This is completely wrong though, I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test. But that can be relatively easily remedied by reducing subscriber growth vs new satellite launches. And literally just today we saw another significant step towards Starship launching with the first static fire of Raptor 2 on a full Super Heavy booster. That'll bring far more launches of the much more powerful Starlink v2.0 satellites. It's brand new cutting edge technology bringing service right now to people abandoned to dialup or ludicrously expensive lines or HEO sat for decades. It's already been a life changer.

Their plans for further scaling are solid and in progress. The tech is obviously and objectively capable. The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though, but even so this is a really disappointing decision.

I agree with all of the aspirational statements you have made here, but I still think this was the right choice. A threshold was set. The threshold was not met. Sounds like they can reapply, and if they provide the necessary service level at that time, then they can get the $.

I would agree if the same standard was being applied to the existing telecoms. But it isn't.

In the last several decades, telecoms have routinely been paid billions for projects that didn't produce, and then won money in the next round as well. Indeed the fight isn't usually about whether to continue this, but who should win this round (established telecoms, municipal broadband, etc).

It was a surprise when Starlink won in the first place. But it is no surprise that it is being held to a higher standard than, say, Charter.

What do you mean by "applied to the existing telecoms"? For this RDOF subsidy, no major telecoms have been given any money.

It's totally fair to criticize subsidies that have been historically given major telecom companies when they failed to deliver (and they have). But, I don't think it's fair to say "historically the US government has given subsidies to telecoms that have failed to deliver, so you should keep doing that".

There have been a series of "give broadband to rural areas" bills starting with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Generally great sums of money are given, and generally only limited customers get broadband. And then a few years later there is a new bill with similar results.

Given this history, I am inclined to believe that actually not giving money to Starlink for a fairly small performance miss is motivated by something other than just applying the rules.

If in a few years it is clear that policies have changed, and telecoms no longer get the gravy train either, then I'll change my opinion. Ending this corruption would be a welcome change.

Perhaps the reason Starlink is being held to this scrutiny is because of those previous attempts being failures and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The solution to “the old people weren’t being vetted enough” is not “the new players should also not be vetted enough.”

That was the one where AT&T took a half $B of taxed money to build out fiber, but never lit it. Because nothing said they had to.

Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms and cable for ages for absolute nada [EDIT, 1]. The clients I put in Starlink for last year had a 10 meg connection for which they were charged hundreds of dollars per month and were fortunate since a mile away it was 56k modem of HughesNet or nothing. It's really good tech. I've been hearing promises and aspirations about fiber for like 17 fucking years. I can completely believe that in designing and putting into being a brand new network like that SpaceX has misjudged cell density vs satellite density and capabilities in areas and let the average speeds fall. But given what they're doing and the (non)alternatives I'd be a lot happier if there was some leeway to bring that back up and see how v2 comes out. Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon is precisely the sort of thing government should do after all their failures up until now. And there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program. And Starlink aren't assholes like the incumbent players either. No datacaps, zero billing crap with surprise charges or fees, no port blocking, no bullshit in general. Of course more speed would be better, but that should be worth something too vs theoretically faster connections that then punish or restrict.

Bottom line: I don't think these $886 million now going elsewhere are going to benefit even a single person up here near the Canadian border in the next few years. Fiber is still not going to appear here. The border is over 3000 miles long. In contrast Starlink can do something now (if you look at the Starlink map [0], there are very few filled cells in northern New England or northern Midwest/Pacific West up near Canada), and has the real promise of doing better. Now that will be harder, and I do not believe anything better is going to come of it for any of us in that time frame. If fiber comes in 2028 wonderful, Starlink could be cancelled then. That's a long time though to still be on 56k/HEOsat.

To sibling comments talking crap like "do you work for SpaceX" if you wish to volunteer and come up to lay fiber for us right fucking now by all means.

----

0: https://www.starlink.com/map

1: I'm editing in response to tyrfing below because I suspect I'll hit the HN reply speed cap sometime shortly. This got tons of coverage in the 00s in particular but has fallen away over time as these things tend to. I had a bunch bookmarked at one point from old /. stories and the like and actual paper books but all the sites now seem to be dead. Here's a more recent one though that seems to cover the gist and could be a place to start for more: "The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

> Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms

Can you share a source for this? I'm very curious to see the breakdown of funding sources.

> there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program

Why would the company receiving free money make it cheaper, are there price caps that SpaceX wouldn't meet? You've clearly laid out that they have no competition.

> Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon

They had 1.5 years. "1-3 year horizon" is thus clearly misleading, since halfway through that timeframe they are unable to meet requirements.

> I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it.

Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much.

The network is improving, the tech is capable, but the real life performance is not up to snuff. Starlink, much like any company Musk seems to get himself involved with, is promising more than it can deliver, and that hurts when it comes to subsidies. They can have their billions when their network does what it promised to do.

Compared to 1.5/0.5 DSL its great, it's getting 60/11 about 40mi away from SpaceX (Starlink) HQ. But compared to municipal bidirectional gigabit fiber it's...not as great.

Heres ping info from starlink:

--- google.com ping statistics --- 38 packets transmitted, 38 packets received, 0.0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 26.879/45.073/95.627/11.582 ms

Is anyone else delivering anything even close? Aiming 10-100x better than competitors and missing by a small percentage is considered failure apparently.

Hughesnet was one of the best options prior to Starlink.

No, but they didn't apply for this either; because, they knew they couldn't meet the expectations set by the FCC.

>Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much.

Anecdotes cannot prove population statistics, you need an unbiased random sample for that. But anecdotes absolute can prove limits though. Remember, this is what I was responding to, emphasis added:

>Starlink isn't CAPABLE of meeting its performance commitments

That's what I took issue with and think is important. Starlink is absolutely capable of those speeds; I've seen them. So the problem isn't the technology, the problem is balancing serving the most people (which is a public good too) with maintaining enough performance on average for each one, all while scaling and evolving the technology fast. I'm assuming SpaceX could have submitted private data showing the public results by ookla were off in some way that would have been sufficient and that the FCC didn't ignore that out of lobbying/politics, so I'm taking it as a given that they did fall behind there. But it's not like Starlink is "done", they're continuing to increase sat numbers, build more ground stations, they're prepping to bring online intersat optical links and have no given a firm date for that (it's required for their marine service to get away from coastal waters), they've got much better sats and a solid process on the rocket to launch them. If we didn't need someone to take on some more risk and help accelerate things, this entire program would be meaningless and there would be no need for government in this space at all! I guess it feels like they're being punished for trying to move faster when that's exactly what lots of Americans need. We needed something better then the crap we've had 10 years ago let alone now.

Of course, this may be 100% the correct legal decision depending on the exact language, administration and so on of the program. I could easily see the FCC not doing well on that but that doesn't mean they aren't required to stick to it by law. But that's not what I see most people criticizing it on, they're talking technical and societal angles instead. And on those grounds, I can be disappointed if the program didn't have some leeway. "Needs to be ready by 2028" isn't good enough!

When someone uses the word "performance commitments," they usually are referring to SLAs like: "performance for 99% of subscribers 99% of the time."

Starlink is probably below three nines of reliability on even having a connection, and may only be at one to two nines or so on the speed demands. Many people on Starlink get bursts of decent speed and also stretches where the network operates at a crawl.

Thus, they can offer you good speed and still be incapable of meeting performance commitments.

no, it's not. it's not capable of meeting those speeds with the number of users they need to be profitable. if what you say is true they simply could have grown the network slower and kept the speeds higher. but they can't, because they need the money, and they need it fast. they're ramping as fast as they can and have decided to provide poor service to many users during peak hour (just like other satellite ISPs do that HN seems to think starlink is immune to).

> They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test.

They've actually been below their commitment for all of 2021 and 2022 so far: they started 2021Q1 with a 16.29 average and 2022Q1 had dropped to 9.33 average. That's a pretty worrying trend and I don't think its the FCC's job to evaluate literal rocket science to decide whether or not they believe SpaceX will meet their obligations.

SpaceX chose what speeds to pitch in their bid, how many satellites and ground stations to deploy, and how many customers to let onto their network. While I agree that Starlink has a bright future I can't help but see this as SpaceX clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.

We've been far too lenient with ISPs in the past with broadband funding, and this is what keeping them to their word looks like.

https://www.ookla.com/articles/starlink-hughesnet-viasat-per...

> The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though

Citation needed. I don’t see why anyone would lobby against starlink or LTD here. Neither won. They money from the fund is not distributed. They can reapply.

What the hell are you talking about? If there is lobbying, it’s certainly not against Starlink or LTD getting the funds as subsidiaries. The goals were set, starlink didn’t meet them, they don’t get subsidized. Simple as that.

