I don't really see how it's embarrassing that the FCC set out a clear requirement for a low-latency, 100/20M rural service and Starlink (having failed to show a plan to achieve that) is not accepted into the program.

Which part is embarrassing to the FCC, exactly?

Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today. SpaceX is also capable of providing differentiated service speeds so looking at what an average user is getting today is not indicative of what could be provided if they were under some minimum speed obligation. The FCC's rational is clearly them twisting themselves into knots to try and get to the decision they want to satisfy their preferred politics.

When a government agency that is supposed to be impartial and fact based is clearly making decisions like this on a political basis that undermines it in the long term due to public mistrust.

So if all this is true, the embarrassing part is that SpaceX couldn't make a compelling presentation of the facts that support them. I'm sorry but "OK, yes, we are missing the target performance goals and trending further away from them but awesomeness" is ... not compelling.

This isn't like cable or fiber where the technology is already mature and it's simply the business case.

> Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today.

The numbers show otherwise and the FCC made it clear that Starlink presented no numbers to the contrary. This isn't even a case of the FCC's numbers saying one thing and Starlink's numbers saying another.

I totally believe that some places give you consistent 100/20 speeds, but aggregate numbers don't show that and Starlink made no attempt to argue otherwise.

Today your speed tier is based on what you pay. If you pay for the priority or business tier service you absolutely get over 100Mbps consistently, a lot more. If you pay for the basic service tier then yeah you might only get 3-4x DSL speeds which is still phenomenal for the purpose being discussed here.

If your basic service tier is lower than 100/20, you would be disqualified for the subsidy.

That's not how it works, they just need to offer a service tier that provides a service with the required minimums by a particular date, it is obviously possible unless you are blinded by revenge politics.

I see. I've misunderstood the broadband auctions, and have reviewed https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904 to determine more correctly what's going on here.

All, please disregard my comment and refer instead to this top comment instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38628276

The question isnt whether it is phenomenal. The question is if Starlink is meeting the obligations outlined in the grant, and if so, why they didn’t bother to dispute the numbers FCC showed.

If the service is so awesome, why does it need a billion dollar subsidy, i.e., free money paid for by taxpayers?

It doesn't. This was originally legislated as a hand out to legacy telecom companies that lobbied for it. Seeing as it exists though I would rather the money be spent with the best option instead of it being used as a political retribution fund.

So the requirements set out however long ago that Starlink agreed to and now isn't meeting is political retribution? How so?

Because the obligation was to meet the requirements in 2025 and FCC basically just subjectivity said 2 years before the deadline they don’t think they will.

I'm curious what happens if they actually do hit the targets, in 2 years.

Some other company could take it happily and increase the competition. Maybe even provide better results, while it might take some time.

Heavy emphasis on maybe, do you think legacy telecoms have a history of actually delivering on rural broadband deployment promises?

> Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today.

If you use their service, you know that it's capable of serving X amount of people at Y up and Z down with N latency? C'mon...

Yes, but that is a function of satellite density or so the argument seems to suggest. SpaceX is launching rockets multiple times a week and has put more satellites into orbit that any entity in the history of human kind by an order of magnitude or more. Betting they won't be able to meet these speed goals is not a rational conclusion.

If you read through the decision, the reasoning is all there, it's absolutely rational. What's _not_ rational is preferring personal anecdotal experience over the aggregate analysis.

The reasoning that is there is all subjective.

I’m confused. Do you think that SpaceX, who demonstrably failed to make those arguments, doesn’t know what it’s capable of? Or that they’re not smart enough to explain it?

You seem to consistently ignore that SpaceX didn’t even make that case, and I’m confused why they didn’t, or why you know their business and fit better than they do.

It seems they did repeatedly say they could do it but fcc just ignored them.

Their goals are only 100/20mbps? I'd say that part is embarrassing. Given the amount of money involved, I'd have expected them to push for higher than that.

