FCC Cancels $886 Million In Funding For SpaceX's Starlink

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No, the minimum is 25/3. I don't see how anyone can be "outbidding" SpaceX for most of the real boonie locations. I'm going to guess the usual suspects are going to get all the money for laying fiber in small towns and farms/etc are just going to get fucked.

Gigabit isn't excessive at all. In a home or office with multiple users it's what you need to avoid having big downloads screw up everyone else's experience. It's what you need for remote work that involves handling large files.

Fibre can scale too. Gigabit is actually quite pedestrian now. In Japan all major cities have 10 gigabit fibre, with some getting 20. 8k TV service is offered via the same cable. The fibre is old, all they did was upgrade the equipment on either end of it. Once installed the fibre wi

I'm on a Comcast line with 350Mbps and I'm not seeing the issue with big downloads. It might be an issue for an office, but typically at least one person in my household is streaming, while I'm RDPing and transferring files, and Windows Update is Windows Updating on various PCs from time to time, and I've never noticed a slowdown. And I didn't back when it was 50Mbps.

The bigger issue, for me, are upload speeds which Comcast has capped at 12Mbps since we started with them.

I think demanding gigabit speeds is silly. But that said, I'm against rural subsidies in general, as all they do ultimately is encourage suburbanization and car culture (which is the intent! Anyone who brings up farmers is an idiot - this is 100% about subsidizing the lifestyles of a group that commutes to a regular office in a pick-up truck or SUV every day.) - if the aim was to support farmers, well, we'd direct it at farmers.

There are people who live in densely populated cities who cannot get anything but LTE/5G as their Internet services. Why do we need to give more than that to someone who has actively made the choice to live somewhere where infrastructure is expensive to provide?

Yeah, sorry I meant to specify that the very low upload speed is a major issue with larger files.

Not only do they take a long time, the connection gets saturated and thus very slow for other users.

In Japan all major cities have 10 gigabit fibre, with some getting 20. 8k TV service is offered via the same cable.

But that's not relevent to this discussion. 10 gigabit fibre to a house in the middle of nowhere, Japan, would be more relevent.

My point was that fibre has a good upgrade path that only requires replacing equipment that has reached EOL anyway. Once it's installed the network will be good for the foreseeable future. In Japan the cost has been spread of decades with loans. They do a lot of stuff that way, e.g. the new maglev train line won't be paid off for 50 years.

That said, fibre is pretty widespread in Japan and you can't buy DSL products anymore. If you want internet out in the sticks they install fibre, if it's not there already

Must have made sense to lay copper there at some point.

You only need like 2-5mb/s consistent to watch steaming 4k. If you want to download a 5tb file, and your source has practically unlimited bandwidth, cap your download speed. 100mb/s is literally enough bandwidth to have 30-40 tvs steaming 4k netflix.

YouTube 4k is 50-60 mb/sec.

I only get 150mbps down and only 10 up. I pay $75/month and this is with Spectrum. I can switch to ATT for 300mb, but will cost the same and require a $250 installation fee.

I'm not even getting 200mbps.So what do you mean "only"? Is it an all or nothing scenario then? Because these people in all of those rural areas are not going to get faster internet from current providers for only a billion.

The FCC is offering a billion dollars to a company that can provide a service (nearly $1,500 per location served) which that company would still be charging for (including in Starlinks case $600 for the satellite).

...and a hundred dollars a month after that.

Musk has consistently railed against government subsidy so I'm not going to lose too much sleep over this decision.

ROFL. Yep, he doesn't like government subsidy, and he doesn't qualify for this one. Seems fair.

Isnt his entire empire based on government subsidies? EV subsidies for the car and battery tech in Tesla. Government tax credits for EV.

Long since expired, actually. May have helped in the early stage of Tesla, but actually the $4K tax credit probably was only a minor incentive, and not the main reason people bought Teslas.

SpaceX biggest customer is the federal government.

True enough (and NASA funded the development of Falcon 9), but these days, not the only customer.

I assume this is for service to areas that have either very crappy or no Internet at all at the moment. So the FCC is saying if they can't have gigabit, they shouldn't have anything at all?

You can have GEO satellite internet using a simple dish that costs far less. Not great, but better than dialup.

No, there was an auction. The FCC asked companies to bid on providing internet to rural areas given certain requirements (speed, etc). Areas were split into blocks and the lowest bid won. (At least, I think so from some quick digging). https://www.fcc.gov/auction/90... [fcc.gov]

Starlink and LTD Broadband won several of the bids (the appendix A and B above) but the FCC believe they can not fulfill the requirements of the auction. Therefore their winning bids are withdrawn and I assume the next bidder wins those blocks. Lowering the requirements now, after the auction, would be unfair to everyone else. Both those who didn't bid in the auction because they couldn't meet the requirements and those who could have bid even lower if the requirements were lower. This is just a case of Starlink overpromising and being called out for it.

