Ukraine's Ministry of Defense signed a letter of intent with Nokia and ICEYE on October 22. A letter of intent. Not a contract. Not a satellite.
No timeline. No funding. Just a handshake during Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo's visit.
Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Capital, says an alternative could be "two to three years away." Matching Starlink's scale takes longer. Starlink has over 10,000 satellites. Nokia and ICEYE have a press release.
Meanwhile, SpaceX made drones lose connection above 160 km/h. Fast-moving drones fell out of the sky. Elon Musk fixed it after a week. Nobody explained who asked him to.
Here is the market lesson. A company can cap your speed, then uncap it. You are not a customer. You are a hostage with a billing address.
Zelenskyy put it plainly: "We must all rely on capabilities that we can control." Fair. Kyiv wants to own the satellites, the ground stations, and the terminals. Finland will help. Finland is good at this. Nokia once made a phone you could throw at a wall. Now it will make a constellation.
Retail traders will pile into Nokia on this news. They will call it a Starlink killer. They will buy calls expiring Friday. The satellite network expires in 2028 at the earliest.
Picture the pitch deck. Slide one: Starlink works. Slide two: Starlink works until a guy in Texas disagrees with you. Slide three: Finland.
Nokia says the system would keep communications alive when ground infrastructure is destroyed. Reassuring. Your brokerage app will be destroyed by Tuesday.
Ukraine wants a network nobody can switch off. Starting with a document anyone can shred.
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