After two months, SpaceX's satellite internet service Starlink is now serving 150,000 active users in Ukraine, according to a government minister in the country.
Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted out the estimate on Monday. "This is crucial support for Ukraine's infrastructure and restoring the destroyed territories," Fedorov wrote. “Ukraine will stay connected no matter what.”
The numbers are remarkable considering Starlink only became operational in Ukraine about two months ago when Russia began its invasion of the country. The war prompted SpaceX to send the Ukrainian government shipments of Starlink dishes, which can receive high-speed broadband from the company’s satellites in orbit around the planet.
In early April, a separate government minister revealed SpaceX had sent over 10,000 Starlink units to the country in an effort to keep Ukraine online.
“There was need for [supplying] military first and hospitals, but then we started to give them out to some enterprises because we need business running,” Alex Bornyakov, the country’s deputy minister of digital transformation, told The Washington Post.
So it’s likely a single Starlink dish is supplying Wi-Fi to clusters of neighboring users, including military personnel. Bornyakov went on to say the government has mainly been deploying the Starlink dishes in areas hit hard by the war.
Ukrainian soldiers have also been praising Starlink’s ability to deliver reliable internet in war zones. “I want to say one thing: Elon Musk’s Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor,” one solider recently told journalist David Patrikarakos. “Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can't.”
For context, SpaceX in March said it had 250,000 paying subscribers to Starlink, which includes consumers and enterprises. Each subscriber gets a dish after paying for the hardware. In Ukraine's case, both SpaceX and the US government have reportedly been subsidizing the deployment of the Starlink dishes to the country.