SpaceX blasts FCC as it refuses to reinstate Starlink’s $886 million grant::FCC doubts ability to provide high-speed, low-latency service in all grant areas.
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The level of ignorance from you musk haters is hilarious. Starlink has done 100xs more for rural areas than the nearly trillion we gave to the telecoms. Yea musk is a dick but you’re ignorant as fuck if you think starlink is a scam.
If it’s not a scam, then they don’t need that money.
Then neither does any other telecoms that took nearly a trillion dollars and haven’t done even half of what starlink has done in under 10 years for rural broadband.
Yes. Exactly.
Hey, you’re catching on!
Giving government money to muskrat companies is the scam.
Yea…fuck all those people who work on projects that have literally changed humanity for the better…
Have you tried gaming on satellite internet?
Yea starlink isn’t geo sat. It’s Leo and has ping around 20-30ms, basically the same as cable. If you’re trying to compare starlink to sat internet of the past, like vianet then you’re confused, as they’re completely different.
Do you personally have starlink and experience those ping levels? Reports from people online claim higher ping times.
Yes, I did, but now have a wired connection through my coop electric company. I don’t know where your getting that ping is higher, go look at the /r/starlink subreddit, tons of people post their speeds there.
People will keep down voting you, but I just wanted to stop in and let you know that there are other people like you who can read.
People on Lemmy are leftist AF and their seething hate for Musk clouds their ability to think.
Yea I know, literally SpaceX has helped NASA out a ton and do a lot of ground breaking work, but because musk is involved, they want all of his shit to fail
It is genuinely concerning the mentality round here, anything with musk must be bad and no one wants to even consider the possibility it’s not. That’s certainly not the only subject like that either, people are very clearly basing options on what suits their personal beliefs rather than what is baked up by fact.
Well you know we get that mentality by observing what he does, listening to what he says, seeing who he keeps company with, and paying attention to the demeanor of the people under him. It’s not very complicated.
Yep, waiting for all the bashing of AWS since bezo runs Amazon…the level of hate companies get that are tied to musk in anyway is insane. Musk is a mouth piece and a shit one at that but musk isn’t making these companies and doing the work, hundreds of thousands of people are.
And yet HE gets all the money and glory for doing nothing but acting like an asshole.
What should happen is that he be removed from all of these compenies and replaced with a competent leader…and no, Musk is NOT a competent leader.
Starlink’s grant was intended to subsidize deployment to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. The August 2022 ruling that rejected the grant called Starlink a “nascent LEO [low Earth orbit] satellite technology” with “recognized capacity constraints.” The FCC questioned Starlink’s ability to consistently provide low-latency service with the required download speeds of 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps.
That’s Phony Stark for ya, everytime: Overpromise and Underdeliver. And then get angry when called on his bulkshit.
The grant requires applicants to meet these benchmarks by 2025. Only SpaceX came close to meeting this standard and only SpaceX is being denied the grant for not yet meeting this requirement.
"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"
If SpaceX had bid on a lower tier of service that they were actually capable of delivering, they would have been fine.
This grant was not designed to fund the development of new technology, it was designed to build infrastructure (fiber, 5G, WISPs, etc) and they were originally going to exclude satellites from the bidding completely. The companies who would have used the grant to build fiber or set up point-to-point wireless would have had no problem meeting the requirements since it’s all proven technology.
Aww. Poor SpaceX. To quote the man himself:
Go fuck yourself.
pull yourself up by your bootstraps. no handouts.
Maybe if they had just used the last subsidies payouts to expand coverage and reliability instead of lobbying local governments to kill off fiber coops, then they could have kept the tap open.
Any tasty sauce to sample?
Subsideez nuts.
Got em
I still think Starlink can be a great service for rural areas, but it seems they need to improve their capabilities first. Which in a way makes a chicken-egg scenario. If they expand servers to handle all those people, they should be eligible for a grant, but they don’t wanna do it until they get the grant.
It’s just not a sustainable idea. To expand service, they need to launch even more satellites. Which degrade and fall down after a year. The only reason it could exist thus far is because the US taxpayer paid for it with subsidies like this.
America has problems with getting cable companies to actually lay cable after giving them money to do that, which is a separate thing. But at least if you get cable laid, it is in the ground providing service for hundreds of years instead of 1 year.
They could do it and make money too, but they are only thinking of short term gains. In my neck of the woods spectrum kept taking the money and barely putting up any cable until our state finally told them to pound sand. Fios then said we’ll do it, and they did. They have run thousands of miles of fibre in the last few years, and guess who everyone is paying for internet service because it’s the only service available up here.