Remote areas can still get as much Starlink service as they want, it just won't be sponsored by the FCC through this particular auction.

Nope. Starlink bid on the 'Above baseline' tier https://www.fcc.gov/auction/90... [fcc.gov]

It has to be fibre. Starlink just won't scale to even small settlements of a few dozen homes. It's already over-subscribed in some areas, with users seeing single digit megabit download speeds.

Copper cable was run to all those areas, at a time when there was no infrastructure. Now the poles and conduits are already there, the copper just needs to be replaced with fibre. It's not even as difficult as the original telephone network build out.

I think if I lived in a RV (that moved around), or

The main limitation is always going to be the fact that the frequencies used are shared by all terminals in an area. They have to do time division multiplexing to serve them all, which results in lower speeds and more latency as the number of terminals increases.

Musk said on Twitter that the V2 terminals will reduce congestion, but unless he plans to give everyone a free upgrade it isn't going to help in areas where it's already bad. I suppose they might do that, they could collect the used terminals and referb them for lower density areas. I'm highly sceptical though, shit Elon Musk says on Twitter isn't worth much.

That's the problem with Starlink - it would work great if you're in the middle of nowhere where contention is low.

Can confirm. I'm in the middle of nowhere where contention is low. It works great!

But yeah, it's not a terrific solution for high population areas. Places like that need physical cables or low-power highly localized radio. I tend to think of Starlink as filling a niche. It's acceptable service in areas too sparse to economically deploy the good stuff. But that's what this is all about, isn't

The Poles are the problem.

In PA for example, pole attachments can take up to 3 months just to get the right of way to put a new line on the pole, then if necessary the Fiber Co has to pay the companies already on the pole to move their wires that need to move up or down the pole. If it's a Broadband competitor, they're basically going to take their good old time to move their wires for a competitor, and they have a 3 months deadline to move it. So there goes half a year and all you've done is sit on your be

(Also if the owner of the poles drags their feet - and remember, half the time it's the electric company that owns them, not the local telephone company - the FCC and state governments can find ways to sanction them. Perhaps the focus should be on that.)

Over here for urban environments it's still customary to trench and only drill/shoot it horizontally from the curb to the house. We have a lot more brick roads though. I suspect that for the US microtrenching + horizontal will tend to make most sense. Microtrenching to me seems much faster than horizontal drilling along the curb between pits at each house.

Conduit? I don't think you understand how rural underground utilities are installed.

Try direct burial. Any upgrades basically have to start from scratch.

They're running plenty of fiber lately. To the most profitable already-served areas.

All they are doing is saying StarLink and LTD Broadband cannot deliver what they are promising. They've said nothing about other providers. And there probably isn't a good case to be made for providing less than gigabit when it would only have to be upgraded later. And if they did fund lower than gigabit, the pols would whine excessively about how rural America is getting screwed by Washington.

And this is really supposed to be infrastructure spending with a long term outlook. Satellites that have to be replaced every 5-10 years are far from stable infrastructure and aren't even terribly specific to the areas served. When you compare the lifespan and utility of the original copper phone network, Starlink would only deserve funding by a technicality of how the plan was worded rather than by its intention.

Even cellular is a better infrastructure investment.

So the FCC is saying if they can't have gigabit, they shouldn't have anything at all?

No one set the bar at gigabit other than you. They set the bar lower than that. And they didn't say that people shouldn't have anything at all, they said if you want to qualify for government funding you need to meet the criteria. SpaceX hasn't shown to do so (yet?), so boohoo.

Starlink had a bunch of shit choices to choose from.

Coverage wasn't weighted at all in the bid and the required coverage is shit. If 99+% coverage had a high weight in the bid as it should have, Starlink would have won it all. As it is, even after spending all this money, broadband is still just going to cherry picked locations it would have gone eventually any way.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]

It seems sort of ridiculous. I recently was able to upgrade from 9mb to 25mb and their is little to no noticeable difference. If only one person is using the internet 9mb is more than enough to watch 4k steaming video. Even if we are talking about some crazy up and coming tech like gaming on a server rack on the internet, that only requires good ping, it does not require 1000mb/s.

I will give Elon shit all day for his stupid and impossible public transit ideas, but not only is he the only national person try

He didn’t meet the terms of the contract so that’s why he doesn’t get paid.

"He" who? SpaceX is a company. Do companies now have genders?