I'm not sure we can really say if their tech is "obviously and objectively capable" at scale. We don't really know enough about the PHY layer modulation or even the mac layer modulation they're using. My guess has always been that they use some flavor of OFDM, but this is a detail thats unrevealed currently. These are incredibly important details for the oversubscription calculus in the access network itself.

RDOF aims to hold providers to a much higher standard for rural broadband, and part of that commitment is whether you can deliver speeds across the whole network at scale, not just relying on theoretical top line speeds. The evidence so far per Ookla demonstrates they don't meet muster currently, and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted, it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.

The cells are 22km and the traffic path strictly client<->satellite<->ground station at the moment. There isn't really any reasonable scaling concern until you start talking about serving densely populated areas but that's not Starlink's market nor what the RDOF targets/measures anyways and the inability to service a user in a city as well as a rural user shouldn't be reasoning to not provide funding to service those rural users.

That said I don't have a problem with the funding being held until the conditions are demonstrably met instead of as funding to meet them. The latter has failed too many times with providers just pocketing money to then stop executing once they have it.

Well we have to square what you're positing with the evidence right now that in the aggregate as their network size increases, the speeds are getting substantially worse over time on average. Lots of explanations for that, but its still the current outcome.

And there are definitely reasonable scaling concerns here. They're using a finite set of frequencies and the laws of physics still apply. Any concurrent transmissions are going to be impacted by both their phy layer modulation strategy, in addition to the mac layer. But we know so little about those layers currently that its hard to comment without being entirely speculative.

The evidence right now is as their network size increases, expands to lower latitudes, covers more than non-rural users, and allows mobile use the download speed increases and the upload speed decreases. "I haven't been given the details of their MAC and PHY" isn't reasoning to jump to conclusions about their MAC and PHY architecture being problematic for the rural use case here because of that.

Yes they must obey the laws of physics but this isn't a WISP, concurrent transmissions can't just stomp on each other and find out fast enough to hide it they've had to be broken out per client in the cell from day one. Other than mentioning the MAC layer exists is there a particular concern you have about it scaling? The satellites only have 2 paths to forward things and only a small patch of cells to do it for. Scaling has been brought by putting up orders of magnitude more satellites to provide coverage at more than the dense northern coverage from the orbits, it has not been by putting a ton more clients through the satellites themselves.

Is RF and framing something Starlink has had to design for? Absolutely, they do after all need these things. That doesn't mean it makes sense to jump to it as the source of any perceived issues, particularly on the basis it's something unknown.

That information is out there but it's scattered and hard to find. The real bottleneck right now seems to be that the number of beams per satellite is higher than the number of cells per satellite.

I haven't seen anything official nor convincing about the aspects I commented on.

I've seen the write up on the individual who was able to spin up an SDR to receive beacons from their satellites, but that doesn't really tell you anything about how the signal is modulated.

>it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.

Maybe it "makes sense" to those who aren't actually one of those consumers. But if "playing it safe" means "you get to stay on 56k/4-1-ADSL/viasat/hughes for another 5 years and maybe you get fiber then or maybe another administration comes along and crushes this whole thing who knows! <3" then no that's not great right? The more positive angle is that this doesn't actually slow SpaceX down at all, they aren't a public company so this doesn't mean their stock plunges immediately and shareholders demand a course change or anything like that, they're obviously committed to improvements and obviously have a fair amount of private capital to tap. So it won't necessarily slow them down much if any, at least hopefully. But it does mean all the growing capacity and improvements will go exclusively to the better off who can afford the $110/mo privately in the immediate future and that's too bad. It's more too bad as well because even with someday tens of thousands of Starlink v2.0 and intersat optical mesh and greatly increased cell density, there will still be tight density limits relatively speaking. So less well off people may find themselves effectively shut out of Starlink due to having to have waited until others move/pass away/get fiber. It might not amount to much but I'd really like to see my tax dollars helping to get them something asap on a more even ground I guess.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong though and for everyone to get fiber instead!

>and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted

Shouldn't government should have more, not less, appetite for risk of this nature? If it's risk free, the market would already be doing it. Particularly after decades of throwing billions down the crapper for "safe" and "proven" tech by "reliable, established" companies which then used it to do mergers or stock buybacks or lobbying against municipal broadband and getting laws against it enacted in much of the country and perhaps a few token deployments.

