321–330 of 773 posts
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I think #1 is what really strikes me here. It's like standing in front of a train and not moving because you asked the conductor to stop. What happens when they reach 2025 and billions of dollars have gone down the drain? Why wait?
There's fines and no evidence SpaceX was getting billions. The award amount is public and paid monthly
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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.
Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.
Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.
Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.
So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.
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It was not targeted. They are not able to meet the constraints written out in the law. Are you saying we should ignore the law as it was written and give them the hand out anyway?
There are also plenty of contradictory laws still on the books which are not enforced because it's considered ridiculous to the judicial system. Judges don't like it, and prosecutors have better things to do like going after criminals.
Perusing idiotic nonsense before putting all the murders and rapists in prison really does more to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system than any political adversary to the US could ever dream of.
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Starlink was never designed to be faster than fibre, and it was certainly never designed or intended for use by people that ave access to fibre (or cable, or LTE for that matter). SpaceX have re-iterated this on many, many occasions. Anyone who things otherwise simply doesn't understand the product. Starlink is designed for people who live in remote areas that have no access to any of that. Go out right now and see h…
It was. The V2 that they are deploying is supposedly communicating directly between satellites, making it faster than fiber over long distances. Elon advertised that in 2019 or something already. I don't deny it is life changing for those people ! All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supporte…
This does not mean you should use it if you have fiber available at your house. This means you should pay for transit over it if you need to have low-latency overseas connections, for instance for HFT or piloting drones.
Maybeeeeeeee Musk shouldn't be conducting personal foreign policy?
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.
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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 off…
A rule of thumb is that big infrastructure projects are always significantly behind schedule and budget. Fiber rollouts are big infrastructure projects. They'll be late, almost guaranteed. Therefore demonstrating that they can hit a schedule is very difficult.
This stage was to focus on if the bid accepted based off of the short-form proposal was progressing and likely to deliver as described by reviewing additional information provided in the long-form application. That is going to be easier for tech with an established delivery history.
I don't understand with so much money being poured into NASA, rural broadband, and the Military why the Government cannot setup their own starlink. It will be less money in the end.
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…
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.