L4sBotSpaceX blasts FCC as it refuses to reinstate Starlink’s $886 million grant
BrkdncrI love shitting on Elon but starlink is one of the most important things that has come out of the US. It made remote work possible for thousands. It provided real internet access for so many rural areas. The FCC needs to fix this.
In rejecting SpaceX’s appeal, yesterday’s FCC order said the agency’s Wireline Competition Bureau “followed Commission guidance and correctly concluded that Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low-latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has acknowledged Starlink’s capacity limits several times, saying for example that it will face “a challenge [serving everyone] when we get into the several million user range.”
Isn’t it Starlink that should fix this?
In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It’s more expensive than what you’d get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.
The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities – the kind of people for whom “neighbor” means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.
If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it’s not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.
Iowa is pretty flat, it’s not hard to run cable across flat land. Try doing that in a mountainous area like Montana or Utah and it gets much trickier.
Rural Iowa has phone lines and can easily put up p2p wireless as long as it’s above the tree line . It’s also easy to trench cable through most of the state . I used to live there.
Many places in the US are much more difficult.
Verizon offered me 3mbps/1mbps dsl for $60/mo 4 years ago and it was their best and only option. I had their LTE service and it was flakey due to mountain interference and distance from tower. Two p2p wireless services exist but 1 had 20% packet loss across all of their customers and after 2 years still refused to fix it and the other was offering single-digit speeds for $100+ per month.
Verizon put up a sign 3 years ago that said “high speed internet coming soon!” The sign has since deteriorated and blew away. It’s symbolic.
The fcc needs to support LEO so that areas like mine are serviced. Starlink doesn’t compete with any other terrestrial service. It’s for the people that don’t have another option, and there are a lot.
Yep, I was 2 miles from my town that had fiber, was considered rural. Called Comcast to bring out the line, which was 1700’ from my property (not fiber, just coax) first quote was $7,500…mailed them the check for it. It sat on someone’s desk for nearly 3 months before they finally told me the company they hired got it wrong and it would be 30k, so I got neighbors around me to jump on board…got signatures and all that. 6 months later they tell us it’s not possible and will cost $250k to service the 15 homes 1600’ from the hub…yea starlink has musk stink on it, but way to many don’t realize what it has done for us “rural” people who have been lied to by all the big telecoms.
Iowa is pretty flat. It’s all farmland that’s been plowed a million times (making trenching much easier, and a lot more opportunity for things like directional drilling/conduit drivers).
Try running cable through somewhere with harder ground/rocks, trees, mountains, swamp (Mid Atlantic, Florida, Alabama, Minnesota, etc) dealing with right-of-way, over-populated poles, etc, etc.
Then there’s the connection rate. In a more populated area there would be many more final connects, which can drive the cost a lot more than running the mainline. If you run fiber across 20 miles with no connects (just point to point), there’s minimal hardware infrastructure along the way. Add in needing switching for 5 communities, now you need buildings, power, termination, switching, runs to houses, etc, etc.
It’s not really a good comparison.
Hi from me, a Starlink customer in rural Australia. It’s a premium service but greatly outperforms the alternatives.
Sorry the only way you can get good speed internet is by paying the worlds biggest douchebag republican. Hopefully things change for you.
Well, the world’s richest douchebag Democrat has provided no internet for them, so…
so what? Are you gonna finish your thought or did you realize you were going nowhere with that?
You’re thought means shit to him if there is no alternative. You’re just being a argumentive dick when your defense against starlink is that musk has a hand in it…
I still think Starlink can be a great service for rural areas, but it seems they need to improve their capabilities first. Which in a way makes a chicken-egg scenario. If they expand servers to handle all those people, they should be eligible for a grant, but they don’t wanna do it until they get the grant.
Funny how the FCC decided starlink is incapable of doing this, but was happy enough to pay all the other ISPs who are still incapable of doing it after decades of payments
It’s just not a sustainable idea. To expand service, they need to launch even more satellites. Which degrade and fall down after a year. The only reason it could exist thus far is because the US taxpayer paid for it with subsidies like this.
America has problems with getting cable companies to actually lay cable after giving them money to do that, which is a separate thing. But at least if you get cable laid, it is in the ground providing service for hundreds of years instead of 1 year.
They could do it and make money too, but they are only thinking of short term gains. In my neck of the woods spectrum kept taking the money and barely putting up any cable until our state finally told them to pound sand. Fios then said we’ll do it, and they did. They have run thousands of miles of fibre in the last few years, and guess who everyone is paying for internet service because it’s the only service available up here.
After 5 years.
SpaceX sells services. Just because they’re selling services to the government doesn’t make it a subsidy.
Starlink is a service sold to you, not the American government. You seem confused. You don’t get it for free paid for by taxes.
You have to buy it, and the American government subsidies it to encourage private sector spending on low to no profit endeavours like Internet to remote regions
SpaceX has paid for starlink through selling flights on their rockets, not through “subsidies like this”
You seem confused if you’re flip flopping between starlink being paid for by consumers and subsidies.
Also not only would they need more satellites, but satellites more densely in any area with multitude of customers. Which eventually hits RF interference saturation.
Radio signal has only so much bandwidth in certain amount of frequency band. Infact being high up and far away makes it worse. Since more receivers hit the beam of the satellite transmission. One would have to acquire more radio bands, but we’ll unused global satellite transmission bands don’t grow in trees.
