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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.