The exact wording used in the denial was:

"The Commission has an obligation to protect our limited Universal Service Funds and to avoid extensive delays in providing needed service to rural areas, including by avoiding subsidizing risky proposals that promise faster speeds than they can deliver, and/or propose deployment plans that are not realistic or that are predicated on aggressive assumptions and predictions. We observe that Ookla data reported as of July 31, 2022 indicate that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, including upload speeds that are falling well below 20 Mbps. Accordingly, we deny LTD’s and Starlink’s long-form applications, and both are in default on all winning bids not already announced as defaulted."

Or as Ookla - their source - described it [ookla.com]: "Starlink speeds increased nearly 58% in Canada and 38% in the U.S. over the past year"

I think it's pretty simple: the grants were awarded under a different administration. The new administration is looking for any excuse to back out of them. Accordingly, they're taking a single-quarter decline on a trend that's always been wavy as their excuse to say, "Nope, see, Starlink's not going to work" and back out.

I can't find SpaceX's specific application, but from descriptions it seems to be that they were proposing to provide 100/20Mbps service, for which they got about 10% of the awards, with the other 90% going to ground-based providers. At present, SpaceX is up to about 100Mbps down on average over the past two quarters, but only about 10Mbps up on average. And the FCC is using this - plus the "decline" - as their excuse to void their win. But at the same time, they're already covering 100% of the service area. While by contrast their ground-based competitors may be meeting their upload speed reqs, but have only covered a tiny fraction of their target service areas. But for some reason, that's not a reason to cancel their contracts.

The short of it is, the new commissioner either doesn't believe Starlink will ever improve or ever scale and doesn't even want to give it a chance; or contrarily, just (like the GP) hates Musk to the point of personifying SpaceX and doesn't want SpaceX to see a dime of government money that they can avoid giving, rather directing it to "traditional" ISPs.

Considering the number of things Musk has said he'll do and failed to deliver, this is a prudent decision.

Yes, and if Musk wants to he could spend the money himself. It's chump change to him.

As a conservative you should be happy the government isn't giving handouts to business. Trump cancelling this contract would be genius level budget balancing.

As a liberal, you should be pissed that the goverment is giving handouts to buisinesses.

See... blanket assumptions are fun.

Cronyism? You mean, when the Former Guy hired his children (illegal nepotism), that wasn't cronyism? Or the non-relatives he hired, who fell to their knees and bowed before him, that wasn't cronyism.

In American business today, you are either with the administration or against them. Elon Musk doesnt hire union employees, who are the chief principle doner to Democrats. He also calls out their bullshit policies. He is no fan of trump, but he isnt one of Biden either, who is the US govts foremost executor of cronyism, perhaps in a generation. So, surprised the contract got weaseled out of?

It wasn't "weaseled out of". The grant was conditional on StarLink showing that they can meet the requirements. They did not show that they can meet the requirements.

The technology was in production before Biden took office. The dish costs were known. It received the grant because it qualified and was capable.

Almost right. It received the grant because they said it would be qualified and would be capable, and the grant was on the condition that funds won't be release until they show that it can meet the explicitly written requirements. And they didn't.

You're essentially saying "they shoulda gotten the money because even though they didn't meet spec

It wasn't "weaseled out of". The grant was conditional on StarLink showing that they can meet the requirements. They did not show that they can meet the requirements.

The thing is, none of the companies have shown that they can meet the requirements. Being able to provide service to a single house at the specified speed meets the requirements for the cable companies, even though they haven't shown that they can run the lines to all of the houses in that area. They don't have plans for road construction work required, so they can't prove that it is feasible. They don't have proof that they can dig trenches in what could turn out to be an inch of topsoil on top of solid

Accordingly, they're taking a single-quarter decline on a trend that's always been wavy as their excuse to say, "Nope, see, Starlink's not going to work" and back out.

The grant doesn't disappear. All Starlink needs to do is meet the terms and conditions.

I don't know why you're getting political on this since you normally don't, but this has f-all to do with the administration and everything to do with a complaint raised by a "competitor" (very loose use of the term) that Starlink wasn't meeting the minimum criteria for the grant.

"competitor"... yeah so loose that they don't even have any customers to speak of.

To speak of? Viasat has 700000 customers in the USA. Starlink currently has 400000 globally. Stick to reality: the reason why they are only loosely defined as a competitor is due to woefully inferior technology, not because of customer base.

Oh, give me a break.

“Starlink’s technology has real promise,” Rosenworcel said. “But the question before us was whether to publicly subsidize its still developing technology for consumer broadband—which requires that users purchase a $600 dish—with nearly $900 million in universal service funds until 2032.”

