FCC cancels Starlink’s and LTD's rural development grants
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
E-Fiber San Juan LLC gets $7.5M to provide broadband services to 1,085 homes in rural Utah. Monster Broadband gets $5.8M for 11,286 homes in Texas and Tennessee. Northern Arapaho Tribal Industries gets $7.8M for 2,408 homes in Wyoming (probably on Indian reservations). So a total of around $21 million will be spent on 15,000ish homes.
The FCC's budget for the RDOF subsidy is around $20 billion for 4 million homes, so 99.99% of the money is still up for grabs, as are 99.96% of the rural households.
Starlink might just end up making deals with the companies that won their bids and sell their services/hardware as rebranded solutions. It's probably cheaper for these companies to do this instead of setting up their own infrastructure.
Of course the real question is probably whether not following through on their obligations and getting fined is less than the amount they were awarded.
The way the rules were set up, virtually any bid in the gigabit category beat the megabit category, so Starlink only won in the regions nobody bid in.
In a perfect world, we would all have active optical fiber from the backbone to our home routers. But 5G and satellite internet is cheaper...
But yes. For rural less dense deployments. Long range signal through the air is much cheaper.
fiber=c lasers=c fiber=nonlinear lasers=linear
So in physics terms, starlink will eventually surpass buried fiber in latency for all situations where fiber routing divergence from linear exceeds the ~1000km orbital round trip.
This is already happening. In many places it is well below half as fast as before. More, and more powerful, birds will help some, but if they need to loft 4000 a year their unit cost will matter.
I expect they will cap subscriptions offered in some areas, particularly parts of Asia and Africa.
That assumes fixed capacity, which isn't at all the case.
Oh wait, I was wrong on all of those!
- Completing the gen 1 constellation, as well as getting gen 2 up.
- All of the ground stations
- Meeting the bandwidth requirements
However, there are potentially other ways SpaceX might be able indirectly benefit.
Another idea I've heard floating around is that Starlink can be used to link ground stations together. This might be very important in those especially hard to reach locations where laying fiber or establishing line of sight, etc might be too complicated/difficult/expensive. I've heard that this is not really a viable solution with gen 1s though.
It's a political move against Elon, just like the previous EV TAX incentive where the strings-attached involved having factories with union labor. Sure $500 is costly, but it's better than nothing.... that's the point.
Then the 4/5G can be set up using a mixture of fiber, line-of-sight or Starlink backhaul, depending on the situation and location.
Of course this is another way that Starlink might be able to win some of these contracts. They could set up (or work with a partner) mini 4/5G networks in these rural areas and also use a mixture of fiber and Starlink backhaul. After all, they still need fiber backhaul for their ground stations anyways.
Starlink customers end up not needing to buy the current, expensive hardware and just use relatively inexpensive 4/5G modems.
I've heard this isn't possible with the gen 1 satellites, so still a theory until the Starship program is off the ground.
It's not better than nothing if you can't afford the $500.
- Not meeting the bandwidth requirements in practice.
- High initial hardware cost.
Starlink effectively being judged not able to meet the program requirements would surely rule them out to be used in connection with RDOF in any capacity?
Keep in mind too that each year average internet consumption rises so the existing sats can service fewer and fewer users.
I am personally surprised they have reached capacity so quickly - I thought they would have fit more users per sat on by aggressive traffic shaping/data caps.
Starlink will only be a niche service imo, FTTH/cellular will continue to roll out to more and more rural locations. It's a great niche service but the capacity really constrains it.
I also wonder how long SpaceX can afford all these falcon launches for starlink. I think the plan was spaceship would do huge deploys at a way lower cost per sat, which would increase capacity much quicker. But it seems spaceship is understandably delayed?
And the real global growth will start when the satellite-to-satellite links finally allow coverage away from SpaceX's teleports. So coverage in the middle of the seas and in the middle of Africa or South-America.
The global angle is interesting; but I don't think Africa will be as simple as people make out - there is a lot of corruption around telco contracts there and they won't just allow SpaceX to turn on all of Africa and bypass it all.
https://www.businessinsider.com/liquid-oxygen-shortage-covid...
Surely it pays for itself if they can sign up users as fast as they can scale? But if capital is the problem, maybe Starlink should be IPO'd the old fashioned way, to raise capital rather than cash out investors.
I would imagine in the future they could narrow the scope of their bid just to really really really remote and unpopulated rural regions, where even a 100% adoption would fit comfortably in a satellite bandwidth, but then I don't know if such a smaller bid would be worth the hassle for them.