I completely understand and applaud the pendulum swinging back against the decades of established monopolies trying to water down definitions of "broadband" to meaningless so they could market and suck subsidies with no capex required. But all pendulums can swing back too far in the opposite direction too, and now that rapid deployment transitional tech is possible (Starlink and WISPs) it'd be nice to see timelines factored in as well. There is value to society in someone getting 50-150 via Starlink or fixed wireless until 2028 even if fiber then makes it in and obsoletes it. And there's parts of the US I doubt see it even then honestly.

Also to your sibling:

>They're using a finite set of frequencies and the laws of physics still apply

This is nice of you to write but would you care to crunch us the numbers on Shannon limit for the Ku-, Ka-, and E- bands (ignoring V-band since nothing for that exists for Starlink yet)? Do you actually have reason to think they're maxing out potential bandwidth right now in 12-18 GHz or 26.5-40 GHz right now vs that being a tech limitation that will be improved with better phased arrays and bigger sats like v2.0? Because it's kind of a significant amount of spectrum.

I very much agree with the thematic sentiment you shared that leaving certain rural folks in the dust because they can't hit an arbitrary 100mbps down (but maybe could get 20mbps instead) is a flaw in this whole program. But note that other more capable providers can bid on those census blocks now that Starlink is in default.

> Do you actually have reason to think they're maxing out potential bandwidth right now in 12-18 GHz or 26.5-40 GHz right now vs that being a tech limitation that will be improved with better phased arrays and bigger sats like v2.0?

I do think its a tech limitation, yes. The capacity limitations in many new RF solutions are unrelated to the theoretical max of any of those bands (re: Shannon limit). As to whether the that can be improved, that depends on where the bottle necks are. I brought up the mac layer note for that reason, I don't know that they're enveloping ethernet frames over that link, but if they are - what is the strategy there? TDMA? CDMA? There's just not a ton of public information out there to make a deductively valid argument that the FCC should expect it to improve.

(EDIT: Realized that I didn't convey my point well. It is a tech limitation imposed by the physical limitations of the medium itself. No matter how much spectrum you have, you still need a modulation scheme to allow for multiplexing over that spectrum. There are limitations there where the implementation details really do matter.)

it will be something similar to dvbs2. not even close to the Shannon limit since it's extremely power-limited. MFTDMA.

I am hearing that lots of people are now getting under 50/15 out of it, and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband. Those people may be in regions that are oversubscribed, but that is also partly a problem related to the price being too low. Of course, if they raise the price, then it might not be considered cheap enough for these subsidies either.

I’ve had it in central Ohio since February 2021. I would say i average ~120M down, ~20M up. There’ve been a few outages, but I’ve never seen a prolonged period of less than 80M down.

The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.

> nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband

AFAIK the minimum speed for "broadband" is 25 down.

I am a highly online person living in a large city with many choices of ISP at many different speeds, and I still only have a 110mbps connection. It seems strange to me to suggest that speed is universally inadequate, though I can understand why large households may need higher bandwidth.

>>and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down

I have starlink and mostly see between 150-300 down and uploads in the 8-15MB range, all for $99/month - verizon was charging me $156/month for 3MB down and 0.768MBP up.

Nice to meet you - now you know at least one person 'with starlink has gotten better than 100 down'

I mostly know people with it in the SF bay area, which is reportedly very oversubscribed. Unfortunately, that may be the experience everyone gets once the network saturates at this price point.

Of course that's really broadband and it's fine for what most households use the Internet for. Maybe once you get into multiple 4K streams you start to run into limits. But once you get past some fairly modest point, it doesn't change the Internet experience for most people.

I get more than that on the RV plan in an oversubscribed area (jumped the queue).

I’d be lucky to get 5/1.5 from frontier, and their DSL service in the area goes down every few weeks.

This seems like a case of lobbyist-induced double standards.

You think Starlink doesn’t have lobbysists?

If they failed their qualifying metrics and did win the subsidies anyway, wouldn’t mirror universe hedora be here complaining about that double standard?

To me at least, this seems less obviously suspect than that would have.

Of course they do. I’m just wondering when the last two decades of RBOF funding (which had no apparent effect) is going to be returned to the federal government.

It's not just "a bit under". I regularly dip down to 10Mbps download in evenings; last night I couldn't even watch a single TV show reliably.

This collection of speed test data shows the US average has been 66/9 for the last month. At 50ms they're also nowhere near their latency requirement. https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us

If you average AWS snowmobile out, it does about 1 Tbps. Has some latency though.

I've done speed tests on 4 separate dishes within a 25mi radius of my house, and I consistently got around 90 down/10 up. The fastest test to date I've seen in my area is ~130 down / 60 up.

