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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

#431

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

kelnos wrote: post #422
Powdering7082 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there's a pretty common routine of SpaceX & Tesla having some of the best results in the world for what they are trying to accomplish AND being much worse than what was promised.

And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.

> it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths

It definitely does, although I don't understand why.

One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?

To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?

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

#432

Post by alephnan »

dbeardsl wrote: post #188
_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, a…

> yet many other award recipients have no service and no rollout and no speeds to even measure:

Unfortunately, most of the public won’t know or care about this blatant corruption and crony capitalism

The revolving door between regulators and industry keeps on turning

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

#433

Post by newaccount74 »

dboreham wrote: post #88
voakbasda wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, my tiny rural co-op ISP should barred from getting one of these, because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like. Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my br…

Indeed. Fiber as a last mile solution for true rural areas is a non-starter. Source: I also built a small WISP and still maintain my own microwave service, and use Starlink as a backup.

Why? We managed to get power lines and phone lines to pretty much every house even in rural areas. Why should laying fiber be a "non-starter"?

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

#434

Post by intrasight »

lolbase wrote: post #99
_ea1k wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. The FCC shouldn't be giving out any funds. They should stick to their role as regulator. Starlink as a properly grounded libertarian outfit should have lobbied to have any subsidy role by the FCC discontinued. Starlink should have just competed in the broadband marketplace - as should have everyone else. In such a level playing field, I think Starlink would do just fine.

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

#435

Post by colechristensen »

pmorici wrote: post #63

Starlink 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.

Is it phenomenal? Not quite. In my experience speeds vary and brief dropouts are frequent. It's great to be able to access high speed internet from anywhere, but it has its limitations.

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

#436

Post by mannykannot »

acdha wrote: post #351
fragmede wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, AGI seems like a hard problem too.

FSD is a substantial subset of AGI: driving is full of edge cases where you need to be able to reason about unusual conditions or behavior by other drivers, understand what someone like a flagger or police officer is saying, etc.

It is not obvious that even level 5 FSD will require either self-awareness or a theory of mind: adequate modeling of the possible behaviors of nearby actors in the immediate future may be "all" it takes, and current systems are struggling with that.

Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a measure of AGI), then, by definition, it would be close to as hard a problem as AGI itself.

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

#437

Post by chrisdhoover »

mcguire wrote: post #376
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell I work at a farm on the coast near Silicon Valley in San Gregorio (designing a farming robot) and Starlink is the only decent internet option we’ve ever had.

What speeds do you get? Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.

There is a slim sliver of coast that has farms, then mountains, then the valley.

The mountains are sparsely populated and heavily forested. Driving up and out of the valley you enter into a different world complete with legends of murder cults.

Its a car and motorbike mecca. Drive down the coast from San Francisco. Climb up the mountain at San Gregorio or further south, stop at Alice’s to look at the superbikes and super cars, and drive back down into the valley.

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

#438

Post by wizardwes »

jandrese wrote: post #275
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #15

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…

Part of the issue is that some of these companies are the only companies in the US capable of this scale of manufacturing, which is expensive to maintain, and only the government really uses. In other words, they're too big to fail. If we penalize them, and they go out of business or even just downsize, and then we need something urgently, we're SOL. And so we keep ponying up so that, should we need it, we keep their manufacturing capabilities.

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

#439

Post by LegitShady »

isk517 wrote: post #381
weswilson wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, my dad lives in a rural area with no cable/DSL broadband available. 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 E…

I feel like in 90% of Starlinks use cases it is only the best option because they are the most motivated to succeed. Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution but the telecoms have made far to much money by taking money then not delivering.

>Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution

It's permanent but it depends on what the word practical means. Often the cost of setting up infrastructure for such low density population means the infrastructure will never pay for itself, or that the same money spent elsewhere would service many more customers, so its not necessarily practical.

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

#440

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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