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 FCC was required to assess if Starlink was reasonably, technically capable of supplying those speeds by 2025. Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch. On top of this, the statistics that were available at the time showed that Starlink transfer speeds were already trending down and the network is a lot less utilized than it would be in 2025. There are technical challenges that need to be solved before Starlink is remotely capable of meeting that obligation and the challenges don't appear to be resolved yet. Giving Starlink money is a gamble and the FCC would rather play it safe.
>RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
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; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal. Don't really care that they didn't hit the ambitious goal of providing 300+, it is already more than 15x better than the next best option available for me.
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.
>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)
As a SpaceX shareholder since 2006, I can confirm that they’ve been turning the impossible into the late, very consistently. There is no more impressive company anywhere
<<Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now.
It's not even 2024, and the targets are for 2025.
How long has T-Mobile been ramping up their program to achieve this 1.4M vs. 1.1M, and how much does the government subsidy ACP cover for this 1.4M in order to have those customers under T-Mobile? And it seems they are being fined $200M for not complying with the subsidy's rules [1].
> 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]
How dare they during a globally-disruptive pandemic?
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 properly estimating costs up front. Or maybe nothing would ever get done again.
I do wonder what the FCC is planning to do with these funds if they aren't funding Starlink. Are they going to go towards a "safer" project like Project Kuiper? Or maybe dumping it into Inmarsat?
I think you may not understand what the government is.
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.
To be fair, defense is an existential risk for the US and its allies. NATO can’t really afford to not have a reasonably up-to-date combat jet. They also need to continually feed money into the military industrial complex so that suppliers don’t go under/downsize too much/etc.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
I looked a bit more into this program and its all a lot more complicated
1) The money was granted in 2020 based on an inaccurate map (leading starlink & others to get funding for covering places like Target's and major airports)
2) This Starlink-FCC debate has been a protracted process, since then the program has essentially failed (a third of the money has gone to companies that didnt deliver)
3) Since then significantly more funding has been given to states for broadband, making this FCC program relatively small
It seems like the FCC is clawing back as much money as possible to try and recover from the initial auction design.
> So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money.
This is, in fact, precisely the issue with government contracting. But not in the way you think.
For all practical purposes, every single government contract can be cancelled without warning and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Consequently, every single government contract is executed with that in mind.
This leads to all the pathological behaviors that everybody bitches about.
The FCC didn't even give Starlink a chance to run late or underdeliver, they assessed the program and capability and decided it wasn't where they wanted to spend grant money. So they aren't being punished, they are being passed over for a better option.
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.
"Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch."
From one of the dissenting opinions:
> 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 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
The Commission decision does address this. Unfortunately the section is redacted of specific details, but it appears Starlink argued that it's second gen satellites would be launched via Starship and address these issues.
However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the initial plan.
The dissenting letter unfortunately just says "no they didn't", but doesn't point to any documentary evidence. It's hard to accept it at face value when compared to the long form explanation. Especially when much of the "corrective action" taken by Starlink has come after the initial denial.
> 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 commitments. The trouble with this
argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF
obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not. Undeterred by the facts, the Commission now
resorts to twisting SpaceX’s words. For example, SpaceX said in a letter to the Commission that it had
“reached a point in the development of its Starship launch vehicle and Gen2 satellites [such] that it can
concentrate solely on Configuration 1 and no longer pursue Configuration 2” (emphasis added).
Configuration 1 involves launching with Starship, and Configuration 2 involves launching with Falcon 9.
Nothing in this sentence suggests that SpaceX needed Starship to launch Gen2 satellites, but that’s
exactly the interpretation that the majority now relies on
Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V2 at 22 per launch regularly for a while now
They are just using what SpaceX/Starlink has said in the past[1].
>SpaceX asked the FCC to expedite approval now that it has settled on the Starship-launched configuration.
Regardless, to reach those obligatory speeds by 2025 they would need to launch an insane amount of satellites with no failures. If the FCC doesn't think they can do that, they don't get funding.
These are future speed metrics, not current speed thresholds. And the performance metrics have been a constant shifting goalpost. You can read FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's letter on this matter here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf This is most likely political.
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.
