I don't know if it is part of the official report or not, but I'd bet that Starlink cutting off service in Ukraine to prevent them from launching an attack on Russian vessels in Crimea definitely played a part in this decision.
US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
91–100 of 773 posts
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#92If 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.
I'd think it would be because SpaceX probably argued that the trajectory with Startship launching 10s of thousands of satellites that it would meet the program requirements.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#93I don't know if it is part of the official report or not, but I'd bet that Starlink cutting off service in Ukraine to prevent them from launching an attack on Russian vessels in Crimea definitely played a part in this decision.
Starlink only cut off service in the occupied parts of Ukraine because you don't want Russia using Starlink there. The Ukrainian forces say Starlink has and is continuing to help them.
> Starlink in use on ‘all front lines,’ Ukraine spy chief says
> “They have proven themselves on the front lines. You can say what you want about whether [Starlink systems] are good or bad, but facts are facts. Absolutely all front lines are using them,” Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate, said Saturday, according to Interfax Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/10/europe/ukraine-starlink-not-a...
Crimea is under occupied territory and didn't have Starlink activated, so it's wrong to say they deacivated it.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#94If 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?
no, because the only reason Starlink doesn't currently hit the metrics is due to them having so many users joining. They could hit the metrics by temporarily halting signups, cutting off users, or delaying the Pentagon's massive deployment project.
Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
>U.S. defense officials had previously estimated that the annual cost for Starlink in Ukraine, which Musk mostly had been donating, will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/...
The tech is proven to work, the FCC is just playing politics.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
Space X is launching Falcon 9 rockets multiple times per week with additional capacity for Starlink on the regular.
Space X is not Elon Musk. It's a company with its own staff, with its own track record, so let's set aside any emotional arguments about FSD from Tesla, which is completely unrelated and which itself is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The "recall" from Tesla, again a completely unrelated issue to SpaceX and the Starlink internet service, was simply a required software patch. Millions of vehicles get recalled all the time from all car manufacturers:
"Ford is recalling 870,701 of the bestselling pickups from 2021 through 2023"
"About a quarter of a million 2016–2019 models are under recall for a connecting rod defect that can cause the engine to stall or not start, including the Pilot, Odyssey, Ridgeline, and Acura TLX and MDX."
"2013–2018 Toyota RAV4s Recalled Due to a Potential Fire Risk The increased fire risk stems from loose-fitting 12-volt batteries, with the recall affecting nearly 1.9 million RAV4s."
The Starlink service is popular, because it generally works, and it's better than what a lot of people even have available to them in many parts of the country or in specific situations (like fulltime RVers).
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#96The 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 has fluctuated over time, but has almost always been over the minimum limits (25/3) IMO
SpaceX didn't apply for 25/3, they applied for 100/20. The rest of your comment matches my experience.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see how it's embarrassing that the FCC set out a clear requirement for a low-latency, 100/20M rural service and Starlink (having failed to show a plan to achieve that) is not accepted into the program. Which part is embarrassing to the FCC, exactly?
Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today. SpaceX is also capable of providing differentiated service speeds so looking at what an average user is getting today is not indicative of what could be provided if they were under some minimum speed obligation. The FCC's rational is clearly them twisting themselves into knots to try and get to the decision they want to satisfy their prefer…
> Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today.
If you use their service, you know that it's capable of serving X amount of people at Y up and Z down with N latency? C'mon...
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.
That's the point of the subsidy: to make the equivalent of fiber runs to rural areas (and presumably local WISPs) cost-effective. The main intent of the subsidy was not to subsidize the development of new, uncertain technologies. Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband." No other satellite internet could either.
"Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband.""
That's false. SpaceX doesn't appear to have actually received any money from the FCC for this program yet, and now won't assuming this decision holds.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sure, and that makes sense if the competitors have proven approaches to meeting the requirements. While I expect Starlink to be able to improve, I can see their point that the outcome is far from certain.
The government shouldn’t give out billion dollar participation trophies.
There’s a set of metrics to meet. Starlink is moving the wrong way against those metrics. As such, they’ll need to succeed unaided in the marketplace, instead of getting a government handout.
Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.
That's the point of the subsidy: to make the equivalent of fiber runs to rural areas (and presumably local WISPs) cost-effective. The main intent of the subsidy was not to subsidize the development of new, uncertain technologies. Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband." No other satellite internet could either.
It sounds as though these new mitigating standards were brought out after the grant was already awarded which is where accusations of political malfeasance come into play.