Speaker A
A Polish Starlink ground station was set on fire. Was it the Russians, or was Ukraine cut off from the internet because of it? The media is panicking, but is there really anything to worry about? What happened this morning is incredible. Almost every mainstream media outlet reported on an attack on the Polish Starlink base station, which, quote, provides internet for Ukraine. And they said it was critical infrastructure and that the authorities were handling the matter. It sounded very ominous and serious. But is this incident really as bad as they make it out to be? Not necessarily. Let's put aside political commentary, because politicians rarely speak sensibly about technology. We're dealing with an arson attack that was supposed to affect critical infrastructure in this area of telecommunications—infrastructure that affects internet operation. The modus operandi in this case is clearly Russian. Let's start with the fact that, from the perspective of the Starlink network itself, the loss of only one ground gateway isn't a significant issue at all. In the event of a problem with a gateway, Starlink satellites can redirect traffic to other gateways, to other ground stations. And in most cases, users don't notice this at all. They don't experience it negatively. Here, for example, is information from our reader Gabor. The failure of the Polish gateway in Wola Krobowska generated a one-and-a-half-second service interruption. Well, that's not a bad thing. And it probably didn't negatively impact the connection quality at all, because the internet relies heavily on TCP, meaning that what goes down, comes back up, and goes down again. This is the magic of the internet, which was designed by the military as a communications network that would survive even nuclear attacks that wiped out a significant portion of the world's technical infrastructure. It was no different with Starlink. It, too, was designed with redundancy in mind. How does it even work? I'll simplify this because there are a lot of technological nuances here, but generally speaking, if Adam from Sosnowiec wants to send an email to Natalia, I don't know, from Chicago, then that email will travel halfway around the world via radio links or cables from various carriers. The path the email takes to Natalia is defined by routing protocols. But how does the situation change when Adam uses a Starlink terminal instead of traditional cable internet? The email is then pushed through a satellite dish, sent to Adam by Elon Musk, to the Starlink satellites orbiting overhead. There are tens of thousands of these satellites. However, as we know, Chicago isn't in space, but in the USA. So Adam's email must travel from the satellite back to Earth to reach Natalia. And that's where Starlink's ground infrastructure comes in, namely the gateways. These are antenna farms that—just like the one in Wola Krobowska—receive data from satellites and push it into the water beneath the farm's plot, meaning the standard terrestrial infrastructure, and sometimes also, of course, the underground or even submarine infrastructure of various operators and various cables that carry internet data. And so, in a classic, non-separate way, Adam's email reaches Natalia in Green Point. If some unusual situation occurs, resulting in the ground station, the one within range of the satellite, going down, the satellite can use a laser to push the email to another satellite in the Starlink constellation, and that other satellite will then forward that message, that data packet, to another ground station, even one located, I don't know, in Sanesco Bar. Sure. This additional connection can slightly increase the delay in the message reaching its destination. It could also place a heavier burden on another part of the Starlink infrastructure, which suddenly receives more traffic than it should. But it's not like the Starlink network's capacity is always maxed out. This network was designed with reserves in mind, so other stations can absorb this excess traffic, and they do so not only when someone sets fire to a gateway. Although, so far, there's no confirmation that an arson attack actually occurred in Poland. Such emergencies have occurred in the past. This is what happened in Spain a year ago, for example, where a blackout occurred. If someone had a Starlink connected to a UPS or a power bank at the time, they still had internet. Even though the Starlink gateways disappeared, the satellites simply orbiting overhead in Spain routed the Spanish traffic to the gateway in Italy. The Starlink network is a pretty good example of how to build connectivity that's resilient to various challenges. The Russians repeatedly attempted to jam Starlink transmissions between terminals and satellites. But Starlink engineers responded to these attempts, modifying various signal and transmission characteristics to limit or completely eliminate this jamming, bypass it, and ensure connectivity. The Russians also tried to jam the GPS signal itself, meaning the one no longer originating from or related to Starlink's constellation. Because Starlink terminals needed to determine their position, to determine their position to function properly. And what did Starlink do then? They introduced a change that enabled the terminals to determine their position based on their own, native Starlink constellation. It didn't have to rely on the GPS signal. Well, as you can see, the cat-and-mouse race is on, but Starlink engineers are keeping their finger on the pulse. I mentioned the Russians because they were behind this arson. So far, I haven't seen convincing evidence for this theory. And while it's true that Russians have been instigating various fires in Poland in recent weeks, the fire at this ground station could just as easily have started spontaneously. These are electronics, after all, and they sometimes catch fire. According to a firefighter's report from Polsat, a power supply box caught fire. The fire itself wasn't major and was extinguished, quote, with a single water jet. And to summarize, blowing up even all the Starlink ground gateways in Poland—because, well, do we only have one ground station in Poland? It doesn't mean that Poles or Ukrainians using Starlink will lose internet connectivity. It's not Amazon's idea that losing all the points in a given region causes a tragedy. As I'm recording this, there's no confirmation yet on how the fire actually started, what caused it, or who caused it. Yes, it could have been Russians, or rather someone the Russians recruited on Telegram for this type of sabotage, as they have done many times in the past. But it could just as easily have been some local Pole who thought those antennas were some next-generation 5G network that had caused his chickens to stop laying eggs. After all, we've had cell phone towers set on fire for similar reasons in the past. In short, it doesn't matter whether the reason for disabling a node of the internet infrastructure is fire, water, a power outage, or a mining excavator. If the infrastructure is well designed, everything will continue to function more smoothly. Yesterday's incident demonstrated this well. Starlink customers experienced no problems. Kudos to Starlink engineers, kudos to Arpanet. And greetings to Natalia from Chicago. Stay safe. M.