Earlier this year I was pulling 250/40 in Utah. Now during the day I hover around 120/15, with speeds back in the 200’s late at night. Of course YMMV, but it’s more than sufficient for my needs of remote work with several zoom calls per day, as well as streaming 4K content. It is a drag for things like large Steam downloads but I honestly can’t complain.

> This is completely wrong though

are you accusing the FCC of lying or just being too incompetent to measure network speeds?

I don't believe they had performance commitments yet. What this is saying is they don't meet the performance criteria now and they don't think they will meet it by 2028 because performance is decreasing with more subscribers. I think the FCC is wrong on this one. I would take the long bet that Starlink will average above 100/20 by 2028.

Agreed. We aren't even on next gen satellites (far larger) or laser communication yet. Those should significantly improve speed, bandwidth, and reliability.

IMO satellite to satellite communication is going to be SpaceX's equivalent of Tesla's FSD: always just around the corner.

They only need to point the lasers at the next bird ahead and behind, and each packet just goes down if it can, or forward or backward according to which is closer to a downlink, unless it is for a special customer.

The main use for the lasers will be to offer super-low inter- and transcontinental latency to hedge funds paying thousands of times as much as a normal subscriber. They won't do anybody else but marine customers much good.

They've launched the lasers. You think alignment is so hard they won't manage it in the next year? I'm not that pessimistic.

I do believe that, yes. and that's not the hardest part in the whole thing. the scheduling is.

Also, this is a weird program for Starlink. Why not just subsidize the terminal cost and monthly plan to any low income area without access to fast wired internet? When fast wired internet makes it to that area stop offering the subsidy. Starlink is unique that removing the subsidy doesn't leave stranded capital assets. Then the FCC could award all the blocks to fiber providers but if they don't make it for another decade or so, the people will at least have decent internet in the meantime.

The FCC used aggregate performance across the network, which arguably isn't accurate at depicting the performance in the most remote cells. Starlink is unusual here in the degree to which their service performs better in more remote areas; for most providers, it's the reverse. So they may well be meeting their performance commitments in the most remote areas, but severe congestion in areas that have other service options is hurting their averages.

I'm not sure what the right call is here. It's very difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison between vastly different technologies; this isn't Starlink exclusive, but will probably apply to the other LEO constellations whenever they come online in strength.

100Mb is higher performance than most people need. That's five 4K video streams. While it's nice to push the definition of broadband forward from ISDN speeds, it should realistically consider the bandwidth a household can consume and that people choosing to live in a rural environment don't need to have the best possible service.

The problem is in the real world, you can't perfectly optimize prioritization. In theory, you can run 5 4k streams on 100Mb. However, in practice, real time data can get messed up.

Before switching to 1Gbps fiber, I had 100Mbps and I frequently noticed that Zoom would lag when 2 people were streaming at the same time. There were enough situations where 3 clients simultaneously needed more data that introduced latency.

That's poor management by your network hardware. (could be your modem, router, ISP, etc) I ran two zoom meetings on my 1.5MBit DSL connection before I got Starlink and it worked fine. Or I could run Netflix and a Zoom meeting. Never did try to push it much past that. But on 100mbps, there's something else wrong there that you can only get one more connection than my shitty DSL line lol.

100Mbps fiber, or 100Mbps non-fiber? Because that sounds like an upload limitation caused by a limit much smaller than 100 or even 20.

It's the incoming videos that stutter. Not the out going video.

It’s not that but total bandwidth capacity is limited by constellation size, waiting for laser links between satellites, etc.

The bidding process had ISPs to declare what speeds they could deliver down to a minimum of 25/3 Mbps. SpaceX didn't need to bid at such a high performance tier if they didn't want to.

I agree that is overkill today, but if we are spending a bunch of money building out new infrastructure it makes sense to future proof it. The ISPs have ten years to complete their rollout, and I'd like to see it provide adequate service for at least a decade after that. Will 100Mb be overkill 20 years from now? Think about trying to use the internet of today on connection speeds that were common 20 years ago.

I'm a technologist in the media sector, I worked for a big ISP in one of the innovation teams and we were struggling to think of future applications that would actually occupy 1Gbps for consumers.