The FCC looked at data from Oopsla, and saw that Starlink is currently averaging 91Mbps Down / 9.5Mbps Up or something like this. Their bid was for 100 Down / 20 Up, so they are some way away from providing the level of service to their current users that they committed for the subsidized users.
The 100/20 was observed early on IIRC so they have demonstrated it’s possible if they don’t oversubscribe. (Which is more than can be said about previous satellite internet services.) But yeah, they certainly aren’t currently in compliance. Given Musk’s general approach to regulatory bodies I can’t blame them for applying skepticism here.
> I think it’s safe to say that in 2024 they will be able to handle 600k extra users. (If they actually try and don’t oversubscribe!)
We'll have to see. It's important to note that so far they've been able to use whatever launch capacity they want to increase the constellation, but by 2024 they will have to start using a good portion of their launch capacity to re-build it, since the satellites launched today will have fallen down by then.
If they manage to launch Starship by then (not sure if that's looking likely or not), maybe they will have extra capacity to be able to both replace satellites and expand the constellation.
What is apparent is that the other upstart satellite flotillas have zero chance of being competitive and getting off the ground, both figuratively and literally.
But at some point there were issues with getting components for the new gen of Dishys, they have less ports and flexibility than mine. Scaling dishys is still an issue along with the satellites, but it's not like growth has stalled.
This decision may minorly slow the growth of starlink, but not by much.
And if SpaceX does get Starship off the ground at anything close to their economic targets, fuggedaboutit.
My point was “cost of terminal” seems like a weird one to be getting dinged on.
I agree capacity seems like a better thing to be focusing on. This seems like an own-goal from StarLink as they could have kept up their speeds by slowing growth and not enabling roaming. But maybe they are just prioritizing subscriber count over winning subsidy dollars.
Except of course the facts suggest the exact opposite, where the FCC very much appreciated the benefits that you "would" bring, so much so as to select you as one of two potential contract recipients, but has determined that you lied during the bid and in reality can't bring what you claimed you'd be able to bring.
Now, the cell of a satellite is enormous, and there's no way to reduce the tx power without getting out of range of the surface of the planet altogether. Not to mention that those satellites are pretty damn fast so they stay over any particular user for a very short amount of time.
What am I missing? Or is this supposed to be a low throughput system (when added up over all concurrent users)?
Cell networks could improve infill coverage consistency with professional installs of roof mounted CPE. That would help people who have a weak signal inside their home but good signal outside.
The issue is economic. Target 1 customer per square mile and most of the orbit over land is useful, target 100,000 customers per square mile and most satellites are only beneficial over megacities like NYC.
Due to the short lifespan of individual satellites they can adjust to market forces and new technology fairly rapidly. If for example China lets them in the economics around density change significantly.
Basically a network that handles 1 customer per square mile might in theory have say 40 million customers worldwide eventually. A network capable of handling 10 people per square mile might cost 10x as much, but only increase that to say 120 million because some areas have less than 10 potential customers per square mile. Increasing that to say 100 or even 100,000 people per square mile would vastly increase the cost, but you hit heavy diminishing returns with a lower percentage of areas reaching those densities and many people with better internet options than starlink or simply can’t afford the service.
So for each busy satellite you have 10 to 100 others on the same orbit which are still cruising over the ocean.
To maximize efficiency you want to have similar load wherever the satellite is.
You're entirely wrong here. Their customer density is way higher than 1 per square mile... I'm not even sure where you get these ideas.
Each cell is 146 miles, which is around 2 terminals per square mile.
People may be clustered a bit, giving the illusion of starlink being able to support a higher density than this.
Starlink isn't as scalable as people want to imagine due to the RF bandwidth SpaceX has as well as power requirements. This is part of why SpaceX made such a big deal over the 12GHz band that Dish wants to use.
The next version of satellites may be able to support additional bands which will help, but starlink's still going to be fairly limited in terms of number of people it can support.
From the ground you can think of an array of satellites like a monitor showing a document. As you read every word is being displayed at the same time in the same color, but because the light is coming from different locations you can focus on a little area and ignore the rest of the screen.
A traditional satellite dish uses a similar idea to just look at a single satellite at a time and ignore the rest of the sky, this is why you need to aim them. What starkink does differently is using a phased array to let it change focus without physically moving the dish, which is really really fast and lets them track satellites in LEO.
