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Only to the extent that it pissed off the democrats, but geofencing the receivers donated to Ukraine is definitely not in the top five reasons for democrats to dislike Musk.
US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
31–40 of 773 posts
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read that letter, and was unconvinced that it's anything more than the FCC not wanting to gamble with nearly 1/16th of the total RDOF grant money (for that round) and would rather give it to a company that can be reasonably expected to hit the obligatory throughput. If Starlink bid for 25/3 they might have made it.
You can arrive at your own conclusion. I think its pretty obvious whats happening here (the commissioners voted along party lines right down the middle). And theres no other company thats even close to Starlink now or in the medium term future. So I dont know who would practically fill this spot. For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to…
Verizon was able to lay fiber all over rural New York in a pretty short amount of time due to a New York law for similar rural funding. Places that couldn't even get cable have fiber now. Just laying fiber is an alternative to satellite.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read that letter, and was unconvinced that it's anything more than the FCC not wanting to gamble with nearly 1/16th of the total RDOF grant money (for that round) and would rather give it to a company that can be reasonably expected to hit the obligatory throughput. If Starlink bid for 25/3 they might have made it.
You can arrive at your own conclusion. I think its pretty obvious whats happening here (the commissioners voted along party lines right down the middle). And theres no other company thats even close to Starlink now or in the medium term future. So I dont know who would practically fill this spot. For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to…
I'd rather the federal government just roll out fiber and not put Starlink and Elon in a position of power. That fiber will always be in the ground and available. Elon has shown himself to be unworthy of any position where trust and good judgement is required. If it costs more, that is a premium worth paying. Fool me once.
https://www.internetforall.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://spacenews.com/senate-armed-services-committee-to-pro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/30/elon-musk...
https://www.cnas.org/press/in-the-news/elon-musks-control-of...
https://babel.ua/en/news/98461-elon-musk-partially-transferr...
(disclosure: starlink customer)
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#34[flagged]
No, because most of that fiasco was just garbage journalism. SpaceX has had a publicly stated policy of not allowing use of Starlink in that manner and the US government has not opposed that stance (hell, it's likely because of technology export regulations that the use of Starlink to directly control drones is not allowed).
The initial story claiming shutdowns was actually just about terminals that the UK was paying for being deactivated with full knowledge of Ukraine because there were far more terminals available being directly supported by SpaceX. Ukraine had rotated out the terminals appropriately. The other intermittent outages were just general system instability as many early users around the world also experienced.
The more recent story was retracted because it turned out to be completely false. SpaceX hadn't turned off the cells over Crimea as an act of sabotage, they had always been off (to prevent Russia from using captured terminals) and they had just refused to turn them on hours before a drone attack. IIRC since then the cells have been turned on after having more time to discuss with relevant authorities.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#35The argument that national average bandwidth for Starlink is probably worse than for those rural communities is a solid one. Not sure if it makes up for the large gap, but in my opinion Starlink is well suited because it works better the less other users are in your cell (ie better in less densely populated regions).
It has fluctuated over time, but has almost always been over the minimum limits (25/3) IMO. It is also vastly more reliable than our only WISP option in the area.
What I have seen is that the cell will start to fill up, speeds slow down a little (still better than our WISP and other Satellite providers), then the cell closes. More satellites launch, speeds go up, and the cell opens again. It's my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. I've had it since the original beta / before 100% coverage.
Most of the complaints I see are from people with existing cable options. It is not as good as cable/fiber, but a complete game changer for those of us who have had flakey connections.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can arrive at your own conclusion. I think its pretty obvious whats happening here (the commissioners voted along party lines right down the middle). And theres no other company thats even close to Starlink now or in the medium term future. So I dont know who would practically fill this spot. For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to…
I'd rather the federal government just roll out fiber and not put Starlink and Elon in a position of power. That fiber will always be in the ground and available. Elon has shown himself to be unworthy of any position where trust and good judgement is required. If it costs more, that is a premium worth paying. Fool me once. https://www.internetforall.gov/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...…
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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd rather the federal government just roll out fiber and not put Starlink and Elon in a position of power. That fiber will always be in the ground and available. Elon has shown himself to be unworthy of any position where trust and good judgement is required. If it costs more, that is a premium worth paying. Fool me once. https://www.internetforall.gov/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...…
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Instead of a simple comment about historical grants, you perhaps could educate yourself on current state grants and efforts. Trying and failing previously doesn't mean trying something different shouldn't be done, you know? Should we just give up because of previous mistakes? No, absolutely not. That is failure.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#38When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the…
Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2]
At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/elon-musk-promises-to-double-...
[2] https://www.ookla.com/articles/us-satellite-performance-q3-2...
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#39Yes indeed, those subsidies were intended to go to the major telcom companies who lobbied for them. Starlink (and Musk) receiving them would be an unintended consequence and ruin the plan.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#40I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain. It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have…
Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can…
The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.