This letter is junk, to put it lightly. I lived in a rural area with copper lines that were destined to stay that way because of classist inaction by the FCC - one that rewarded cities with new, expanded internet lines repeatedly and required vast parts of rural America to be torn up for backbones that they weren't allowed to tap, or could only be tapped with inexpensive copper lines mandated through telephony requirements. To put it less lightly, 100/20 is still a joke and a clear discrepancy between what's offered in most US cities and suburbs. The Biden Administration is trying to fix that history with the FCCs mandate; I don't care about whether Elon's satellite business is worth it in the end. I do care whether rural people get stable, dependable, fast internet that doesn't become irrelevant the moment it's laid.
Just FYI, in case it makes a difference to your assessment of credibility, but this is the same commissioner who opposes net neutrality, wants to rework the CDA to deal with the way "the far left has worked to weaponize social media platforms", hopes to have TikTok banned in the interest of national security, and appeared on Fox News to talk about how "the far-left has hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain how it lost to President Trump at the ballot box".
When you say it is most likely political, it certainly is, because Carr and Simington (who was rammed through the Senate at the last moment by the Trump administration) are pretty much the definition of partisan. People who were paying attention to the development of this situation back in 2020/21 saw it coming.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I said this in previous stories (not as eloquently) and got an angry mob for not praising spacex. There's a difference between respecting what they're doing for launches and what they're doing for Internet. The former is extremely impressive and groundbreaking.
The latter is hitting the same problems everyone in the industry knew would happen. It costs too much money to maintain the launch cadence, speeds will suffer as the network gets congested, and latency will grow. All of these happened and are continuing to get worse.
I just checked my Starlink and we have 150Mbps/6Mbps, by Speedtest.com, is that the same concept as the numbers you reference? Is the concern that if more users came online they wouldn't be able to maintain 100/20? I don't know much about the topic, FYI.
My parents in rural Northeast Texas use Starlink as their primary connection (they have a WISP as failover). Since Sept. 2022, I've been running automated speed tests four times a day (1 and 7, AM and PM). Speeds vary a lot throughout the day, but average about 100 Mbps down by 10 Mbps up.
Before starlink my only option was 3MB DSL from Verizon, it was literally life changing as a WFH person to get the 100-200Mbps downloads that Starlink gave me (for $99/month).
Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.
Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.
It’s also possible that you would not have gotten fiber in the same timeframe if Starlink hadn’t competed for your business. Companies like Windstream are notorious for gaining regulated monopolies in rural areas, gobbling up government subsidies, only to deliver low bandwidth, saturated service to customers.
when we first moved here we had 15/5 that was actually 6/1 if we were lucky, so Starlink seemed like a good idea, so I got in my reservation early. We finally were able to switch to Starlink and while things were better, it became obvious that they were possibly oversubscribe in our area. Then they put caps in. Then they raised prices.
Then my rural power company saved the day by stringing fibre to EVERY single drop in their system. 1000 symmetric but really more like 950/800 but I'm doing fine, thanks.
I really think fiber is it for rural internet. They have the will to do it and it's rolling out all over in some states.
I'm in very rural NW New Mexico on Starlink for the last 18 mo or so. I run a q 15 minute Fast.com speed test via HomeAssistant. Speeds are almost always between 60 and 80 mbps.
Previously was on the only local competitor without data caps, 6 mbps via DSL. All others are either cell or satellite based and would destroy my wallet at my usually usage (<=1TB/mo).
Note that the timestamps are UTC, while Texas is UTC-6:00 during Standard Time and UTC-5:00 during Daylight Saving Time. The biggest dip is during prime streaming hours.
Huh. It's really nice to see actual metrics. I live in a rural area and get my internet through a fixed wireless provider. For a while I'd been wondering if it was worth giving Starlink a try
While this is usually a bit more bandwidth than I get, that isn't consistent and the ping is much worse. I pretty consistently get 50/15 with 15ms ping at about $90/mo after tax+fees. Based on some of the hype and press Starlink gets I assumed it would have had much better bandwidth, even if the latency is about inline with my expectations. Thanks for gathering and sharing this.
Maybe a dumb take but I’d really like for the population to earn an ownership stake in the company for providing subsidies. I don’t know much about subsidies but it seems like it would be in the best interest of the population to be able to have an ownership stake in the companies that are providing a head start through monetary or policy subsidizing. Can someone tell me if there is a way for the US to recoup subsidy money or how this works?
We the people recoup the subsidy money in non-monetary rewards.
Culture is becoming so focused on only the money: I guess because capitalism appears to optimise for the single dimension of dollars so that is all we see.
