Photo: The Kilowatts
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has offered Starlink terminals and services to those defending themselves against Russia in Ukraine, recently positing a new estimate for how many are using the service in the country.
@ElonMusk said on Sunday that there are around 25,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine, but he also added that each can also be used to uplink to cell phone towers — potentially allowing several thousand people to use each terminal.
The tweet came in response to another user asking for the statistics on how many Ukrainians are using Starlink per day, during a discussion about de-escalating the war with Russia.
There are ~25k terminals in Ukraine, but each terminal can be used to provide an Internet uplink to a cell phone tower, so potentially several thousand people can be served by a single terminal
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 9, 2022
Back in late July, there were just over 12,000 Starlink dishes in Ukraine and in less than three months, that number has more than doubled.
In May, SpaceX reported around 150,000 active daily users in Ukraine per day.
The news comes just a couple of weeks after Musk caught backlash for suggesting that Ukraine could cede certain regions of the country to prevent more lives from being lost, even eliciting a response from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Days later, Starlink outages in Ukraine were described as debilitating by military users, and Musk called reports from Financial Times “bad reporting,” saying that it said the Starlink terminals had been paid for.
Instead, Musk noted, SpaceX has paid $80 million and counting for the terminals, and set to surpass $100 million by the end of the year.
