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Except for X, most of his companies have involved large government subsidies or contracts. Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Hyperloop.
US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#62If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense?
Odd that they'd include comments about Starship in it, though. That doesn't seem like a requirement for continued development of Starlink and seems very speculative. There could be details on that aspect that I'm missing though.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#63Starlink service is so obviously phenomenal to anyone who's used it, this isn't going to change that or effect SpaceX's success one bit. The FCC's actions here are just embarrassing their agency by exposing their petty ineptitude and harming whomever this program was supposed to help.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#64If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense? Odd that they'd include comments about Starship in it, though. That doesn't seem like a requirement for continued development of Starlink and seems very speculative. There could be details on that aspect that I'm missing though.
> If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense?
I think the metric is 'more likely than not meet peformance goals in 2025'. The technology itself is capable of the goals of latency and bandwidth.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#65Earlier 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…
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.
Do want to point out buildout requirements that are actually enforced in NY would be strongly compelling. Spectrum was heavily fined and had their license suspended on cable for failing to meet these commitments a few years back. Other states just dole out the money without punishing the companies that cash out dividends and use it for mergers.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#66Starlink service is so obviously phenomenal to anyone who's used it, this isn't going to change that or effect SpaceX's success one bit. The FCC's actions here are just embarrassing their agency by exposing their petty ineptitude and harming whomever this program was supposed to help.
Ehh, their average speeds have gone down by half in the last 3 years (150 down -> 75 down). They chased profits by signing up more people at the expense of network saturation. Had they held this reduction to 100+ down, they would have remained eligible for the grant they applied for.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#67As commissioner Brendan Carr's dissent wasn't included in the article: https://twitter.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/173469670679577812...
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a letter from one FCC commissioner, of which there are currently 5. He dissents from the decision the commission as a whole came to. There are a lot of companies on the ground that could benefit from that ~$900 million so a single company replacing Starlink is not necessary. The main concern is if the FCC give Starlink money to reach 100/20 and they don't do it (because there are legitimate technical issues to s…
you're ignoring over-provisioning which generally is ~10x
The terms of these subsidies only allow 4X oversubscription.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#69>> : "SpaceX continues to put more satellites into orbit every month, which should translate to even faster and more reliable service." NB. Should =/= does "Should" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence. If Starlink dosen't meet requirements today, they can improve and meet them in the future. Meanwhile, this seems like more of an effort to unfairly pre-empt funds going to other competitors.
From one of the dissenting opinions: > the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in…
Sure. Neither you nor I were in the room, and the evidence is that the committee that was in the room evaluated those plans and it seemed more unlikely to meet the goals.
Given Musk's track record, it is very reasonable to treat any timeline with a shipload of salt. He literally took $thousands from thousands of customers for Full-Self-Driving upgrades that were to transform their Teslas into self-driving Uber/Lyft goldmines by 2021, not 2022, not 2023, no... oops, recall 2 million yesterday because of safety failures in "autopilot" that isn't. Even with the assumption that Starship is not part of the equation, Starlink still is falling down on bandwidth reliability as subscription exceeds capacity.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#70[flagged]
He doesn't, he has publicly said the company didn't lobby for this program. If it exists though would you rather have the most efficient player be award the contract or some legacy telco who lobbied for the largesse and is woefully slow and inefficient?