Let's not forget the value of what we are buying: called "consumer surplus" in economics.
So often commenters seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities, but completely forget what we receive that isn't measured in dollars: in this case access to the internet for people in the boondocks ⃰.
Albeit I am not a US tax payer (however the USA charges me in many many other joyful ways).
This whole thread is about the govt handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies; the topic couldn't be more about money. There are plenty of worthwhile non-monetary things that can be done to improve society, but a discussion about how to allocate government cash subsidies seems like an odd place to object to a focus on financial matters.
It’s funny how these corporations can hoover up billions of taxpayer dollars and only care about cold hard cash, but as soon as someone suggests that perhaps the people in whose name those subsidies are granted should get an ownership stake in the corporations receiving those subsidies if only to have a sliver of control into what those companies do with said subsidies, all of a sudden the guitar is whipped out, and people start singing Kumbaya because “it’s not all about the money.”
I want to make a counterproposal that should be perfectly in tune with that philosophy:
How about instead of receiving billions in subsidies, these corporations do the funding themselves and provide broadband internet to these rural communities at no cost?
Let’s not forget the value these corporations buy, which they call “goodwill” in economics.
So often, corporations seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities but completely forget what they receive that isn’t measured in dollars: in this case, provide a service to the society they benefit so much from.
I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain.
It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have no problem profitably laying fiber where they are legally allowed to do so.
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 branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago).
I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….
<I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money
If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant.
>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.
Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
If you choose to live away from civilization then you’ve chosen to forgo the benefits of civilization. It’s ridiculous that we massively subsidize people who made the voluntary decision to live in a way that makes providing infrastructure for them cost prohibitive.
It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
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.
I live in a small EU country, and we had the same issues here.... we solved them by municipalities building fiber (usually when (re)building the roads, because it's cheaper then) and ISPs just renting it out. There's actually EU fuding for that and ISPs aren't forced to invest where they don't want to (but have to pay rent to the municipality).
I love how the cost of directional drilling is completely discounted here. It's an expensive process that requires a ton of skilled (often union) labor.
> It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places
I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here.
I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back?
And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground.
Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.
When you're rebuilding a road (so the old asphalt is dug out and new one put in place), laying an additional small pipe and running fiber through is actually very cheap. Here in my small country in europe the municipalites lay fiber along the road repair works and then rent it out to ISPs in rural areas. In some areas als private ISPs can apply to put their own fiber if they want.
Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can reuse and have been doing this for decades at massive scale.
If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.
I'd like to see a citation on the "imminent" domain comment as well. It seems far-fetched to me that the Federal government would take away local control from counties and municipal governments to issue permits and inspect their right-of-ways, just because a utility company was awarded a grant.
>>It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places
How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber
I'm glad to see the FCC sticking to its requirements and having a testing regime for them. Starlink's own service specifications are far below the 100/20Mbps requirements. They currently are promising 25-100Mbps down, 5-10Mbps up. In congested areas they often don't even deliver that in the evenings. [1]
I use Starlink in my rural area and am grateful for it. But hopefully the $900M will be better spent on other ISPs. A particular problem with Starlink is if it fails, there's no infrastructure left behind. The fiber installs that RDOF is paying for should outlive the companies getting the grants.
Now if the FCC was actually principled when when choosing when to " sticking to its requirements" because ti seems large traditional companies can just do what ever the hell they want and get subsidies.
Do you have an example with the RDOF of a "large traditional company" doing whatever the hell they want and getting subsidies? It's a bit complciated since it's still under review.
This happened in the past all the time, particularly in Ajit Pai's version of the FCC. But the RDOF process seems different. In particular the FCC is actually measuring performance, not just relying on ISP's self-reported numbers. AT&T was really good at strategically lying about those in the past.
I’m looking at Lambert’s data, but aside from the problem of sample size, it seems to support the FCC’s reading of the situation.
There are barely any samples that hit the required >= 20Mbps up and while it’s easier to spot >= 100Mbps down, it’s far from consistent and seems to be more of a “once a day” occurrence.
I suggest reviewing this data again, especially with the understanding that the timestamps are in UTC. 0027 UTC corresponds to 1827 in CST (the timezone for Texas). During prime time, this user was often around 10mbps.
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.
For starters, last year (when this initial decision was made), a total of 22 applicants defaulted (i.e., didn’t meet the requirements)[0].