This is exactly it and everyone should keep it in mind even if it’s helped you individually in your rural area. Elon keeps taking shortcuts for a cash grab and shooting garbage into space is not a long term answer.
The SATs burn up after a few years. No trash in space, and if you think sats in space in large numbers is clogging up space. I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Do you crash into every house you drive past?
The SATs burn up after a few years.
Releasing all kinds of cool chemicals into the upper atmosphere, and no one really knows what kind of effect that will have. Cool.
No trash in space,
The number of satellites Starlink plans to launch will quintuple the number of spacecraft in LEO.
if you think sats in space in large numbers is clogging up space. I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
It absolutely is clogging up LEO, and multiple space agencies share that opinion. NASA wrote a whole letter on the potential hazards Starlink presents, and the challenges it adds to critical missions.
Do you crash into every house you drive past?
The speeds these satellites are moving at make this comparison so bad it’s embarrassing. Starlink satellites have accounted for over half of all close calls since they’ve been in orbit, and when the constellation is done, it’s estimated that that number will grow to 90% of all close encounters.
Releasing all kinds of cool chemicals into the upper atmosphere, and no one really knows what kind of effect that will have. Cool.
Lol what the fuck are you talking about, do you know how much shit burns up in our atmosphere yearly? It’s a nothing burger.
The number of satellites Starlink plans to launch will quintuple the number of spacecraft in LEO.
Ooo nooo, you do realize how large space is right? It’s also, not on a flat plane like the earth is …
It absolutely is clogging up LEO, and multiple space agencies share that opinion. NASA wrote a whole letter on the potential hazards Starlink presents, and the challenges it adds to critical missions.
Yes and spacex addressed those concerns. It’s not clogging up anything. Space is massive…and unlike the earth it’s on a 3d plain.
The speeds these satellites are moving at make this comparison so bad it’s embarrassing. Starlink satellites have accounted for over half of all close calls since they’ve been in orbit, and when the constellation is done, it’s estimated that that number will grow to 90% of all close encounters.
Go look up what a close encounter is…earth has close encounters with big rocks all the damn time, and it misses shit by hundreds of thousands of miles… again space is huge.
do you know how much shit burns up in our atmosphere yearly? It’s a nothing burger.
About 60 tons or so of rock a day, which mostly deposit oxygen, magnesium, and silicon into the atmosphere, with known effects. Once Starlink is fully up, an additional 2 tons of aluminum satellite per day will be burning up in the upper atmosphere, giving off alumina dust and potentially wreaking havoc on the ozone layer and blocking sunlight. It’s impossible to know the full effects of that drastic of a change.
Ooo nooo, you do realize how large space is right?
The satellites are in low Earth orbit (LEO) though, a very specific, very small, and very crowded region of space.
Yes and spacex addressed those concerns.
You know what you’re right, they did say they’ll steer Starlink away from the ISS during docking, how nice of them. Still doesn’t address the rest of their concerns in that letter, nor the concerns of the rest of the scientific community.
It’s also, not on a flat plane like the earth is … and unlike the earth it’s on a 3d plain.
This is a weird thing to repeat twice. It almost sounds like you think the earth is flat.
Go look up what a close encounter is
Any encounter between two craft that get closer than 1km.
earth has close encounters with big rocks all the damn time,
Again, the “big rocks” that burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere have known effects. Also I don’t think you know what a close encounter is - the whole world would know if a “big rock” came within 1km of the Earth’s surface.
and it misses shit by hundreds of thousands of miles…
Ah, yeah, you have no idea what a close encounter is.
again space is huge.
Again, we’re talking about low Earth orbit, a very specific, very small, very crowded region of space. Where the spacecraft there are traveling at speeds up to 30,000 kph. Dismissing all that and just saying “but but space is huge” is ignorant.
Wow you have alot of patience trying to actually refute/educate this dumbass. Good explanations
Bless you for having the amount of patience to respond to this elon-bot
After 5 years.
SpaceX sells services. Just because they’re selling services to the government doesn’t make it a subsidy.
Starlink is a service sold to you, not the American government. You seem confused. You don’t get it for free paid for by taxes.
You have to buy it, and the American government subsidies it to encourage private sector spending on low to no profit endeavours like Internet to remote regions
SpaceX has paid for starlink through selling flights on their rockets, not through “subsidies like this”
You seem confused if you’re flip flopping between starlink being paid for by consumers and subsidies.
No, they didn’t. They got almost a billion a year in subsidies, which is what this whole thread is about.