Just like cellphones it can hand off from satellite to satellite plenty fast to keep up with the speeds involved. As soon as you can handle 1 transistion just repeat the same thing millions of times, computers are great at repetitive tasks.
As to throughput, it’s supposed to be fast enough to watch 4K video which isn’t gigabit speeds but is vastly better than millions of people are stuck with.
Sibling comment has the correct answer.
A cellphone networks depend on proximity to a cell tower to alow frequencies to be reused across multiple cell towers. On top of this they also use a wide range of techniques to share each individual towers available bandwidth with multiple cell phones. But the most basic trick is signals get weaker with distance.
Starlink also uses distance as a satellite can only see a small fraction of the total number of ground stations. However, weaker from distance is indistinguishable from a weaker signal due to a phased array antenna pointing somewhere else, so they can in effect simulate more cells than they would have from proximity alone. On top of this they can use all the existing cellphone tricks to maximise bandwidth.
PS: Yes Starlink is limited to ~100 megabits per customer, but that’s vastly better than 1.5 Mbps DSL which is what many rural communities are stuck with.
Trolling is unwelcome here. You have been told this before.
So it would seem an easy way to scale out is by adding satellites. I don't think they're anywhere near capacity on that, yet.
Also, each current-gen satellite is 20 Gbps of bandwidth. v2 is claimed to be "almost an order of magnitude more capable than v1.0" in terms of communications bandwidth.
If by "last decade" you're comparing against geostationary, then yes. The satellites are roughly a hundred times closer.
Yes. Starlink satelites are at low earth orbit, much much closer than the geosyncronous orbits communication satelites a decade ago had to be at.
Distance is latency because the radio waves can “only” propagate at the speed of light. The shorter the trip the faster the signals can make it.
Also, that 22km beam isn't going to be uniform, but rather higher gain at the center, and below some power threshold at the peripheral.
I wonder if this is why SETI hasn't found any alien communications: they invented spread-spectrum communications and it all looks like noise to us.
You can add more antennas, but those cost money. So, you use as many as you can afford, and space them out according to what you need. A too-broad antenna array on a satellite would have one set of problems, one on the ground others.
Also a little sad; I'd hoped that 100/20 RDOF standard would mean Starlink would have someone keeping them honest. They seem to be in a race to the congestion bottom right now.
SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Considering the expenses of Starlink and Starship, both big money sinks, it's entirely possible for Stalink to get scrapped at some point if investment money dries up.
Probably unlikely, since they could stop launching and keep the service running until the sats decay, but still possible.
OTOH $900M is a lot of money to give to a company. And there's no guarantee that if they survive they won't just keep overselling capacity.
> SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Takes like these make no sense. They assume some kind of lack of intelligence among people at SpaceX. As if they don't know how economics work. Rather than assuming stupidity, maybe you should rethink your premise?
The math doesn’t work out for starlink and people have noted this for years at this point.
Believing that FSD is a fraud in the first place is where you go wrong here. Frauds generally require something to not work at all or not exist. FSD works and exists, just not on the timelines promised but continued to be refined.
Musk himself has repeatedly said that Starlink is a risky bet, and that satellite network operators usually go bankrupt.
Taking risks does not imply lack of intelligence.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
We have a 1080p TV. We had a connection that was effectively 6mbit dedicated down, and it never pixelated or buffered. Our “75mbit” comcast line regularly dropped to minimum resolution or started buffering. Speedtests said the connection was providing 25-100 mbit down, since ISPs often prioritize households that are currently running speed tests. This was before netflix launched fast.com to defeat such gaming.
For starlink, everything is fine, except that a few times an hour it jumps to the next satellite and the connection drops for about a second.
I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
> I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
It hops to next satellite more often than that. The satellites take about 90 minutes to go around the globe.
Most of the handovers to next satellite are seamless (maybe 10ms delay in traffic), but especially when they're working on the beta phase software the more routing-oriented parts of the system seem glitchy. Earlier in 2022 I'd lose Internet for a few tens of seconds every now and then -- but that seems to have been a bug in the routing stack that they since fixed.
There's a few Grafana based Starlink monitoring projects I've been looking at. Historical data would be nice to have.
Now, OK, maybe that's not going to be acceptable to regulators. And... that's sort of a shame given the fact that satellite services are available literally everywhere. How many people not served by existing rural broadband RDOF recipients would love to have a subsidized Starlink antenna?