The FCC is pushing here and wants to see 1000/500 speeds but the lobbyists are pushing back.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/cable-lobby-to-f...

100/20 average is spectacular for those living in the US boonies. And they're the target.

No one else comes even close. You can't run fiber there, can't mount towers everywhere.

It is certainly better than a lot of existing options, but so is Starlink. I'd have expected an option that excludes Starlink to be something fairly future-proof. And, IME, people in those remote areas are using Starlink pretty successfully now.

Instead, these standards are so low that it makes me wonder how Starlink doesn't qualify. The fact that they are just out of reach of Starlink in just enough areas to disqualify them does make the whole process a bit suspect looking.

Starlink, when originally launched, did hit the performance targets. It seems pretty clear that Starlink could've produced a plan that would've restricted user onboarding in a way that showed a commitment to continue hitting the targets. Instead, they added subscribers to the point that service deteriorated below the standards and was trending worse.

I don't know whether this was a purely commercial decision to generate mass adoption prior to building out the constellation and the rest of the required infrastructure, or whether there was some kind of underperformance vs engineer plan or whatever.

In either case, it's not a good look. Particularly if it was a commercial decision, then it's a case of "decisions have consequences".

I can understand that, but are they measuring Starlink's competitors by the same standard? Overloading backhaul, at least temporarily, is hardly a new problem.

They're using (AIUI) Ookla Speedtest data, rather than taking anyone's word for anything.

>can't mount towers everywhere

How are you getting phone/power?

Barely. Those take much less bandwidth.

The embarrassing part is how they have been allocating subsidies to ISPs that don't provide rural connectivity improvements nearly as significant as what Starlink managed to actually pull off. A competent agency would do whatever they can to support Starlink's efforts or replicate them elsewhere. Instead, they're cutting off the one ISP that actually revolutionized rural internet access after 20 years of government-bankrolled stagnation and grift.

No one else is even close to being able to offer 100/20M rural service.

That's the point of the subsidy: to make the equivalent of fiber runs to rural areas (and presumably local WISPs) cost-effective. The main intent of the subsidy was not to subsidize the development of new, uncertain technologies.

Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband." No other satellite internet could either.

By no means does the program make the claim "to make the equivalent of fiber runs". You're just making claims up to rationalize what in all likelihood, was politically driven. Even the votes from the FCC members were along party lines.

There were speed targets of 100Mbps available to 20M households. They're currently at a median of 65Mbps [1] and they already have more than 99% of the U.S. covered [2]. It's an egregious, questionable, partisan claim by the FCC that they can't reasonably be expected to hit the speed target by 2025.

[1] https://www.ookla.com/articles/us-satellite-performance-q3-2... [2] https://www.starlink.com/map?view=availability

Starlink is basically a WISP with an actually scalable business model, just the towers (and soon a lot of the backhaul) are up in space.

WISPs rely on a local enthusiastic person to make it work.

"Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband.""

That's false. SpaceX doesn't appear to have actually received any money from the FCC for this program yet, and now won't assuming this decision holds.

It sounds as though these new mitigating standards were brought out after the grant was already awarded which is where accusations of political malfeasance come into play.

Where did you get this idea spacex has been paid any money? This article is a denial of said subsidy

In my parents county (very rural), the local electric coop is running fiber on all their poles. Its possible that my parents living 10 miles from the nearest town (2 4-way stops, a grocery store and a couple of gas stations) will get gigabit fiber before my friends that live in a well off suburb in a dense urban area will.

About 5 years ago I moved from Silicon Valley to rural Vermont. I have 750 symmetric fiber on my dirt road, and have had more reliable internet here than I did in the South Bay for the decade I lived there.

Where politics doesn't impede the growth of municipal and co-op internet solutions, it is absolutely possible for rural communities to end up with very capable internet access.

same here. - I don't live far from you, in a town of less than 1000 people - and more than 40 miles from even a modest-sized city - and we now have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home for less than $100/month - and it hasn't gone out even once in over 2 years.

