Starlink has become less dependable in Ukraine, and Ukrainian officials and their European partners are now asking what they would use instead.
The satellite service has underpinned Ukraine's resistance to Russia's full-scale invasion for years. Ars Technica attributes the recent unreliability to Elon Musk's political inclinations and describes the latest disruptions as a surprise. It does not detail their scale or length.
Starlink is the world's largest communications satellite network. A relatively compact terminal gives any user or vehicle high-speed internet and data. In Ukraine, that has carried civilian traffic and military communications. It has also widened the military's ability to remotely control or guide drones, which are used both for air defense and for strikes on Russian targets.
The head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech spoke to Ars Technica anonymously for security reasons. "Starlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use," the engineer said. The main limitation, the engineer added, is positioning the antenna so it can see the satellites.
That is a mild complaint, and it explains why replacing Starlink is hard. Analysis: any alternative has to match it on three fronts at once, and beating it on one is not enough. Europe has satellite operators of its own, but nothing in this account suggests they match Starlink's combination of price, supply, and simple terminals.
The stakes also differ from a typical vendor dispute. When a network guides drones, an outage is an operational problem, not an inconvenience. Relying on one privately controlled supplier, whose behavior is described as politically driven, is a procurement risk as much as a technical one. The harder question is whether Ukraine can build a mix of providers before the next disruption arrives.