I really don't see how this is helping anyone except a handful of cable companies actually doing deployments. The vast bulk of the rural subscriber base that fund is intended to assist aren't going to get anything out of it.
So, in the case of Starlink, they absolutely CAN provision customers like that, and that's EXACTLY how it works right now - invites happen per "cell," and each "cell" has a capacity quota.
Recently, they've been overprovisioning "cells" for some reason or another, and the service has slowed down, so it objectively didn't meet the thresholds and they'll need to bid again. This also seems reasonable.
I say this all as a happy Starlink customer - negative externalities to space junk and obnoxious fanbase aside, it's way better than my previous fixed point to point WISP experience was, and worlds better than ADSL stretched to the bitter end of distance capability over lines from the 1970s was.
But there are no good alternatives. ADSL was 1Mbps down with a tailwind and it was the last house on the road that could get it. Cell service is very sketchy, especially if not on Verizon. HughesNet limitations are well-known. So it's pretty much a game-changer in terms of Internet access.
Here in Colorado my service is actually pretty good - I get 20-30mbit during crowded times, and 150-200mbit during off hours. Outages were problematic a few months ago but have improved and now usually coincide only with severe thunderstorms.
Overall, it's a literal order of magnitude better than end-of-line ADSL and roughly a 2x gain over my old WISP (at 2x the cost). For someone who used to have access to a WISP, it's evolutionary. For locations with no previous access at all, it's revolutionary.
On the flip side, the hardware is almost offensively silly and ridiculous (proprietary connectors and cables, router with 0 Ethernet ports but a diagram of Mars instead, etc.). IPv6 support disappeared sometime last year, and everything is behind a CGNAT. And link quality sometimes seems to depend on the dish repositioning algorithm picking the correct inclination, which seems to be a crapshoot depending on when it was last rebooted rather than an ongoing correction process.
I agree not having Ethernet out of the box sucks. I suspect some one chose environmental seals over Ethernet given the water proofing on the cables. Though they seem only half way committed to the path given the warnings and disclaimers about the Wi-Fi access point not being rated for waterproofing.
I had a cable sliced and I put standard rj45 jacks and a coupler in as a repair and it works fine. Pretty sure you could put standard ethernet in there straight to dishy if you really wanted to. At least if you can feed it enough power.
There's really no good excuse for the router setup - SpaceX could still supply a standalone power injector with Ethernet on one side and the proprietary connector on the other side.
https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...
If only they’d replace the ancient phone lines around here with wet string! Until then, I’ll continue to get my internet via multi-mile air gaps.
You might want to tell SpaceX that, because that’s what they’ve been doing.
The satellites near a particular area (at any particular point in time) have a capacity as do the local ground station(s).
Why is the FCC using Ookla when they built their own speed test app?
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-encourages-public-use-its-s...
1. Apparently I have to install an app on my phone. I can't use a web-based tool from my desktop. (I was thinking there must be a version for regular computer users, right?)
2. Thinking I missed something, I searched for "FCC speed test". The results all point back to this app.
3. On a whim, I tried visiting speedtest.fcc.gov. Of course nothing lives there.
Why is FCC bothering with this if they're going to obscure it behind app stores? Seems like a way to only get outlier users.
So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC! The hypocrisy in this statement is laughable since rural customer's only choice is dial-up, HughesNet(which is worse than Starlink) and mobile hot-spots. I think there is more to this than that statement.
And no, there isn't more to it, the only reason we're even here is because they had to play along with Starlink's initial application that had too optimistic numbers because it's not their job to question pie in the sky numbers, but instead, to tentatively approve it until it's proven false.
You don’t want that. They (and others like Verizon) have repeatedly taken government grants to extend their networks into unserved areas (both rural and urban) and then just not done the work. Ars Technica follows this stuff pretty closely and they’ve done some good reporting on it.
Each satellite paints a spot on the ground using the beamforming capabilities of the phased array antenna. The capacity of that spot is of course limited by Shannon limit, where C ~ B * S C = capacity (think Mbps) B = spectrum (think Mhz) S = SINR (Singal to noise ratio)
If you have a smaller spot on the ground, then the spectrum is shared amoung fewer users. If you have more powerful transmitters and or better antennas, then your C will be better.
Right now based on the specifications I have seen publicly, Amazon's Kuiper (their LEOS) will have higher capacity than starlink because it will have half the "spot" diameter. That is due to better antennas mostly, more array elements mean narrower beam width.
