301–310 of 773 posts
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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.
So basically now 15/16th of the money goes into a void to never actually get service to anyone.
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If the service is so awesome, why does it need a billion dollar subsidy, i.e., free money paid for by taxpayers?
It doesn't. This was originally legislated as a hand out to legacy telecom companies that lobbied for it. Seeing as it exists though I would rather the money be spent with the best option instead of it being used as a political retribution fund.
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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;…
I get 300/30 on starlink. I’m not sure why ookla’s data says otherwise.
Highly recommend actually reading the FCC reports. I know that is a high bar. https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-reaffirms-rejection-nearly-... I'm pretty convinced that this ruling was a bit horseshit.
Paragraphs 30 and 31 seem pretty dispositive to me. Starlink has not yet been able to reach the required speeds, its speeds have gotten worse over the past years, and it can point to no concrete evidence to suggest that Starlink's aspirational plans to suddenly and dramatically change that trend over the next several months are in fact realistic. Not that the report points this out, but Musk's companies do have a lon…
It's supposed to only cover deployments under the award itself.
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> This is a very marginal issue, folks need to calm down. Is it? Why do we need to visually see, basically permanently, a ring or string of lights in the sky, unwittingly, just because of some billionaire? > You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter if you know where they're at if they're in your way. Telescope time is extremely precious and expens…
If it’s cheap and easy to fill the night sky with satellites, the obvious implication is that it will also be cheap and easy to do astronomy from space, and your “extremely precious and expensive” telescope time could be on a satellite outside the atmosphere in the first place. This is an entirely transitory issue and instead of trying to deprive people of internet access, astronomers should be working together on la…
That's so beyond false it's difficult to even respond to. Do you understand the size of the telescopes, both optical and radio?
Do you understand the complexity of space-based instruments like the James Webb and Hubble telescopes?
When 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 reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. Read the article you are referencing > To justify its motivated reasoning, 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 commi…
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, a…
When 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…
I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK? So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start pr…
The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones.
Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial budget is a bit moot since the point is to pay for a capability. That obviously doesn't apply here and the FCC wasn't offering a Cost+ program.
It looks like it's becoming apparent that Elon's empire is based on a lot of impossible promises. Starlink is probably one of them. A perfect 'business' for Musk. You can show something great - high speed internet in remote areas - and then extrapolate that - just think about the whole world etc... Faster than fibre, with V2... Thing is, this business is probably not economically viable. It can work if not a lot of p…
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> […] (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline": > September 2014: They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame * https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)
To be fair FSD is the hardest software problem that man has ever attempted.
The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.