Starlink is paid for by consumers and heavily subsidized by governments. It’s not that hard to follow.
On one hand, ew Elon Musk.
On the other hand Starlink has given us the first decent internet we’ve ever had so…
The more people that use starlink the slower and less usable it becomes, additionally phony stark can turn it off whenever he sees fit.
Good luck with that
In theory they’re gonna keep upgrading the network, they’ve been constantly launching new and better satellites since launch. Also yeah in theory they can turn it off but that’s such an odd hypothetical that who cares. In theory our old ISP could also do that.
The fastest we could get before was 10mpbs and it went out multiple times a day, sometimes for hours. I really doubt it’ll get that bad.
And if Starlink does die we just go back to our old garbage or hopefully someone else will have a functional LEO constellation by then.
cable companies literally took a billion dollar grant to expand infrastructure and didnt do much of anything. This is literally doing something. F elon but the engineers who worked hard to make this a reality deserve better
Ok, but we already have all those satellites up there now. Please fucking tell me those are not going to become space trash, because I will fully blame the government on that one.
You know, on one hand, I do want to like. I have been looking into some cool space stuff more recently, and it seems like spaceX and starlink have been doing pretty well, relative to musk’s other business ventures, like X (no relation to spaceX, of course, which is great branding), and maybe tesla, which I kind of hate on the basis that they suck. But on the other hand, I wonder about how much of that is due to musk’s involvement, or if it’s just a factor of right place right time. I don’t think venture capital capture and attention capture from the balding manlet CEO of tesla, channeled towards reusable rockets, I don’t think any of that hurt, it was probably an advantage to those organizations, even if only like, by a small amount. But then, I dunno how much his mismanagement of these projects, and of most of his business ventures, have ended up hamstringing them in the long run, with unreasonable demands of his employees, and over-promising, and higher turnover rates than would probably be necessary. You know, I’m posting this from starlink internet, because I live in a rural place. Would that have happened without his idiocy? I’m inclined to say probably, but I’m also inclined to thank that guy that invented fertilizer, maybe even if he also invented mustard gas or whatever that story was. Which isn’t really to say that musk invented anything, or what have you.
Basically what I’m saying, is that I think it is probably a good thing, if you have gotten to a point where you can look at someone who’s “fucked up” history, and you can spin that into a good thing, even not by their intention, or even if it’s removed a causal step or two, it’s a good thing if you can spin their shit into gold. Probably. I dunno, it’s reassuring to me somehow, among the sea of situations that are the exact opposite where some guy’s cool idea gets taken by a soulless venture capital firm and drained like a vampire for investor hype before it’s discarded as useless vaporware. Mistakes into miracles.
While it’s always entertaining to read nonsense from haters as much as drama between haters and fanbois ……
Can’t y’all step back and look at the actual situation? US Government is spending our tax money to improve internet access for rural areas (good), but given the monopolistic behavior of telecoms, it will be going to one or more large companies (bad). The goal is improved access to the internet. The choice is between a turd and a shit sandwich.
Don’t anthropomorphize a corp: Starlink is one of the corps who can serve this goal. On their merit, do you really think they’re any worse than other candidates? Do you really prefer all that money disappearing into the mass of established internet providers, just like previous hundreds of billions, with nothing to show for it? Personally I see these companies with established technology but long history of not delivering, whereas Starlink has new technology not yet proven at scale, but really seems a lot more promising to serve the goal. Yes, I want grandpa Jones in North Haverville to have internet access and I really don’t care who runs the corp that provides it
I don’t particularly like Elon, but I think a lot of people are forgetting what Starlink has done for rural areas, and areas that don’t have highspeed internet. I live in the Southern US, and the only other options at my address are AT&T DSL or other satellite companies. We don’t have 5G towers in the area so I can’t go that route, most satellite companies have extremely low data caps, Hughesnet has a cap of 200Gbs for $150, with horrible connection, and AT&T DSL makes a 200MB download take 30-45 minutes at the fastest. My town has a population of 10k, and we’re still dealing with those being the only choices. If you go 30 minutes over to the next town they have Satellite, and that’s it. ISPs don’t care to fix the problem unless there’s another company taking customers from them with better service. Starlink has opened up a lot of the internet, and the possibility to work from home for a lot of people.
Sounds like y’all should start building your own infrastructure as others have done
That only works when the republicans that run the place don’t ban municipal internet build outs.
Exactly. I truly hate Elon but I admit that Starlink works and is a good option for rural areas. But now, the irony here is that people in these areas are the first ones to point out when the government gives “hand outs” to others, and vote for the party that gives all the power to the big players, who then give the rural population the finger.
