Everything about Ukraine’s Tech sector in one place

The VERGE: Ukraine engineer talks testing SpaceX’s new Starlink service

On Monday night, in between the hourly air alarms reverberating outside his home, Oleg Kutkov stuck his SpaceX Starlink dish outside of his window in Kyiv, Ukraine, and pointed it up at the sky. To his surprise, he got a signal in just 10 seconds from one of SpaceX’s satellites overhead, indicating he was receiving broadband internet.

“I honestly didn’t believe that it would work,” Kutkov tells The Verge. “I thought there might be some problems with obstructions, might be some problems with my Dishy. But no, it just connected. I got really good speed, really good connectivity.”

Kutkov has actually had a Starlink dish for a few months now, but wasn’t able to use it. A software and communications engineer, he bought his off eBay — where dishes range from $2,000 to $3,000 — in order to reverse engineer the device and learn more about it. The person he bought the dish from transferred his US account to Kutkov, though there wasn’t much Kutkov could do with it, as Starlink service wasn’t available yet in Ukraine.

He wrote an article in late 2021 about his reverse engineering efforts, which garnered him some contacts within SpaceX, he says. He had also tried switching the address on his account from a US address to his own in Ukraine, but SpaceX support told him his location wasn’t supported. Kutkov paid for the account anyway “to keep service alive for my experiments and… just in case,” he said through a Twitter message.

Read more via The VERGE

#StayWithUkraine

#RussiaInvadedUkraine

Ukrainian entrepreneurs donate to the military-1
Support Ukraine!
  • Come Back Alive is one of the largest charitable foundations that supports Ukrainian soldiers, founded by the IT specialist Vitaliy Deynega. The organization collected more than 210 million UAH (more than $7M) in 2014. According to Na chasi, the Patreon page Come Back Alive is in the top ten projects by the number of financial donations.
  • Army SOS, which develops drones;
  • Everybody Can, an organization that supports internally displaced people;
  • Help on the Ministry of Defense website.
#StrongerTogether
#staywithukraine
Menu