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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

They’re not the same devices. The premium terminals support higher data rates up to double those of the basic consumer units. There may be other improvements and advantages as well, there was talk of wider field of view of the sky, multiple simultaneous satellite tracking and redundant connections but I don’t know if those features made it into these devices. Starlink prioritised Ukraine for the latest gear.

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But majority of terminals were bought by third parties. State Department (USAID) paid for ~2K, Poland bought >11K units.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/13/politics/elon-musk-spacex...

> The largest single contributor of terminals, according to the newly obtained documents, is Poland with payment for almost 9,000 individual terminals.

https://twitter.com/j_jakobowski/status/1579889819010097154

>~11.7k out of 18k Starlink sets in were bought by Poland.

>6,7k by Polish government and 5k by Polish oil company Orlen

Another good thread about how the terminals and subscriptions have been done from someone else whose been buying them: https://twitter.com/dim0kq/status/1580827171903635456

The terminals aren't the issue here hut rather the operational service provided to the terminals: the satellites providing connectivity.

That's correct, Starlink provided 3,670 of the premium terminals at their own cost, plus (so far) free premium service to all of the terminals provided as aid, including those bought by USAID and various governments. There are further consumer grade terminals individuals and crowd funders have provided entirely at their own cost including service.

If they knew it was just going to be a free trial, maybe everyone involved would have rejected the premium terminals. I wonder if the premium terminals are even faster when there are so many of them clogging the network.

>maybe everyone involved would have rejected the premium terminals

Sure, maybe they should have. Maybe that would have been much better for them. They're grown ups, I'm sure they would make the right decision.

I bet one of the issues is that there's actually too few of them. While Ukraine is fairly small compared to the US, it's still no slouch. The front was as long at one point as the distance between the northern and southern border of the US. A few thousand ground terminal in such a large area make what seems to be a sub-optimal number of ground terminals per base station. Normally the "non-premium" terminals would be oversubscribed in an area and the ISP would rely on usage statistics to determine the economic optimum, but here you might have a situation where the "non-premium" pricing may not reflect the service available (there may be more connectivity available per terminal, because there's so few of them) nor the costs incurred (the same amount of effort is spent on servicing a small number of terminals). The upside is that the ground terminals can each be shared by many people so it's not all that expensive per connected individual -- you're just splitting the costs at the level of connected individuals, not at the level of privately owned terminals.

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