The base stations were never free - they were subsidized by various sources.

But that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine.

The media loves to whip up a frenzy over Musk, but Ukrainian commanders on the front have said Starlink is the single biggest advantage they have, their efficacy would drop by more than half without it, and even, they’d rather have more Starlink than more guns.

Simply put no one has done more for Ukraine than Elon / SpaceX.

> that $4,500 a month is insanely cheap and an absolutely incredible value for Ukraine

"I have bought over 50 StarLinks, with official prices right from the website in EU countries - Poland, CZ, Germany - like 400-500 bucks each, then enable portability for extra IIRC 50$, then payed monthly fee of 60$ (was 120$ before). It’s the same for everyone else in EU" Dimko Zhluktenko, the head of Dzuga’s Paw charity fund, tweeted in his response to the development.

So regular joe donates them for $500 with monthly fee of $60 but $4,500 a month is insanely cheap?

I have a $10,000 toilet seat to sell you.

Regular joe seems to be donating the typical residential units on residential plans. My understanding is that the military set up is different, especially in terms of support/priority.

The 'donated' units are business plans - there is no 'military' tier.

Starlink - Latency 20-40 ms Download - 50-200 mbps Upload - 10-20 mbps

Starlink Business - Latency 20-40 ms Download - 100-350 mbps Upload - 10-40 mbps

I didn't say military tier. My understanding is that they are 1) business plans 2) available in areas where business isn't currently offered 3) get prioritization over other orders and 4) have a different support model.

"The media loves to whip up a frenzy over Musk"

No, Musk does that himself by saying and doing a lot of very stupid things and also lying a lot.

It's fair to say it's both.

I think the media would likely ignore him most of the time if he were boring.

A big reason he says so many stupid things is he loves the attention.

> Like sending Ukraine "free" base stations and charging them $4,500 a month for service.

Are there any alternatives? Nope. Also, let's not talk about how SpaceX "should" sponge up the costs, because you would not ask Lockheed Martin or Raytheon Technologies to do that. Compared to regular prices of military hardware, Starlink costs nothing.

To get any credit for 'charity' we should at least look at the nominal cost to service a particular base station instead of the cost to make Starlink profitable. For the former I only really see the bandwidth costs because the base stations are part of Starlink's normal operation and all of the satellites are up there anyways.

Yeah. I mean, from SpaceX's perspective they're perfectly entitled to try to get the US government to underwrite general operational costs as well; any other supplier is going to do the same thing (albeit not on Twitter...), and Starlink could certainly use the additional funds because the whole network is pre-profit. But that doesn't mean that if the US government doesn't fund everything they ask for the Ukraine service is a philanthropic endeavour. Lots of marginal costs are being unwritten and (again, ignoring Twitter) SpaceX is getting a lot of PR benefit and stress testing from doing it.

I don’t agree because bandwidth isn’t the only part of nominal operations in a war zone. You’re also painting a bright red target on your back for the highly sophisticated state actors (On the level that they might bribe or threaten employees, try to infiltrate the company, etc.) If I were SpaceX I wouldn’t want any part of it.

Those are all things they should already be guarding against though for the most part and definitely not a cost incurred per unit. If they're not already doing tons of work to secure against malicious employees they're a joke of an ISP to begin with.

Security isn't binary. There's a difference between normal commercial-grade security, and being actively engaged in warfare against an adversary with serious cyber and space warfare capabilities.

Space doesn't matter here, if Russia decides to mess with StarLink by shooting down satellites there's nothing SpaceX can do beyond launching replacements. So we're back to the more normal security they should already be doing because ISPs are already huge targets for state level actors even if you're not involved in a war.

I mean didn't they re purpose says for the Ukraine costing 10s of millions?

Yes they gave everyone the $4,500 service even if they only took (and paid for) the $500 tier.

The $60 tier is not available on the 20,000 donated terminals - 85% of the retail price of which ($1,500 and a $2,500 model) was paid for by governments.

"Free" as in almost entirely paid for by Ukranians themselves, or the Polish, UK, or US governments.