It can work.

In my parents not-so-rural any longer home (although it was when I was a kid), despite being located less than a mile from a 100K+ population community, they still cannot get more than 1.5 Mbps and DSL is the only wired option available to them. They have an AT&T hotspot card that they use, but it gets throttled (dramatically) after 30GB of data usage, and itself has to be positioned in very specific areas of their house in order to get 1 or 2 bars to eke out a 10Mbps connection speed.

It's nice that your parents have a co-op that is actively rolling out such infrastructure. That's not the rule though, and the U.S. has massive swaths of low density population areas with substandard internet speeds.

There's some kind of disconnect here, because 85% of the service areas covered by the RDOF have winning bidders committed to providing at least 1000/500M service.

It's obvious to anyone who actually used the service or lives in a rural area how much good the service is doing. In many rural places there are literally no other options, or the options are so bad that it is laughable. This is one of those letter of the law vs spirit of the law things. Yes technically the speeds you currently get are not exactly at the promised level yet, but the service is a monumental success and is providing service that is definitely in line with the intent behind the subsidy.

I could see this making sense if there was any real competition or someone else who was realistically going to provide the service. But the only competition for this money are companies with a poor track records and that are notoriously bad.

You’re right.

The only point I’d like to point out is that the minimum requirement is 25/3Mbps with the option to bid for a higher tier that comes with more subsidies but also locks you into the higher requirement.

Starlink made a bid for the higher tier that requires 100/20Mbps and now it turns out that its plans don’t sufficiently establish how they’re going to meet those requirements.

While Starlink was able to achieve 100Mbps down in some areas (albeit not consistently), it is nowhere near 20Mbps up.

But with everything this man is involved in, he has a loyal army of fans who will carry water for him, no matter how much the facts say otherwise.

Who knows, maybe if I’ve spent $600 on a dish, I too will try to rationalize it by becoming a cheerleader.

Talk about embarrassing.

> Starlink service is so obviously phenomenal to anyone who's used it, this isn't going to change that or effect SpaceX's success one bit.

Starlink success, and to that extent, SpaceX, are arguably tied to government money.

I would say that not getting almost $1B may impact their operations quite a bit.

VCs are falling over themselves trying to get in on SpaceX. If there were to go public they would immediately be worth hundreds of billions. It will likely be one of the biggest IPOs in history. They are not that strapped for cash.

Then what's the deal with government funds?

For a company that doesn't need money, they seem quite upset that they aren't getting much of it.

When your competition gets funds and you don't it puts you at a disadvantage.

You can see NEVI as an example.

"Oh look, free money to provide the service we're already providing"

> They are not that strapped for cash.

Exactly - because they were/are getting boatloads of cash from the government. There is no shame in that.

No they haven't as you can read in this article

Starlink has 2 million customers, likely with >$1000 ARPU and is growing quite rapidly. $1B annually would be material. $1B as a one time payment is significant but seems unlikely to affect viability. Musk has said that Starship and Starlink are each $5B-$10B investments.

> Starlink has 2 million customers, likely with >$1000 ARPU and is growing quite rapidly. $1B annually would be material.

This suggests that they are in the black, which they are not. They are losing a lot of money.

SpaceX was profitable last quarter.

https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musks-spacex-turns-pro...

> Starlink success, and to that extent, SpaceX, are arguably tied to government money.

Citation please.

The government are paying SpaceX as a customer, they're not giving them free money.

Also note they're paying them a lot less than they pay ULA for the same things

This is a good point. So long as you define “government money” as “something other than money from the government”, SpaceX does not rely on government money.

You can see that this is true with other businesses as well, no business relies on getting “customer money” because “customer money” means when customers donate to you in exchange for nothing, not money that they pay in exchange for goods or services.

Of course by government money, the OP meant subsidization and other form of direct money incentives, not paying for fair and square services.