You might say "low compression, high quality video", true, uncompressed 1080p50 can be 3Gbps, but there's no consumer device available or planned that can handle raw video delivered in this way. You can easily compress HD video to 45Mbps and it's indistinguishable from the source to the average consumer. 4K at 150Mbps is easily done and again, most TVs and STBs cannot handle that kind of input. You'd literally need new silicon to be designed for most consumer devices to be able to do this and no one is starting that process.

There is an argument that low packet latency is important, but in reality more than 95% of people access their broadband over WiFi which negates most packet timing arguments.

There's arguments about VR, but all evidence is that VR is still not getting market traction, despite what Meta wants.

Sure, I can't predict 20 years from now, but there's nothing on the horizon (for consumers) that will stretch the current ultra-fast broadband for the average consumer. Power users are an exception and should not be the basis of business decisions unless they are paying the premium. We're fortunate that gigabit exists because of the competitive nature of the environment, it's not really about meeting consumer needs.

Pessimistically, if the next 20 years are anything like the last 20, I would expect most bandwidth growth to come from sloppy development and advertising, plus increased multi-device use, such that even if no single use needs that bandwidth lots of smaller amounts will add up quickly. Several hundred MB to load a normal webpage, before it starts streaming 5Mbps video ad, dozens of IoT devices phoning home orders of magnitude more often than the need to, on top of desired use of 50Mbps 4K TV streaming, and multiple 5Mbps TikTok/YouTube-like streams could easily make 100Mbps seem slow.

25mbit 4K ewwww this is why we don't yet have same bitrate of 4K blurays something like 128Mbps

Costs 5x more to deliver, few people would be able to consume it and 95% of consumers wouldn't notice the difference. You might be in the 5%, but most people you know aren't, or at least don't care enough.

Multiple studies by companies whose business it is to care, have shown that consumer engagement in viewing caps out at 1080p60+HDR, beyond that most people don't care. Sure, marketing creates hype and demand around bigger numbers, but when people are actually watching, they don't actually get more involved in the content above 1080p+HDR.

I don't think I've ever seen 20Mbits up on my Starlink. It's usually a solid 10-15.

Starlink's constellation isn't even half completed yet. It's likely that Starlink will get faster when they have more satellites. Why are they judging results on incomplete data? The other guys get until 2028 to finish their build-out -- why doesn't Starlink?

They do. Once they finish their buildout and can meet the performance required, they can re-apply.

That's a completely different round. There will be different rules, and different competitors. They have to recompete.

Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.

That's like telling the winner of a sports tournament that sorry, the prize you were promised is gone. But we might have another tournament next year, so that's OK.

Starlink is going to sue over this, and they'll win. By 2028 Starlink expects to have two orders of magnitude more capacity than they do now. 15x as many satellites, with an order of magnitude more capacity per satellite.

> That's like telling the winner of a sports tournament

But Starlink didn't win the sports tournament this year, they didn't meet the performance obligations.

> Starlink is going to sue over this, and they'll win. By 2028 Starlink expects to have two orders of magnitude more capacity than they do now. 15x as many satellites, with an order of magnitude more capacity per satellite

and an order of magnitude (or more) more subscribers. they're likely going to fall far short on the launch cadence (as they have) and subscriber demand isn't going away.

More satellites means they can sell more subscriptions, not that subscriptions will be faster. And, they need those subscriptions badly.

I know, but they need more subscriptions and those subscriptions to be faster given these latest results.

> Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.

This program started under the previous administration. Overall these subsidies have been around forever and will likely continue. Here’s a negative take on the status quo that runs through the history up to this program:

https://techpolicyinstitute.org/publications/broadband/rural...

Personally I think this falls into the category of “if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing poorly.” I actually think that having 100/20 as a benchmark is good and that Starlink will get there. Is it close enough to be an improvement over Hughsnet and 56k modems? Yes. Even at 20 up, 10 down it’s more usable.

Anything Elon Musk touches invites controversy these days so boring policy issues like this get a new life of their own.

If this were Comcast being shown the door we’d all be cheering. For example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/man-who-built-is...

>Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.

Why do you think this? The FCC was handing out tons of cash to rural ISPs under Trump & a Republican congress. Improving rural internet is popular and well supported among the republicans since lots of rural areas are pretty red.

hahaha .... umm you know they still will over provision them its a business after all limited bandwidth lots of potential customers...

It's a good thing then that there's a cash incentive not to over provision. Oh wait, they just took that away.

ahaha you are funny... every single NA ISP does this... gov funds their built out of network and they get it for free then over subscribe the crap out of it..

plus Musk is against subsidies and government intervention