Some didn’t get their funding in order, others didn’t get their ETC certification arranged in time, others didn’t provide a viable proposal, and some withdrew their bid.
SpaceX falls in the latter category.
It’s important to understand that throughout the process, viability and progress are looked at, and rightly so; we’re talking about billions of dollars in taxpayer monies, and it would be silly to only look at the deadline and go “Whelp, you didn’t make it, guess the money is gone now.” Particularly when clawing back the money would be very cumbersome with someone notorious for not paying their bills and what they owe.
There are a couple of minimum requirements; for this debate and simplicity, I’ll highlight the minimum speed, which is 25/3Mbps.
You could’ve bid to provide service at that minimum level, but you also could bid for a higher speed tier (the speeds are divided into different tiers)[1].
Bidding a higher tier comes with a higher amount of subsidies, but it also means you need to meet the requirements of that higher tier. There is no “Oh well, just give me the subsidies of the lower tier”; you either meet the requirements tied to your bid or you don’t.
SpaceX made a bid for the “Above Baseline” tier, which requires them to provide 100/20Mbps.
There are a couple of ways the FCC tries to evaluate if the applicant can comply with the FCC requirements.
For one, they look at the technology the applicant said they would use. Mature and more reliable technologies will provide a clearer picture than newer and less reliable technologies, of course. I don’t think anyone here will argue that LEO satellites can provide the same consistency and quality in experience as fiber, for example.
They also look at historical achievements, especially concerning newer technology such as LEO satellites. Most other applicants don’t use LEO satellites but instead use fiber, for example.
Whether the fiber equipment is in use in RDOR areas or not is irrelevant; if the applicant says they’ll use the same equipment they’re operating in a different region, you can pretty much expect the same performance.
Starlink’s performance has been declining, with upload already falling well below 20Mbps.
Another part they look at is the long-form applications by the applicant (i.e., their plan for achieving it all). If the strategies aren’t realistic or based on predictions and assumptions that rely too much on unlikely positive outcomes, they are not considered reliable.
Again, it’s easier to put a shovel in the dirt than it is to launch rockets, so the historical performance of laying the infrastructure is going to look different depending on the technology used.
The fact of the matter is that Starlink is still too much of a question mark in a lot of points and not performing as expected and required, coupled with customers needing to purchase a $600 dish[2] and the FCC is rightfully going to wonder if it’s all achievable or not and if they money they manage is being put to good use.
That’s why, back in August of 2022, when the original decision was made, they summed it up as such[3]:
> The Bureau has concluded its review of LTD Broadband’s (LTD) and Starlink’s long form
applications. LTD proposes to deploy gigabit fiber to 475,616 estimated locations in 11 states.64 Starlink,
relying upon a nascent LEO satellite technology and the ability to timely deploy future satellites to
manage recognized capacity constraints while maintaining broadband speeds to both RDOF and non-
RDOF customers, seeks funding to provide 100/20 Mbps low latency service to 642,925 estimated
locations in 35 states. The Bureau has determined that, based on the totality of the long-form
applications, the expansive service areas reflected in their winning bids, and their inadequate responses to
the Bureau’s follow-up questions, LTD and Starlink are not reasonably capable of complying with the
Commission’s requirements. 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. Because LTD has defaulted on its remaining winning
bids, we also dismiss as moot LTD’s petition for reconsideration of the Bureau’s denial of its request for
additional time to obtain an ETC designation in Nebraska and North Dakota.
Remember that by this time, SpaceX had hitched this wagon to their Starship configuration, abandoning the Falcon[4].
By now, when the FCC was looking if they should reconsider, the Starship program wasn’t doing so hot, only reaffirming their decision of last year.
Starlink is nothing that you deploy and then you are done. When you have launched the last satellite, then the first ones launched will have reached the end of their lifespan and you essentially have to start over, deploy the entire constellation once again as the satellites reach the end of their lifespan one by one. With a lifespan of say 5 years, you will have to deploy the entire constellation once every 5 years, with 12k satellites you are looking at replacing 200 satellites each month, forever. That sounds possible without Starship but I can also imagine that being able to use Starship is necessary for the economical viability in the long run.
I’ve got news for you about Earth-based networking gear. You don’t just install it and forget about it forever - you replace and upgrade, almost continuously, and lifespans are frequently significantly less than five years.
