.
>A $10 daily opportunity cost would never deplete your account
Well that's assuming you have no expenses. In your example the difference between realizing the opportunity cost or not is the difference between 10 days of runway and paying the bills in perpetuity.
Bills pile up no matter what, so there's only a limited amount of opportunity cost you can afford to eat.
Agreed, but I don't understand the cost structure at all. Basic Starlink service in the US is $110 a month, and all these quotes are for service fees in Ukraine are on the order of $2500-$4500 a month. I totally get that deploying into another country (and a war zone at that) may have some structurally higher costs due to currency conversions and extra support, but 20-40x seems absurd.
I would love to have some explain to me why I am wrong, but this seems like war profiteering to me.
There are multiple tiers to Starlink (residential, RV, boat, plane, …). I don’t think Ukraine gets the most basic plan with limited bandwidth and meant for stationary dishes.
If I understood correctly some are used as a backbone for their internet infrastructure and some on the field on moving vehicles. The $110 plan wouldn’t cover those use cases.
how about 20-40x for 20-40x the traffic? streaming Netflix all day long isn't the same thing, bandwidth-wise as supporting an entire military base. Comcast gets to charge different rates for home vs business, it seems military traffic which runs at a higher priority than business class should be straightforwards to charge more for. We can disagree over the exact price to charge but the different QOS seems justified.
Where did you get 20-40x the traffic? When their business class dish has basically two dishes built in, and you get, basically double the bandwidth. Unless they are setting up arrays of these things, nobody is getting much more bandwidth than a home user. Otherwise that would mean each site has effectively 20 terminals, and each terminal would cost $2500/mo.
And who in Ukraine are they competing with for bandwidth? Did they start selling terminals to civilians too?
The only way I can see justifying the price, is because ground stations are required nearby, as there is no sat to sat communication yet. Getting internet to a ground station in a war zone might be expensive and dangerous.
What is odd is that it's obvious the Pentagon will pay the costs (given their military utility) but instead of quietly reaching out to them Musk made a public complaint, then withdrew it, claiming he'll pay.
It's really difficult to figure out what's going though his head.
Seems to have worked fine to make the Pentagon anxious to get the negotiation done rather than sit on the whole thing for as long as humanly possible (what I’d expect as a default from a bureaucracy of that size):
> “Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay [SpaceX],” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry [Musk]’ll change his mind.”
Whether this was a deliberate negotiation strategy or a simple case of Musk being Musk in public, I can’t tell.
I think him telling the military he doesn't want to pay for it anymore privately would have done the job. It's not like they're short of cash, $44 billion has been allocated to UA's defense.
“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
They have something like 25k terminals in use. They’ve been acquired from various sources. It’s highly likely a temporary billing or technical issue yet the article makes it sound like it’s being done deliberately. Maybe it is? But Occam’s Razor.
Also, this has proven to likely be the most important piece of tech on the battle field. The US government could march into SpaceX HQ in a moment and turn it back on if needed.
From past stories, it appears that Ukraine asked for the $500 a month service, but Starling instead gave them $4500 a month service so that they can milk the Pentagon. Musk knows a government teat when he sucks on one.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadWhen starlink charges you $100 it's because where it does so it has competitors that charge at that level. (Pendants will challenge this). In Australia where starlink is the superior satellite service there is an inferior NBN service and various mobile services if you can get signal. In Ukraine what do the alternatives charge that have consistent service?
If I own the only gas station with gas after a hurricane or earthquake, I should be able to raise my rates to whatever I want?
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible business, but there are real operating costs to keeping the network alive.
(fwiw it would be chill of the US government to pitch them some money for the actual cost imo, but i think the actual cost to spacex (real and opportunity) is likely much smaller than the numbers being bandied about here)
Heh.
The thought that there is no overhead to such a complex system that is designed to continually fall out of they sky and self destruct every couple years.
1. Usage patterns being way different from normal customers, i.e. at max capacity nearly 24/7, whereas regular customers can be oversubscribed by as much as 50 to 1.
2. Cyberattacks requiring enormous effort to mitigate or block
3. More stringent and demanding requirements for customer support, etc., because of the military application.
Though on the other hand there should be economies of scale somewhere here, so 50x greater usage likely isn't a linear 50x increase in cost.
At some point during this whole thing, Musk tweeted a bandwidth usage graph that showed that all of the Starlink units combined (many thousands of them) were using a total of 7TB a day. Which is a minuscule amount of data and wouldn't be much of an issue even if it was for a single unit.
I got the impression that they were turning on the super expensive max unrestricted service (which has no incremental cost over the regular service) then pretending that the price of the service times the number of units was money that they were losing every month.
Looking at the graph, it looks like it's from May, so I don't know what it looks like today. But I think most of the terminals were in place by then.
As others have said, the demands of military use probably require 24/7 dedicated support and monitoring with real-time threat detection and evasion from skilled engineers at SpaceX/Starlink and actively monitoring the satellites passing over Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.
[0] https://www.starlink.com/business
> Reading the article: what seems to have happened is that Ukrainian government bought a batch of 1300 Starlink units from some private company in UK, had them shipped to Ukraine and distributed among the military, then had a disagreement over actually paying for the service. As a result, those units were cut off the network.
> Literally no side of the dispute is commenting on the whole ordeal, so this is about the extent of information we have.
> Starlink clearly sold those units expecting to get paid. Then the terminnals got resold and shipped to Ukraine and it seems like no one is paying for them now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ym4w1q/ukraine_s...
>Negotiations between SpaceX and the Defense Department continue despite Musk’s claim that SpaceX withdrepw its request, according to a senior defense official.
>“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
Interesting tactic.
> As a result, Musk’s control of the signal gives him significant sway over the battlefield at a time when he has come under heavy criticism for arguing that Ukraine should sue for peace and give up some of its territory.
I wonder if really the play is less ambitious: press covering disruptions in the service, and quotes from military personnel about how critical or valuable the service is are bolstering the starlink brand more than providing uninterrupted service would.
If you have a bank account with $100 in it, a $10 daily expense will deplete your account in 10 days. A $10 daily opportunity cost would never deplete your account.
Well that's assuming you have no expenses. In your example the difference between realizing the opportunity cost or not is the difference between 10 days of runway and paying the bills in perpetuity.
Bills pile up no matter what, so there's only a limited amount of opportunity cost you can afford to eat.
I would love to have some explain to me why I am wrong, but this seems like war profiteering to me.
If I understood correctly some are used as a backbone for their internet infrastructure and some on the field on moving vehicles. The $110 plan wouldn’t cover those use cases.
And who in Ukraine are they competing with for bandwidth? Did they start selling terminals to civilians too?
The only way I can see justifying the price, is because ground stations are required nearby, as there is no sat to sat communication yet. Getting internet to a ground station in a war zone might be expensive and dangerous.
It's really difficult to figure out what's going though his head.
> “Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay [SpaceX],” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry [Musk]’ll change his mind.”
Whether this was a deliberate negotiation strategy or a simple case of Musk being Musk in public, I can’t tell.
“Negotiations are very much underway. Everyone in our building knows we’re going to pay them,” the senior Pentagon official told CNN, adding that the department is eager to have commitments in writing “because we worry he’ll change his mind.”
Also, this has proven to likely be the most important piece of tech on the battle field. The US government could march into SpaceX HQ in a moment and turn it back on if needed.
The way the headline is worded makes it sound like there was some sort of hardware malfunction and that SpaceX is having financial difficulties.