Ineptly retracting a subsidy that isn't needed or even impactful?

Ehh, their average speeds have gone down by half in the last 3 years (150 down -> 75 down). They chased profits by signing up more people at the expense of network saturation. Had they held this reduction to 100+ down, they would have remained eligible for the grant they applied for.

If the terms of the deal were that they didn't need to hit the performance benchmarks until 2025 and they have demonstrated that the technology was capable of those speeds it makes little sense to do this now except as a thinly vailed political punishment.

That was not the terms, there were buildout requirements attached that started when the bid was accepted. https://www.usac.org/high-cost/funds/rural-digital-opportuni...

Looks like Starlink was supposed to be 40% built with their participation starting in 2020, that are consistent with their winning bid (in this case 100/20). It seems they clearly failed by that metric.

Seeing as they offer service basically everywhere in the US right now and the only quibble is that the average speed is only 75 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps I'd say they are well ahead of 40%.

That isn't a quibble, the 100/20 requirement was a key requirement they set themselves.

Regardless though, I was wrong about the buildout reasoning. The FCC just doesn't believe, based off the information provided by Starlink, they had a strong enough likelihood of success with the plan provided to stay in the running.

Starlink hasn't gotten any money, so they aren't subject to build requirements

Yeah I messed that up. After reading more the denial was focused on the fact that Starlink didn't refute they were not consistently delivering speeds and latency that matched the tier they bid on, and their plan to bridge that gap wasn't convincing to the reviewers or the Commission.

The argument is if they had paid on time would they have been able to deliver to the particular customers by 2025? i.e not everyone. Just RDOF subsided users in the awarded areas

The Dems say no. Evidence is current state of network and absence of starship.

SpaceX says yes. V2 is already launching on Falcon. We don't need starship to meet our obligations but it will make it faster.

Republicans say both of you are talking nonsense. Until 2025 you can't find out. And there's a process for getting there. You only test devices that are under the RDOF plan, not everyone. And since SpaceX hasn't been awarded, you can't do any testing that's relevant.

Imagine SpaceX got awarded say Diomede and you're bringing up speeds in LA and Seattle or the Midwest.

SpaceX will sue and lose due to Chevron deference

This is dependent on the cell you're in. I've been on Starlink since Feb 2021 and dipping below 100 down is very rare. It' averages about 140 down and 20 up with about 30ms latency.

For this grant the 100/20 needed to be consistently available in specific geographic areas. So if the cells bring down the performance averages are concentrated in those grant areas, it makes sense for them to fail to meet the program criteria while still having a product that hits those metrics elsewhere.

The denial doesn't quote speeds in those areas

It doesn't, I'm just expanding on why a specific cell meeting the program specifications "usually" wouldn't really move the need for the FCC analysis.

The denial mentions national speed levels from a third party not the particular coverage areas or services delivered under RDOF

I'm in a rural location. Not that rural, about five minutes away from a town of 10,000 people. I have exactly three internet choices: old-school satellite (with 600 ms latency), unreliable 10 Mbit DSL for $150/month, or Starlink for $120/month. Many of my neighbors aren't as lucky and don't even get DSL.

My DSL provider received hundreds of millions in government subsidies and did nothing to improve the service in the region, and brazenly lied about it to the FCC. I know that it's fashionable to criticize Elon Musk, and it's often justified, but Starlink is far more deserving of government funds than most of the grifter ISPs who actually get the subsidies.

If you start a WISP and service your neighbors, the FCC would probably be happy to provide you a subsidy now that they have an extra $1 billion that isn't going to Starlink.

That's not how this works.

Under this program there's no option of another org replacing a denied org. Who's stepping up for LTD broadband for example?

There's a fixed pool of money ($16 billion), so everyone who gets some of it does replace a denied org.

You have no idea how this works. Denied money isn't redistributed.

Where do people get this from?

