[HN Gopher] 1,300 SpaceX satellite units went offline over fundi...
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1,300 SpaceX satellite units went offline over funding issues
Author : mzs
Score : 37 points
Date : 2022-11-04 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| supercanuck wrote:
| >Nobody is asking them to "eat the costs"
|
| "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."
| lgg wrote:
| 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| 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.
| patd wrote:
| 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.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| 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.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| 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.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| 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.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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?
| realgeniushere wrote:
| Opportunity cost is no less real than other kinds of costs.
| If not for the cost, their bank account would have a higher
| number in it.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's explicitly a less real type of cost.
|
| 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.
| indecisive_user wrote:
| >A $10 daily opportunity cost would never deplete your
| account
|
| Well that's assuming you have no expenses. In your
| example the difference between realizing the opportunity
| cost or not is the difference between 10 days of runway
| and paying the bills in perpetuity.
|
| Bills pile up no matter what, so there's only a limited
| amount of opportunity cost you can afford to eat.
| greatgib wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why Ukrainians have to pay 2500 to
| 4500$ in monthly fee while normal consumers of the service are
| normally only paying around 100$?
| aaron695 wrote:
| killingtime74 wrote:
| 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?
| ROTMetro wrote:
| So war profiteering then? Since Ukraine HAD alternatives pre-
| war, then your model only applies because they can get away
| with it in a war zone.
|
| 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?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| Many governments (especially states in the U.S) have anti
| price gouging laws.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| So does mine (Australian). However during covid we didn't
| see much actual enforcement
| celestialcheese wrote:
| 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.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Pre-war there were alternatives. The only reason for
| scarcity is the war, hence it being war profiteering.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not necessarily, having security resources to counter
| Russian attempts at civilian bombings is expensive from an
| opportunity cost standpoint.
| Animatronio wrote:
| 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.
| warbler73 wrote:
| Satellites cost a lot to operate and UA is using significant
| bandwidth for these satellites. SpaceX is not a charity.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 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.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| 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.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 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)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "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.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I've heard it's a combination of
|
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| 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.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| >max capacity nearly 24/7
|
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That 7TB figure seems pretty low for several thousand
| terminals over 24 hours, do you have a link to the numbers?
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1580572380535001088
|
| 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.
| bioemerl wrote:
| 4. Big money gets big bill. US government has big money.
| iam-TJ wrote:
| 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 "...
| PS400/mo for service and PS2,410 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.
|
| [0] https://www.starlink.com/business
| wilg wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ym4w1q/ukraine_s...
| [deleted]
| mzs wrote:
| 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."
| abeppu wrote:
| 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.
| warbler73 wrote:
| 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".
| keneda7 wrote:
| Do you happen to have a source for that? I've seen numbers
| similar a couple times but never had a source on it.
| eagerpace wrote:
| 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.
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