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US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

reuters.com

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Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#181

Post by chrisco255 »

a2tech wrote: post #107
chrisco255 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.

In my parents county (very rural), the local electric coop is running fiber on all their poles. Its possible that my parents living 10 miles from the nearest town (2 4-way stops, a grocery store and a couple of gas stations) will get gigabit fiber before my friends that live in a well off suburb in a dense urban area will.

In my parents not-so-rural any longer home (although it was when I was a kid), despite being located less than a mile from a 100K+ population community, they still cannot get more than 1.5 Mbps and DSL is the only wired option available to them. They have an AT&T hotspot card that they use, but it gets throttled (dramatically) after 30GB of data usage, and itself has to be positioned in very specific areas of their house in order to get 1 or 2 bars to eke out a 10Mbps connection speed.

It's nice that your parents have a co-op that is actively rolling out such infrastructure. That's not the rule though, and the U.S. has massive swaths of low density population areas with substandard internet speeds.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#182

Post by Deprecate9151 »

hnburnsy wrote: post #148
mdasen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

>In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022 (and about two million in September 2023) https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf

That argument is a red herring. The RDOF program is concentrated in specific geographic areas. Starlink onboarding subscribers in other areas doesn't really have a bearing on this program if they can't prove they can extend that to the areas in scope and hit the service levels they bid at. It might even hurt their argument if performance degrades as they focus on areas outside the RDOF locations.

More traditional offerings have a much easier time demonstrating they can do that, even if they haven't started physically building yet. It's very easy for them to say x amount of fiber capacity at this location will meet the program specs, and this is how fast we can install it.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#184

Post by literalAardvark »

paxys wrote: post #91

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.

I doubt Starlink make any military related decisions. They have a framework from the US government that they follow and that's that.

Musk can't just randomly decide to give Ukraine access to Starlink on Russian territory without severe consequences, and this fcc bullshit isn't that.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#185

Post by altairprime »

rohansingh wrote: post #71
downvotetruth wrote: post #54

> The FCC cited among its reasons SpaceX's failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket, saying "the uncertain nature of Starship's future launches could impact Starlink's ability to meet" its obligations. The X beatings will continue until the tweeting improves.

OK, but that was far from the only reason. From the actual decision: > While Starlink faults the Bureau for relying on the most recent available data at the time of its decision to evaluate is existing network performance, Starlink does not explain what other data source the Bureau should have used in lieu of using the most recently available data. When the Bureau's decision was made, the most recent available eviden…

Please don’t use code-formatted space-indent for quotes, your paragraph looks like a sawtooth on mobile with an indent every other sentence.

Instead, use > *quote*. It’ll be unindented but readable, which is an improvement over being indented but unreadable:

> While Starlink …

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#186

Post by wnevets »

josefritz wrote: post #51

This is consistent with the original decision. LTD Broadband, another big 2020 recipient is no longer eligible. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-rejects-ltd-broadband-starl...

This is precisely why anyone trying to tie this to Twitter is a political dunce.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#187

Post by toss1 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #95
toss1 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> 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).

Right. And the issue is the ratio of popularity to supply. A neighbor near a family cabin in rural Maine, where the service is only copper ~10mbps down/1 up and more expensive that FIOS at home just installed two Starlinks. They're generally satisfied, but the first thing they mentioned is occasional slow speeds.

The officials in charge of the contract must ensure that the required service level will be met. Granting nearly a Billion dollars to provide a level of service, and then having them say "sorry, it's too popular and everyone is slow" will not cut it. Everyone (I hope including you) would be screaming about wasting taxpayer dollars on a service that did not provide the service.

I'm sure one fix for Starlink would be to offer a prioritized service level for all of the rural broadband customers. Yes, this could mean that RVers might just wind up with no service at some times and locales, but if Starlink really wants that contract, perhaps they should offer that assurance.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#188

Post by dbeardsl »

_ea1k wrote: post #62

If 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.

An FCC commissioner indicates that the FCC is yoinking the award because it thinks SpaceX won't hit the 2025 targets, yet many other award recipients have no service and no rollout and no speeds to even measure:

> What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead? In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022 (and about two million in September 2023). The majority’s only response to this point is that those other recipients were relying on proven technologies like fiber, while SpaceX was relying on new LEO technology.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#189

Post by ianburrell »

ren_engineer wrote: post #94
_ea1k wrote: post #62

If 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…

What Pentagon deployment project? I can't find any news stories about military rolling out Starlink. The only news is US paying for Ukraine's access; cutting off Ukraine would not be good for SpaceX. The military doesn't need Starlink with all their communications satellites. They are looking at it for polar use where Starlink has better coverage.

Are you talking about the SDA Starshield constellation? That isn't launching yet, the contract is for development. Starshield has nothing to do with Starlink except using the same platform and taking up launch slots.

I like how you didn't mention that Starlink could solve capacity problems by launching more satellites.

Re: US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

#190

Post by ilikehurdles »

libraryatnight wrote: post #126
bryanlarsen wrote: post #105

If the complaint is that Elon Musk has a history of not delivering on his promises, why the #%@# are telecom companies still getting money based on promises? They also have an awful track record on delivering on their promises. Nobody should get anything until after they've delivered. If they need money to do their deployments, they can take their FCC awards to the bank and get a factoring loan. And if their plan is…

They did reject another broadband company - that company just doesn't have a cult of fans to throw tantrums online for them.

They rejected that telecom company for the same underlying reason as this one - the company presented a challenge to legacy telecoms, and the industry dominated by regulatory capture defeated it. You’re celebrating a win for the Comcast and AT&T protection racket.
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