Kuiper needs Blue Origin to get cost competitive with SpaceX, which doesn't look likely because a) they don't even have commercial operations and b) uhoh, here comes Starship.
Sure SpaceX might launch Kuiper satellites ... at a premium over Starlink.
Hm, they were supposed to launch two satellites in 2021, now that's pushed to Dec 2022. They "announced" 83 launches with way-more-expensive than SpaceX and fictitious New Glenn launches. Blue Origin has been way way way behind its estimates.
... Kuiper has Bezos money behind it, but we'll see. Starlink is already up, and if Starship launches, I doubt anyone but SpaceX can compete.
Elon the prognosticator says 1-12 months for first starship launch. Even if it's two years, Starship likely becomes operational before even a minimal Kuiper flotilla.
But, competition is good, so even if that happens, I hope Bezos keeps the money flowing.
Edit: Actually it looks like it goes back into the Universal Service Fund (which is where RDOF got it's money), and may be used for RDOF or other USF funded programs.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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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...
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.
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.
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
Hughesnet was one of the best options prior to Starlink.
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!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.
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.
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’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.
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.
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
are you accusing the FCC of lying or just being too incompetent to measure network speeds?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But Starlink didn't win the sports tournament this year, they didn't meet the performance obligations.
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.
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...
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.
plus Musk is against subsidies and government intervention
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32417500, but we merged that thread hither)
These programs still exist to some degree in the form of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and Universal Service Fund Administrator Co (USAC), and the chunk of money here (called RDOF) is actually a specially earmarked portion of the USF. That said, USF's impact on improving broadband across the country has been somewhat limited because USF's focus tends to be on areas and individuals with no service (e.g. due to rural locations or poverty), rather than improving competitiveness of service in markets that have it. For example, the "Free Cellphone" popup booths you see in poorer areas of the US are an implementation of USF programs to provide subsidized connectivity to low-income individuals, as are the $10/mo ISP plans available to low-income households.
This set of priorities is in no small part because, as you can imagine, the incumbent ISPs lobby against USAC actions that would subject them to more competition. But it also comes out of the history of the concept of "Universal Service" which was born in an era when regulated monopolies were the norm for public utilities, and so inter-provider competition was simply not something being discussed. At that point in history, areas with inter-provider competition were generally viewed as bad for the consumer because in areas with competing telcos (for example Los Angeles in the 1910s with LA Telephone and LA Home Telephone) you could only call people that used the same telephone company as you... requiring businesses to have two phones and list two phone numbers. The present world of multiple competing but interconnected providers wasn't really something that was contemplated when most of the regulatory system was built, and post-1982 (AT&T divestiture) the regulatory system has never really caught up... which we can fairly confidently blame heavily on extensive lobbying by both divested AT&T companies (USWest, AT&T, etc) and their competitors that forced the '82 monopoly busting (Sprint/MCI, GTE/Verizon, etc).
Unregulated monopolies.
Infrastructure that runs to your doorstep is a natural monopoly. All of them -- roads, water, electricity, sewer -- are either municipally owned or else regulated to prevent vertical expansion. Except non-voice telecom.
Compare somewhere like Romania with the US. Sure, the size of the country matters, but they started their modern network buildouts WAYYYY after the US. They US was heavily invested in copper and coax. Romania was able to leapfrog our legacy technology and move straight to fiber + neighborhood based local ISP's. While both technologies performed similarly very early on, the ceiling of performance and lifetime of the line is far higher for fiber than copper or coax (barring physically destructive actions like an errant shovel.
So, in effect, they started with something can be upgraded continuously to this day. We started with something whose performance ceiling was much lower, and whose effective lifespan was over 10 years ago or more in many cases. So now that old stuff has to be maintained while doing the capex heavy infrastructure work all over again to get the new stuff in there. Meanwhile, we're still paying them every month and their shareholders are collecting their dividends, so why would they want anything to change? It's not like they're going be able to charge some insane premium for their new faster fiber lines over their old and slow coax and copper.
Even our cabins have fiber installed these days ...
This happens enough by accident that cases of intent are hard to prove, but nobody doubts that it happens with intent as well.
The result as we've had more and more wires up is more and more regulatory costs around putting up wires.
It's illegal for me to start my own electric distribution company within the footprint of my power company. It's also illegal for them to deny me service, or to expand vertically into anything other than electrical local distribution.