It's hard to tell due to the redactions, but it seems like Starlink brought Starship into the discussion as part of the explanation of how it would have the technical capability to deliver the service.
I’m an unqualified casual observer and working from memory, but I seem to remember capacity and throughput promises related to the “Starlink 2.0” satellites, which Mr. Musk claims are “an order of magnitude better” than the current birds on unspecified measures [0], and without which Starlink couldn’t credibly deliver the promised service to the promised number of households in the promised time to earn the subsidy [1].
The new satellite designs got a bit mired in regulatory complications until December of 2022, but it turned out to be moot since they’re too big and heavy to get up to orbit without Starship’s lift capacity and Starship isn’t there yet (and might not be within the period the subsidy contemplated). After the decision to cancel the subsidy (which is on appeal here) was taken back in 2022, Starlink seem to have rejiggered the 2.0 satellites into a “2.0-mini” configuration suitable for launch via Falcon 9 [2].
Apparently they would like for the FCC to reconsider the subsidy decision in light of them engineering around the Starship dependency?
I'd think it would be because SpaceX probably argued that the trajectory with Startship launching 10s of thousands of satellites that it would meet the program requirements.
The reason Starship is brought up is because all of this hinges on SpaceX’s explanation on how they’re going to achieve the requirements of their bid.
SpaceX has stated they’re going to use Starship for this, going as far as stating early last year that they were exclusively going to use Starship.
So obviously, when the FCC is going to weigh if SpaceX is going to be able to meet the requirements of their bid, they’re going to look at the plan presented to them by SpaceX.
In the FCC’s defense, they apparently asked SpaceX questions regarding concerns they had, but SpaceX didn’t answer.
I feel like it's a fair decision, they had certain criteria. Even so, more broadband competition in rural areas would be better than subsidizing the incumbents.
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.
>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 consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
>U.S. defense officials had previously estimated that the annual cost for Starlink in Ukraine, which Musk mostly had been donating, will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
> 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.
I admittedly don't know much about this process, but with a billion dollars on the line, why wouldn't they have presented these options? It's not like this came out of nowhere, Starlink knew that they were not meeting their obligations and was given a chance to present their case.
I don't know, it just seems like it would be pretty easy to halt signups for a month, show that speeds increased drastically as my launches got ahead of my signups, and then explain to the FCC why this would be the normal state of affairs at some point in the future. Or, don't even actually halt signups, just make a convincing case about why halting signups would drastically increase speeds, and by 2025 you plan to do whatever you need to do to hit that 100/20 metric, but right now you're trying to do the most good for the most people, which means more signups and lower speeds.
For a billion dollars, these all seem like easy & obvious arguments to make if they were at all viable.
Anyway, I think that if Starlink can prove that they're making progress towards their commitment, they become eligible for the subsidy again, so if halting signups is really a viable strategy and they really care about the billion dollars then it seems like they should do that.
> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
That doesn’t sound right. Satellites over Ukraine cannot be reached anywhere from the US and they also wouldn’t use the same gateways. So I could see the use of starlink in Ukraine possibly slowing service in Europe. But I cannot see how it would affect customers in the US.
> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)
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.
Does anyone know how to find out information on progress or updates if you live in one of the RDOF auction blocks? I can see that Charter won a bid for my location 4 years ago. The FCC page also states "Winning bidders must meet periodic buildout requirements that will require them to reach all assigned locations by the end of the sixth year." We're going on 4 years now since the auction closed. I'm just curious if this is actually going to happen as it impacts my decision whether to move or not. The cynic in me says they haven't even started yet, and inevitably will push for extensions and do everything conceivable to take this money and not deliver within 6 years or possibly ever.
Meanwhile for the past 2 years Starlink is the only service I can actually use with any reasonable stability and low(ish) latency. They have at times delivered up to 200Mbps down and 20 up but it is not consistent. I have much more faith that they will deliver 100/20 consistently by 2025 than Charter will be delivering gigabit to me by then.
Readit News
>RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
1. https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/what-do-starlinks-la...
2. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A1.pdf
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; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/elon-musk-promises-to-double-...
[2] https://www.ookla.com/articles/us-satellite-performance-q3-2...
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)
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
I live exactly 13 miles away from T-Mobile HQ (one city over) and their service was unusable. I know, I know, anecdotal. But funny!
https://elonmusk.today/
It doesn't take very many doublings for this comment to go down with "why would anyone want Dropbox."