I think it's pretty simple. Your sycophantry blinds you to reality. Rosenworcel doesn't indicate in the slightest that they think Starlink isn't going to work. They find them in default of their contracted eligibility. A status which can even be fixed. Making it political and personal indicates to me that you are invested enough in either Starlink or Musk, financially and/or emotionally, as to drop your intellectual honesty when it's convenient to you.

p>Or as Ookla - their source - described it [ookla.com]: "Starlink speeds increased nearly 58% in Canada and 38% in the U.S. over the past year"

Odd that you failed to continue the quote: "However, Speedtest Intelligence also showed that upload speeds for Starlink decreased at least 33% in the U.S. (16.29 Mbps in Q1 2021 to 9.33 Mbps in Q1 2022) and at least 36% in Canada (16.69 Mbps to 10.70 Mbps) during the same time period."

from the graph, looks like the only reason download speeds increased so much was that they anomalously low in Q1/2021. But in any case, despite the "speeds increased!" they still aren't up to the requirements they signed up f

ah...when spaceX lands rockets...Elon Musk is the genius who achieved that...when one of his company fall flat then it is the company's fault. Got it ...Musk Sect much !

Putting words in people's mouths much? Since when have I ever said "Elon Musk is a genius who landed rockets"?

Stop acting like SpaceX and Tesla are one person. They're not.

The harm it does to astronomy for the entire world does not justify it.

The harm of what? The harm of invalidating the utility of ground based optical telescopes to keep a larger number of mediocre astronomers employed to find new things out of ancient technology? Lets face it, it seems all the ground breaking stuff is coming from telescopes that are not hampered by dealing with earth's atmosphere. Granted, I don't really see amazing utility from putting a network of LEO satellites to watch streaming porn movies in the middle of nowhere either.

as its far cheaper to build a bunch of 600ft towers than it is to launch a never ending supply of satellites into space.

If that were the case, it would

The harm of what? The harm of invalidating the utility of ground based optical telescopes

Believe it or not, but we're still investing in ground based astronomy and they will be substantially more powerful than anything we have in space and substantially cheaper than anything we could afford to put in space. The only reason their usefulness could be invalidated is by polluting LEO with junk.

Lets face it, it seems all the ground breaking stuff is coming from telescopes that are not hampered by dealing with earth's atmosphere.

If you think this, then you don't pay attention to astronomy at all and shouldn't speak out of your ass on a topic you are ill-informed to discuss until you are adequately aware of the topic at hand.

If that were the case, it would have already been done.

Being far cheaper is not the same as being cheap. You're ignoring the original issue of bringing broadband access to rural areas in the first place - a lack of customers. Starlink can and does get subscribers from all over, including from larger cities not restricted by ISP choice. A single Falcon 9 launch costs $67M. A broadcast antenna is going to top out at a few hundred thousand to maybe $1M at most. Thats a lot of antennas you can put up for the cost of a single launch. Being generous for arguments sake, if each Starlink launch puts 60 satellites in orbit, thats 200 launches to complete the original Starlink plan for 12,000 active satellites, costing $13Billion to complete. Thats 13,000 $1M long range antennas, more than the number of satellites you could have for the same price.

Wow, what incredible ignorance. You've seen one pretty image by JWST and declared ground based telescopes obsolete? Back in reality there are orders of magnitude more science performed by ground space observatories than the few things we've launched into space. There's a reason space based telescopes are largely limited to measuring a few pieces of IR light. There's also a reason there is consistent continuous investment in ground space telescopes including the ELT which is scheduled to finish in 2025.

So the FCC is saying if they can't have gigabit, they shouldn't have anything at all? Yes. If you can't get Comcast Gigablast, you don't deserve to get anything at all.

So the FCC is saying if they can't have gigabit, they shouldn't have anything at all?

Yes. If you can't get Comcast Gigablast, you don't deserve to get anything at all.

No. The FCC is saying that if StarLink can't provide the service that was required in the contract, they won't be paid.

Seems reasonable. The contract awarded two years ago specifically said that they wouldn't get the federal subsicy unless they could show that they could meet the specs.

If you want StarLink because it's better than nothing, nothing stops you from buying it yourself. But if they promise to sell something to the government for almost a billion dollars, they shouldn't get paid unless the can

"We cannot afford to subsidize ventures that are not delivering the promised speeds or are not likely to meet program requirements."

But the FCC does that every single day for terrestrial internet providers. Why single out Starlink?

I don't get it either. I have a 200mbps account and only get 150mbps. I'm assuming that when the government gave cable providers funding, it wasn't for theoretical speeds. But when it comes to Starlink it's a different story.

Hmm I wonder what has changed in the last few months.