It would be so easy to do the same thing for dark fiber. Hold an auction, whoever wins gets to buy all the dark fiber that crosses property lines within the territory. In exchange, they have to divest ownership of any business that isn't dark fiber, and must lease point-to-point wavelengths on a fixed and published price schedule to any willing buyer.
The electrical companies would be happy to do this. Mine already does, but only for certain areas where they had to run their own fiber anyways (basically along the major highways). They would be happy to expand to every doorstep if they were guaranteed a regulated monopoly just like they have for electrical lines. That would be a big enough market to allow their fiber department to split off from the electrical utility and become a standalone dark fiber utility. They don't want to be an ISP (they had the chance to become one and turned it down). They're just really good at hanging ADSS on poles and want to do a lot of that.
All solutions have problems here. :-(
And this grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
And now the people who they didn't vote for are in charge and they lose their bid.
Not sure you're accurate.
Nothing. Utilities just got lazy. If an address has ever had working landline telephone service or grid electrical service, then there's no good reason they don't also have gigabit fiber service.
Follow the money and the politics.
This is all very much above board.
> In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021
snippet answer from Google search https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+muc...
I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.
I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again.
I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.
It's expensive in fuel and in the cost and maintenance of machinery designed to deliver the most energy. It's like paying for GPU compute time.
It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).
I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.
He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.
I don't hate poor people, but subsidizing people in urban areas is just a better way to help them - the money goes a lot further.
I have had the opportunity of growing up in a poorer rural area, and have lived in a major city. I find this mindset pretty grotesque and extremely polarizing, to the degree that it actually undercuts public policy.
More importantly these are the people who are more likely to complain about government handouts and socialism.
Now we have people like you, hating on anyone that doesn't want or can't afford to live as you think they should.
The rest of this post will probably be very confusing.
I understand the sentiment. However, real life is more complex than that. For example, this article in particular is talking about an area around Ann Arbor. I have a friend who lives in this area (in a rural house). He's a tech worker. His neighbor is a tech worker. His brother around the corner used to be a tech worker. I've been to the gun range near his house several times, and each time it is populated by a diverse (age, race, sex) group of people.
On the flip side, there are folks (without children) at the local school board meeting trying to have certain books removed. A council in the area recently got into trouble for misallocating covid funds as personal bonuses.
It's a constant battle, but painting everyone in a rural area with the same brush is a mistake.
They aren't saving money, though. Everything gets weird if you live in a rural area - or heck, a small town. Sometimes housing is cheaper, sure, and then you realize that while you don't have a water bill, you do now have to get your septic system pumped regularly, keep bottled water around because your well pump doesn't work when there is a power outage, and you have to drive everywhere. I imagine that Amazon has made it slightly cheaper because you can drive less. If you don't want to drive, good luck: You can't take your bike on the fastest route and the country roads are poorly maintained.
And I'm really happy the government makes up for the utilities. You might live in the country, but if you don't have electricity and internet service, your time is going to be more isolated and miserable. Folks living in the countryside shouldn't have to be without because of crushing costs, especially when we consider that a portion these folks are producing food for the rest of us.
I haven't actually met a farmer that is opposed to farm subsidies, for example.
And I think there is a hint of ignorance when it does benefit them: The local ISP finally giving a rural location higher-speed internet probably did so because they received government money or have brushed up against government regulations that require them to upgrade in the countryside as well as urban areas - yet the government spending goes unnoticed.
I'll add that the US is a 2 party system in practice, so the reasons for voting conservative vary greatly and you can't really take voting a certain way as "against handouts" when it is easily other issues that prompts the vote.
Important distinction.
If you want to reply that city people also take advantage of government programs remember they aren't going around angry all the time about government spending and welfare. It's the hypocrisy that brings out my sarcastic side.
This is a travesty of policy. The US has so many rural underserved areas and Starlink is instant cable-internet anywhere you go with a good view of the sky. Telecoms have been pocketing these rural development dollars brazenly and screwing over taxpayers and thumbing their noses at the FCC with their lobbying power.
Starlink comes along with a usable service ... anyway, it's sad. Some Trump telecom insider (Ajit Pai) has a more balanced view than the Biden administration.
This is bad policy.
Starlink won't need it though. They have a billion or more potential worldwide customers.
Blame Starlink for not bidding at a more realistic level, if you want to blame anyone.
I’ve never had a broadband bill go down. Not sure what you were expecting from a brand new company, but I’ve had the same service for 4+ years at the same cost from one provider, and 2.5 yrs from another. That’s the way they roll…