Delivered millions of EVs that everyone said would never work, dragging the entire car industry out of its stupor.
Delivered a vast electric charging network and made it available to the competition.
Delivered the best satellite internet.
Delivered rockets that NASA uses.
Delivered the most payload to space, more than even China.
Gee, imagine under-delivering that badly.
It's not even 2024, and the targets are for 2025.
How long has T-Mobile been ramping up their program to achieve this 1.4M vs. 1.1M, and how much does the government subsidy ACP cover for this 1.4M in order to have those customers under T-Mobile? And it seems they are being fined $200M for not complying with the subsidy's rules [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tmobile-fine-idUKKBN27K25...
Starlink delivers a usable service that far exceeds hughesnet and other crappy alternatives.
Granted this is a five year old take and I haven't followed things, but as a rural in flyover country starlink is amazing.
How dare they during a globally-disruptive pandemic?
So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start properly estimating costs up front. Or maybe nothing would ever get done again.
I do wonder what the FCC is planning to do with these funds if they aren't funding Starlink. Are they going to go towards a "safer" project like Project Kuiper? Or maybe dumping it into Inmarsat?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro...
F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
1) The money was granted in 2020 based on an inaccurate map (leading starlink & others to get funding for covering places like Target's and major airports)
2) This Starlink-FCC debate has been a protracted process, since then the program has essentially failed (a third of the money has gone to companies that didnt deliver)
3) Since then significantly more funding has been given to states for broadband, making this FCC program relatively small
It seems like the FCC is clawing back as much money as possible to try and recover from the initial auction design.
https://communitynets.org/content/worries-mount-rural-digita...
This is, in fact, precisely the issue with government contracting. But not in the way you think.
For all practical purposes, every single government contract can be cancelled without warning and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Consequently, every single government contract is executed with that in mind.
This leads to all the pathological behaviors that everybody bitches about.
"Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch."
From one of the dissenting opinions:
> 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 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the initial plan.
The dissenting letter unfortunately just says "no they didn't", but doesn't point to any documentary evidence. It's hard to accept it at face value when compared to the long form explanation. Especially when much of the "corrective action" taken by Starlink has come after the initial denial.
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 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not. Undeterred by the facts, the Commission now resorts to twisting SpaceX’s words. For example, SpaceX said in a letter to the Commission that it had “reached a point in the development of its Starship launch vehicle and Gen2 satellites [such] that it can concentrate solely on Configuration 1 and no longer pursue Configuration 2” (emphasis added). Configuration 1 involves launching with Starship, and Configuration 2 involves launching with Falcon 9. Nothing in this sentence suggests that SpaceX needed Starship to launch Gen2 satellites, but that’s exactly the interpretation that the majority now relies on
Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V2 at 22 per launch regularly for a while now
>SpaceX asked the FCC to expedite approval now that it has settled on the Starship-launched configuration.
Regardless, to reach those obligatory speeds by 2025 they would need to launch an insane amount of satellites with no failures. If the FCC doesn't think they can do that, they don't get funding.
1. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
If Starlink bid for 25/3 they might have made it.
When you say it is most likely political, it certainly is, because Carr and Simington (who was rammed through the Senate at the last moment by the Trump administration) are pretty much the definition of partisan. People who were paying attention to the development of this situation back in 2020/21 saw it coming.
The latter is hitting the same problems everyone in the industry knew would happen. It costs too much money to maintain the launch cadence, speeds will suffer as the network gets congested, and latency will grow. All of these happened and are continuing to get worse.
Dead Comment
https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...
Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.
Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.
Then my rural power company saved the day by stringing fibre to EVERY single drop in their system. 1000 symmetric but really more like 950/800 but I'm doing fine, thanks.
I really think fiber is it for rural internet. They have the will to do it and it's rolling out all over in some states.
Previously was on the only local competitor without data caps, 6 mbps via DSL. All others are either cell or satellite based and would destroy my wallet at my usually usage (<=1TB/mo).
Starlink has been a godsend.
While this is usually a bit more bandwidth than I get, that isn't consistent and the ping is much worse. I pretty consistently get 50/15 with 15ms ping at about $90/mo after tax+fees. Based on some of the hype and press Starlink gets I assumed it would have had much better bandwidth, even if the latency is about inline with my expectations. Thanks for gathering and sharing this.
https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli
works good.