Tighter transmitters and better filtering receivers can help, but usually at great expense and in the end eventually one hits a limit of “can’t cheat laws of physics”
Funny how the FCC decided starlink is incapable of doing this, but was happy enough to pay all the other ISPs who are still incapable of doing it after decades of payments
Which other ISPs? Do you mean the BOCs & RBOCs?
Yes. Verizon, AT&T et al
The6 pulled wire for miles to service rural areas and are maintaining a network to service rural customers. The BOCs are why there is RUS funds
They were paid to provide broadband services to the rural areas. As millions of people living in the rural areas can attest, the majority of their promises were not fulfilled.
No. They were paid to provide services, which is what they did/do. The rural customers pay no more than urban customers but use a hell of a lot lot more infrastructure. Broadband is now a service that can be used for RUS, that’s all.
RUS
Just so we’re clear, the discussion here is not about RUS, but the Rural Broadband Initiative. ISPs were paid billions to bring broadband services to the countryside. They took the money and did nothing with it.
Hi, it’s me with my rural community that doesn’t have service at all.
Whereabouts
I have friends who live within a handful of miles of DC with ZERO wired infrastructure. Fortunately that part of the US is pretty flat, and an LTE provider decided to cover the area.
Mind, they’re about 1 mile from a major highway, so it’s not like they’re in the back woods.
The cable company was paid to build to that area 40 years ago, but never did it.
I agree building out wired infrastructure seems to make the most sense, as it’s pretty robust, and we’re often finding new ways to increase effective bandwidth (even on good old telephone wires). But it’s a bit of chicken and egg, like any network infrastructure (water, sewer, roads, bridges, etc).
At one time, I reviewed the entire telecom operations structure in DC in as a vendor conditioning exercise. Considering what DC has, I’m very surprised. If the wired network is far enough away, a digital line isn’t viable. But, roads are usually covered for mobile phone. I would see if the local mobile operators, like Verizon, might have 5G available.
One of the desert communities.
They’ve been paid multiple times to do it.
God I hate how our options are between shit and shit like every time. I just want RC cola internet, instead of pepsi and coke, is that too much to ask? I want kirkland signature internet, that’s what I want.
I would buy Kirkland signature internet in a heartbeat, all their stuff is so good.
To quote the man himself:
Go fuck yourself.
pull yourself up by your bootstraps. no handouts.
On one hand, ew Elon Musk.
On the other hand Starlink has given us the first decent internet we’ve ever had so…
The more people that use starlink the slower and less usable it becomes, additionally phony stark can turn it off whenever he sees fit.
Good luck with that
However this isn’t about your anecdotal experience. This is about what level of service they can guarantee as minimum and overall to meet the conditions of the subsidiary.
I would also note this isn’t reinstatement. FCC refused to give them the subsidiary in the first place with this decision. What they are trying to spin as reneg on previous decision is them making the short list of companies to be considered. Well getting short listed is not same as being selected fully.
They passed the criterion for the short list check, but the final authorization and selection included more and more through checking on the promises of companies to meet criterion and SpaceX failed the more through final round of scrutiny before being awarded the subsidiary.
Government having awarded bad money previously isn’t fized by following up bad awards with more bad awards. SpaceX exactly failed since previously money was handed out too losely and FCC has tightened the scrutiny on subsidiary awards to not follow up bad money with more bad money.
Nobody is prevented from buying Starlink, thus just means Starlink isn’t getting subsidized with tax payer money.
It looked so promising but I feel like once I fell in love with the service they will start enshitification. Like Gmail, maps, pixel phones, YouTube, g-drive. Etc…
You know, on one hand, I do want to like. I have been looking into some cool space stuff more recently, and it seems like spaceX and starlink have been doing pretty well, relative to musk’s other business ventures, like X (no relation to spaceX, of course, which is great branding), and maybe tesla, which I kind of hate on the basis that they suck. But on the other hand, I wonder about how much of that is due to musk’s involvement, or if it’s just a factor of right place right time. I don’t think venture capital capture and attention capture from the balding manlet CEO of tesla, channeled towards reusable rockets, I don’t think any of that hurt, it was probably an advantage to those organizations, even if only like, by a small amount. But then, I dunno how much his mismanagement of these projects, and of most of his business ventures, have ended up hamstringing them in the long run, with unreasonable demands of his employees, and over-promising, and higher turnover rates than would probably be necessary. You know, I’m posting this from starlink internet, because I live in a rural place. Would that have happened without his idiocy? I’m inclined to say probably, but I’m also inclined to thank that guy that invented fertilizer, maybe even if he also invented mustard gas or whatever that story was. Which isn’t really to say that musk invented anything, or what have you.
Basically what I’m saying, is that I think it is probably a good thing, if you have gotten to a point where you can look at someone who’s “fucked up” history, and you can spin that into a good thing, even not by their intention, or even if it’s removed a causal step or two, it’s a good thing if you can spin their shit into gold. Probably. I dunno, it’s reassuring to me somehow, among the sea of situations that are the exact opposite where some guy’s cool idea gets taken by a soulless venture capital firm and drained like a vampire for investor hype before it’s discarded as useless vaporware. Mistakes into miracles.
Musk cannot make a profitable company without government subsidies. Hilarious.
SpaceX is estimated to have 8 billion in revenue this year.
How much are SpaceX expenses though? Revenue is different from Net Profit.
coleSpaceX is doing just fine