I live out in the boonies myself, to the point dialup isn’t an option. We got wireless connection akin to a cellphone connection. I tried star link and it was pretty trash compared to the ground based wireless solution even though the advertised speed and latency seemed too good to be true (because they were)
SpaceX is just massively over engineering a solution for literally 0 reason. The money that was used to design and implement could have been used to
A) lay fiber lines
B) build wireless infrastructure
C) mix of A/B
And prob still have a boatload of money left over. IMO Elon is an idiot for wanting to pollute the atmosphere and the night sky with temporary satilites (2-16 months IIRC) instead of building traditional infrastructure. Also if SpaceX collapses, star link will be done too in a matter of months
Well get everyone together and CHANGE THEIR FUCKING MINDS. Government is beholdent to THE PEOPLE not the other way around. If that is your excuse, well you did done fuck up
The real problem there is all of the government handouts that have gone to the other ISPs for the purpose of wiring up everybody… Taking the money and then not delivering. And I know some years ago it was said that Comcast’s internet division was running at over 90% profit margin… And like other companies that were regarded highly successful operate around 30% or less.
I think I’ve read about two occasions that the government handed money to ISPs to get Internet out to rural areas, and both times the results were essentially “ISPs pocket the money, nothing changes.” It’s infuriating, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s happened more than twice.
Way more than twice, we’ve provided them around 1 trillion to wire all homes in the USA…and yea. No where near that has been done.
I love shitting on Elon but starlink is one of the most important things that has come out of the US. It made remote work possible for thousands. It provided real internet access for so many rural areas. The FCC needs to fix this.
In rejecting SpaceX’s appeal, yesterday’s FCC order said the agency’s Wireline Competition Bureau “followed Commission guidance and correctly concluded that Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low-latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has acknowledged Starlink’s capacity limits several times, saying for example that it will face “a challenge [serving everyone] when we get into the several million user range.”
Isn’t it Starlink that should fix this?
this applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade
Maybe we should invest in another company that will actually deserve it.
In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It’s more expensive than what you’d get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.
The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities – the kind of people for whom “neighbor” means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.
If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it’s not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.
Rural Iowa has phone lines and can easily put up p2p wireless as long as it’s above the tree line . It’s also easy to trench cable through most of the state . I used to live there.
Many places in the US are much more difficult.
Verizon offered me 3mbps/1mbps dsl for $60/mo 4 years ago and it was their best and only option. I had their LTE service and it was flakey due to mountain interference and distance from tower. Two p2p wireless services exist but 1 had 20% packet loss across all of their customers and after 2 years still refused to fix it and the other was offering single-digit speeds for $100+ per month.
Verizon put up a sign 3 years ago that said “high speed internet coming soon!” The sign has since deteriorated and blew away. It’s symbolic.
The fcc needs to support LEO so that areas like mine are serviced. Starlink doesn’t compete with any other terrestrial service. It’s for the people that don’t have another option, and there are a lot.
Yep, I was 2 miles from my town that had fiber, was considered rural. Called Comcast to bring out the line, which was 1700’ from my property (not fiber, just coax) first quote was $7,500…mailed them the check for it. It sat on someone’s desk for nearly 3 months before they finally told me the company they hired got it wrong and it would be 30k, so I got neighbors around me to jump on board…got signatures and all that. 6 months later they tell us it’s not possible and will cost $250k to service the 15 homes 1600’ from the hub…yea starlink has musk stink on it, but way to many don’t realize what it has done for us “rural” people who have been lied to by all the big telecoms.
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Iowa is pretty flat. It’s all farmland that’s been plowed a million times (making trenching much easier, and a lot more opportunity for things like directional drilling/conduit drivers).
Try running cable through somewhere with harder ground/rocks, trees, mountains, swamp (Mid Atlantic, Florida, Alabama, Minnesota, etc) dealing with right-of-way, over-populated poles, etc, etc.
Then there’s the connection rate. In a more populated area there would be many more final connects, which can drive the cost a lot more than running the mainline. If you run fiber across 20 miles with no connects (just point to point), there’s minimal hardware infrastructure along the way. Add in needing switching for 5 communities, now you need buildings, power, termination, switching, runs to houses, etc, etc.
It’s not really a good comparison.
Hi from me, a Starlink customer in rural Australia. It’s a premium service but greatly outperforms the alternatives.
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Well, the world’s richest douchebag Democrat has provided no internet for them, so…
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You’re thought means shit to him if there is no alternative. You’re just being a argumentive dick when your defense against starlink is that musk has a hand in it…