Deleted Comment
Culture is becoming so focused on only the money: I guess because capitalism appears to optimise for the single dimension of dollars so that is all we see.
Let's not forget the value of what we are buying: called "consumer surplus" in economics.
So often commenters seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities, but completely forget what we receive that isn't measured in dollars: in this case access to the internet for people in the boondocks ⃰.
Albeit I am not a US tax payer (however the USA charges me in many many other joyful ways).
⃰ 1940s: boondock from Tagalog bundok 'mountain'.
I want to make a counterproposal that should be perfectly in tune with that philosophy:
How about instead of receiving billions in subsidies, these corporations do the funding themselves and provide broadband internet to these rural communities at no cost?
Let’s not forget the value these corporations buy, which they call “goodwill” in economics.
So often, corporations seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities but completely forget what they receive that isn’t measured in dollars: in this case, provide a service to the society they benefit so much from.
It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have no problem profitably laying fiber where they are legally allowed to do so.
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 branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago).
I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….
<I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money
If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant.
>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.
Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here.
I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back?
And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground.
Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.
If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
Deleted Comment
How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber
I use Starlink in my rural area and am grateful for it. But hopefully the $900M will be better spent on other ISPs. A particular problem with Starlink is if it fails, there's no infrastructure left behind. The fiber installs that RDOF is paying for should outlive the companies getting the grants.
[1] https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70
This happened in the past all the time, particularly in Ajit Pai's version of the FCC. But the RDOF process seems different. In particular the FCC is actually measuring performance, not just relying on ISP's self-reported numbers. AT&T was really good at strategically lying about those in the past.
https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...
I’m looking at Lambert’s data, but aside from the problem of sample size, it seems to support the FCC’s reading of the situation.
There are barely any samples that hit the required >= 20Mbps up and while it’s easier to spot >= 100Mbps down, it’s far from consistent and seems to be more of a “once a day” occurrence.
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.
> 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
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
For starters, last year (when this initial decision was made), a total of 22 applicants defaulted (i.e., didn’t meet the requirements)[0].
Some didn’t get their funding in order, others didn’t get their ETC certification arranged in time, others didn’t provide a viable proposal, and some withdrew their bid.
SpaceX falls in the latter category.
It’s important to understand that throughout the process, viability and progress are looked at, and rightly so; we’re talking about billions of dollars in taxpayer monies, and it would be silly to only look at the deadline and go “Whelp, you didn’t make it, guess the money is gone now.” Particularly when clawing back the money would be very cumbersome with someone notorious for not paying their bills and what they owe.
There are a couple of minimum requirements; for this debate and simplicity, I’ll highlight the minimum speed, which is 25/3Mbps.
You could’ve bid to provide service at that minimum level, but you also could bid for a higher speed tier (the speeds are divided into different tiers)[1].
Bidding a higher tier comes with a higher amount of subsidies, but it also means you need to meet the requirements of that higher tier. There is no “Oh well, just give me the subsidies of the lower tier”; you either meet the requirements tied to your bid or you don’t.
SpaceX made a bid for the “Above Baseline” tier, which requires them to provide 100/20Mbps.
There are a couple of ways the FCC tries to evaluate if the applicant can comply with the FCC requirements.
For one, they look at the technology the applicant said they would use. Mature and more reliable technologies will provide a clearer picture than newer and less reliable technologies, of course. I don’t think anyone here will argue that LEO satellites can provide the same consistency and quality in experience as fiber, for example.
They also look at historical achievements, especially concerning newer technology such as LEO satellites. Most other applicants don’t use LEO satellites but instead use fiber, for example.
Whether the fiber equipment is in use in RDOR areas or not is irrelevant; if the applicant says they’ll use the same equipment they’re operating in a different region, you can pretty much expect the same performance.
Starlink’s performance has been declining, with upload already falling well below 20Mbps.
Another part they look at is the long-form applications by the applicant (i.e., their plan for achieving it all). If the strategies aren’t realistic or based on predictions and assumptions that rely too much on unlikely positive outcomes, they are not considered reliable.
Again, it’s easier to put a shovel in the dirt than it is to launch rockets, so the historical performance of laying the infrastructure is going to look different depending on the technology used.
The fact of the matter is that Starlink is still too much of a question mark in a lot of points and not performing as expected and required, coupled with customers needing to purchase a $600 dish[2] and the FCC is rightfully going to wonder if it’s all achievable or not and if they money they manage is being put to good use.