Is this the same FCC that has literally paid for this exact same thing 3 times already?

By the standards denied, the established competition should have been blackballed long ago.

I figured that most of these FCC broadband subsidies are going to go to the same Telcos and Cable companies (Frontier, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) who failed to deliver broadband to rural areas during the last major rollout.

I can't see why we should expect better results this time.

Serious question, why should the federal government fund this at all?

There is obviously no market to run cable to 3 customers in the middle of nowhere. But satellites cover vast areas. It's not like they have to pick towns as much as they are picking regions/states/etc. Seems like an issue the states should handle.

My son lives in a rural area in Ga. He gets 2 mbps thru Windstream. That is his ONLY choice.

So tell him to go buy a StarLink terminal. The fact that the FCC isn't funding it doesn't mean he can't buy it himself. https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/s... [pcmag.com]

Elon Musk has been one of the few who isn't terrified to speak up against Democrats, a

He only started opening his mouth as soon as the tax credits ended. He doesn't care who is in office.

Elon Musk has been one of the few who isn't terrified to speak up against Democrats, and now this is their revenge.

Their revenge is enforcing the terms of a contract set up under the previous administration and not bending over to every corporation with a sob story and a lobbyist?

Fuck me I hope the democrats take "revenge" against *everyone*.

Anyone who is actually familiar with the technology (aka not a bureaucrat or a politician) knows how great it is

Awesome. And if someone offered you $1bn to build something "great", you'd have a point. But they don't. The grant isn't for "great", it's for specific performance.

If a contractor built you a "great" house but forgot to install plumbing, would you accept the excuse that the house is

keep up the good work.

It would seem that all that can be done about such people is to point out their delusions to others who are still capable of reasoning.

This is why I'm voting for Trump/DeSantis. They would never use his political power to punish people who speak out against them. If anything, they calmly and thoughtfully address the public in a way that brings calm and understanding to their positions.

Elon Musk has been one of the few who isn't terrified to speak up against Democrats,

Huh? "Few"? There are millions of people who are rabidly vocal against Democrats of any stripe. Even counting only billionaires, Peter Thiel and Charles Koch are both pumping large amounts of funding into defeating Democrats.

So the Hyperloop, for example, he admitted to his biographer that the reason the Hyperloop was announcedâ"even though he had no intention of pursuing itâ"was to try to disrupt the California high-speed rail project and to get in the way of that actually succeeding.

-- https://gizmodo.com/silicon-va... [gizmodo.com]

This is what a lot of us were pointing out from the beginning (the numbers didn't even make sense

https://www.satellitetoday.com... [satellitetoday.com]

Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr issued his own statement after the announcement — saying he did not know about the FCC’s decision until the press release, disagreeing with the decision.

“We should be making it easier for unserved communities to get service, not rejecting a proven satellite technology that is delivering robust, high-speed service today,” Carr wrote. “To be clear, this is a decision that tells families in states across the cou

An old-technology (geostationary satellites) company poo--pooed this to the right bureaucrat (along with a briefcase full of cash) and voila, there goes the subsidy. Meanwhile, the aforementioned old-tech company isn't doing diddly or squat to achieve the same goal. They just wanted to be able to milk their over-priced products for a few more years (I'm also looking at YOU Iridium/Garmin inReach).

Given today's political environment, I would not be the least bit surprised if the real reason was that they don't like Musk.

After daddy Musk publicly rejected and insulted the democrats, they are punishing him in every way they can.

1Mbit/s is not enough. At least IMO..

Most streaming situations are not well equipped to buffer. Even my Jellyfin server isn't too good at it and a crappy 480p stream that doesn't look like it's 1990 takes 1.5 Mbit/s.

And frankly, while it's certainly not vital to have streaming, let's be honest, it IS a big part of what the internet offers the consumer.

That being said, I agree with a poster above you that asks whether the FCC is all "Gigabit or nothing" about the situation. I think having 20 to 40 Mbit/s whe

If just that could sustain across 100% coverage for 99% of the time then the Internet needs no more.

I demand my 8k Netflix streaming something different in every room in the house!

it's not an eye sore. A disco ball satellite is an eye sore. https://www.space.com/32981-na... [space.com]

Starlink trains are only visible for the first few weeks after they are launched. Once they have spread out enough, they align themselves correctly and no longer reflect enough light to be visible without magnification.

If you saw one - congratulations! I've been watching sat tracking sites and going out trying to catch one, but haven't yet been able to.

Then Musk should make sure that his contracts are tightened properly.

I was thinking some sort of paperweight might be called for.

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FCC Cancels $886 Million In Funding For SpaceX's Starlink - Slashdot

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