Maybe there will be a future award. But there's no rollover here.

Two facts let you conclude this easily:

1. Money is fungible

2. Grant applications are still open

So money not spent on SpaceX can go to a future application.

In 2026

It's "embarrassing" that the FCC doesn't want to continue to pour a billion dollars of public money into a private company that has failed to meet its agreed upon targets? They shouldn't get any government funding to begin with, at least not without relinquishing an equivalent amount of shares to the public so we can all profit from their eventual IPO, not just fund some VCs and existing billionaires for free. Otherwise we will just have broadband 2.0, with Comcast & co getting billions in subsidies and not doing even a fraction of the necessary work.

From what I understand, this is a political hatchet job. Space X still had 2 years to meet the the mark but capricious new standards are being applied specifically to them.

or maybe speeds were dropping, requirements not met, and they didn't want to dump more money on self driving car man's company. Seems reasonable to me - if it also makes elon and his cult sad, that's just a happy accident.

This argument is too deeply rotted with bias to have value. This is going to slow the adoption of broadband and you’re happy because the guy you dislike might be harmed as a consequence.

You should reflect on this behavior, because you’re embodying everything you criticize this supposed “other side” of being.

> This argument is too deeply rotted with bias to have value.

As opposed to what it responds to?

> > This is going to slow the adoption of broadband

Just lay down fiber. Unlike satellites you only have to do it once, but that's not exciting enough for rocket man because unlike satellites you don't get the government to pay you to play with rockets.

This is all there is to it, like the Apollo program was. A bunch of techbros want to play with rockets and try really hard to reverse engineer an excuse for government to hand them cash for it.

For the Apollo program it was collecting moon rocks that were supposed to hold god knows what secrets, for the current age of space it's rural internet.

We’ve had companies with astronomical market caps and the wealthiest government in the world for a long time, both with the capability of laying fiber and none doing so. Space tech bro is actually solving it not just for rural areas but much of world.

What I’m saying is, feel free to step in if you can, but the market has spoken and the market is not interested in solving the problem your way.

> > We’ve had companies with astronomical market caps and the wealthiest government in the world for a long time, both with the capability of laying fiber and none doing so

Maybe because they are looking at the trends and are seeing that the number of people living in urbanized areas is increasing year after year constantly?

People are moving to cities for reasons that are totally unrelated to internet speed, or internet access, hence maybe, just maybe it makes sense to have them do so and then see how many people remain in the rural areas and then decide much to invest?

> > Much of the world

Much of the world, 90% lives in urban areas, they will always use 4G-LTE and 5G and Fiber because the density is such that the aforementioned technologies are and will always be superior

> a private company that has failed to meet its agreed upon targets?

Starlink hasn't failed to meet any agreed upon targets. The agreed upon targets are for 2025.

Starlink is currently providing service that is below those targets, but has several more years to meet them. Meanwhile, other recipients haven't delivered any service yet.

> Otherwise we will just have broadband 2.0, with Comcast & co getting billions in subsidies and not doing even a fraction of the necessary work.

Who do you think the other recipients are?

There's no continue. And your share nonsense is nonsense. Where's the shares from other applicants?

No they meet the targets just fine the FCC has determined that they don't see a path for SpaceX to meet the 2025 requirements despite the overwhelming evidence that they are keeping up on satellite launches.

That's why everyone is calling it political. The FCC has their opinion and based on that they are withholding not a failure to meet contract requirements.

In defense of the FCC, barely anyone survives the lobbying power of entrenched ISPs.

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

In truly rural or remote areas relative to any available alternative it is as close to a miracle product as one could imagine. If you haven’t had to use other satellite Internet services like BGAN, Iridium, viasat, etc… it’s hard to explain what a revolution Starlink is in every aspect.

If starlink would be a success regardless, why should it be subsidized with tax payer money. Isn’t the point of subsidies to support things that would otherwise not be a success?