That’s why, back in August of 2022, when the original decision was made, they summed it up as such[3]:
> The Bureau has concluded its review of LTD Broadband’s (LTD) and Starlink’s long form applications. LTD proposes to deploy gigabit fiber to 475,616 estimated locations in 11 states.64 Starlink, relying upon a nascent LEO satellite technology and the ability to timely deploy future satellites to manage recognized capacity constraints while maintaining broadband speeds to both RDOF and non- RDOF customers, seeks funding to provide 100/20 Mbps low latency service to 642,925 estimated locations in 35 states. The Bureau has determined that, based on the totality of the long-form applications, the expansive service areas reflected in their winning bids, and their inadequate responses to the Bureau’s follow-up questions, LTD and Starlink are not reasonably capable of complying with the Commission’s requirements. 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. Because LTD has defaulted on its remaining winning bids, we also dismiss as moot LTD’s petition for reconsideration of the Bureau’s denial of its request for additional time to obtain an ETC designation in Nebraska and North Dakota.
Remember that by this time, SpaceX had hitched this wagon to their Starship configuration, abandoning the Falcon[4].
By now, when the FCC was looking if they should reconsider, the Starship program wasn’t doing so hot, only reaffirming their decision of last year.
0: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-over-8m-fines-agai...
1: https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904 under Fact Sheet
2: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-386140A1.pdf
3: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-848A1.pdf
4: https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
The new satellite designs got a bit mired in regulatory complications until December of 2022, but it turned out to be moot since they’re too big and heavy to get up to orbit without Starship’s lift capacity and Starship isn’t there yet (and might not be within the period the subsidy contemplated). After the decision to cancel the subsidy (which is on appeal here) was taken back in 2022, Starlink seem to have rejiggered the 2.0 satellites into a “2.0-mini” configuration suitable for launch via Falcon 9 [2].
Apparently they would like for the FCC to reconsider the subsidy decision in light of them engineering around the Starship dependency?
[0] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/spacex-starshi...
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-pro...
[2] https://starlinkinsider.com/starlink-gen2-satellites/
SpaceX has stated they’re going to use Starship for this, going as far as stating early last year that they were exclusively going to use Starship.
So obviously, when the FCC is going to weigh if SpaceX is going to be able to meet the requirements of their bid, they’re going to look at the plan presented to them by SpaceX. In the FCC’s defense, they apparently asked SpaceX questions regarding concerns they had, but SpaceX didn’t answer.
I think the metric is 'more likely than not meet peformance goals in 2025'. The technology itself is capable of the goals of latency and bandwidth.
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 consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
>U.S. defense officials had previously estimated that the annual cost for Starlink in Ukraine, which Musk mostly had been donating, will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/...
The tech is proven to work, the FCC is just playing politics.
I admittedly don't know much about this process, but with a billion dollars on the line, why wouldn't they have presented these options? It's not like this came out of nowhere, Starlink knew that they were not meeting their obligations and was given a chance to present their case.
I don't know, it just seems like it would be pretty easy to halt signups for a month, show that speeds increased drastically as my launches got ahead of my signups, and then explain to the FCC why this would be the normal state of affairs at some point in the future. Or, don't even actually halt signups, just make a convincing case about why halting signups would drastically increase speeds, and by 2025 you plan to do whatever you need to do to hit that 100/20 metric, but right now you're trying to do the most good for the most people, which means more signups and lower speeds.
For a billion dollars, these all seem like easy & obvious arguments to make if they were at all viable.
Anyway, I think that if Starlink can prove that they're making progress towards their commitment, they become eligible for the subsidy again, so if halting signups is really a viable strategy and they really care about the billion dollars then it seems like they should do that.
That doesn’t sound right. Satellites over Ukraine cannot be reached anywhere from the US and they also wouldn’t use the same gateways. So I could see the use of starlink in Ukraine possibly slowing service in Europe. But I cannot see how it would affect customers in the US.
Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)
I’m actually curious, what is their userbase and where can I find the info?
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.
Meanwhile for the past 2 years Starlink is the only service I can actually use with any reasonable stability and low(ish) latency. They have at times delivered up to 200Mbps down and 20 up but it is not consistent. I have much more faith that they will deliver 100/20 consistently by 2025 than Charter will be delivering gigabit to me by then.