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$?
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.
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?
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.