25M homes will lose broadband discounts if Congress keeps stalling, FCC warns | Hacker News Reader

25M homes will lose broadband discounts if Congress keeps stalling, FCC warns

arstechnica.com

10 pointsrbanffy20 comments

There are millions of Americans who still don’t have any broadband internet options because they live in rural areas where fiber will NEVER be laid. The first priority should be to fully fund broadband satellite internet, which is the ONLY way rural Americans will ever get broadband internet. Giving $14 billion in small discounts to people with good existing services should not be happening while so many people have no service at all.

> Giving $14 billion in small discounts to people with good existing services should not be happening while so many people have no service at all.

I don't think the answer to "some people don't have access to broadband internet", should be "more people won't have access to broadband internet".

I agree. Thats why I didn't propose that. This is just another way the urban poor are unfairly advantaged over the rural poor. These subsidies only apply if you have existing service in your area.

> This is just another way the urban poor are unfairly advantaged over the rural poor.

I think the point here is that the urban poor cannot afford it already.

This is not a zero sum game. Providing for some doesn't take it from others.

Agreed. The issue is that for the past few years ONLY urban people have been receiving assistance.

But that's not true either.

Rural communities disproportionately receive more federal funds, than urban ones, e.g. 60% of the Universal Service Fund budget goes to high-cost, rural areas [0]

On a personal note, living in Texas has also given me a new perspective on rural subsidies, especially on education and civil engineering. I pay taxes through the nose, only for them to be recaptured by the state and invested further away. And more recently, my phone bill increased dramatically, precisely to replenish the USF, which should guarantee 4G/5G wireless access in more remote areas.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund

So much money gets funneled to rural areas. Billions have been spent on rural broadband but it is slow to spread. I am from a very rural area, we were 30 minutes from the nearest store except for a small gas station 10 minutes away. 2+ hours from the nearest airport (although minutes in several directions from tax funded municipal airports, which is a whole other can of worms of subsidies for wealthy rural citizens), and just last year, a lot of locals got symmetric fiber to the curb, several miles down a dirt road with a few hundred people living on it. Annoyingly, my family still doesn't have it because they don't live near other houses, even though the stinking fiber branch runs across our land. But I digress. So much money flows to the rural poor, in different ways than the urban poor, but we are still living in a world that for centuries was built in a way to advantage white people. And the rural poor are mostly white. While the urban poor are mostly brown.

> rural areas where fiber will NEVER be laid.

> broadband satellite internet, which is the ONLY way rural Americans will ever get broadband internet.

What's your basis for "never" and "only"? If you mean that universal fiber will be "never" (hyperbolically speaking) happen in the US due to subsidy fraud by large incumbent ISPs paired with lack of subsidy enforcement by the federal government, then I would agree with you (again, only hyperbolically).

If you mean that internet access is not affordable enough for poor rural Americans, then fiber is the most sustainable in the long term for ISPs and hence makes it harder for ISPs to justify maintaining high prices. (Comcast and the like will continue overcharging, but ISPs operating within states or municipalities will be able to undercut them.) I don't see how satellite broadband would be cheaper than fiber in the long term for residents.

If you mean that building out fiber is not technically feasible then you would be wrong, considering that rural electrification in the US was almost completely successful in terms of physically reaching homes. (I say almost because there might be a number of households without physical access to electricity, but not on the same order of magnitude as households without physical access to internet.) From the Wikipedia article on rural electrification [1]:

> By the early 1970s about 98% of all farms in the United States had electric service, a demonstration of REA's success.

Note: REA stands for the Rural Electrification Administration.

Rural Americans are disadvantaged because the lower population density means that ISPs need to wait longer to get returns on their investments, but in the long term the situation is the same as in urban areas. From a TechCrunch article regarding broadband access:

> Approximately 28% of Americans in rural areas do not have access to or cannot afford broadband — the rate is 23% in urban areas.

The article doesn't distinguish between people without physical access and people who simply can't afford service. However, there are some Americans in urban areas, not just rural areas, who lack physical access to broadband.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification#United_S...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/covid-19-shows-we-need-uni...

The difference between accessibility and affordability is large.

Why are jumping to satellites? They don't perform well, and there are a lot of other options. Fixed wireless and cellular spectrum come to mind. Both are way cheaper than launching thousands of satellites.

Starlink performs amazingly well in its use-case.

... As long as there aren't many subscribers in the area.

Satellite is OK if there isn't anything else. On average, it doesn't beat 4G/5G.

Starlink is completely different from previous satellite internet. Those things are not true about it.

But they are?

Starlink sucks in high service density areas, that's not news [0]. It also averages 100Mbps and tops at a theoretical 500Mbps, whereas 5G averages 250Mbps and tops at a theoretical 1000Mbps. Latency is also considerably higher for Starlink (~60-100ms), than for 5G (~1-50ms).

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/09/ookla-starlinks-...

If fixed wireless were a practical solution there wouldn't still be millions of rural Americans without broadband in 2023 with all the billions already spent on it. Starlink satellites are small and cheap to send to orbit. Its still more expensive than wiring an urban apartment building with fiber but it is absolutely the only way we have to get these people connected.

The economics are boarder-line but it should be still be given a fair chance at success.

ISPs would rather not tap into the broadband rural market, as long as they get subsidies while providing subpar service.

This is not a technical or economic issue, but a regulatory one, and it is not new either.

> Starlink satellites are small and cheap to send to orbit. Its still more expensive than wiring an urban apartment building with fiber but it is absolutely the only way we have to get these people connected.

This is absolutely not true. Quote [0]:

> We assume that the territory of the continental United States can be served by 5 percent of the satellites in the constellation, and in this case, the constellation should consist of 4,229 satellites.

This only accounts for rural US population.

As of August 2023, the total number of satellites in the constellation is ~4500 [1], with an estimate cost of ~$500,000 per unit, including launch [2].

A 5G tower costs roughly a fifth of that [3], while providing higher bandwidth and dramatically lower latency.

Again, this is just another example of corporations sucking from the government, and giving nothing in return.

[0] http://www.satmagazine.com/story.php?number=1026762698

[1] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html

[2] https://ts2.space/en/how-much-does-a-starlink-satellite-cost...

[3] https://www.steelintheair.com/5g-cell-towers-in-2023-top-que....

Half a million is cheap compared to other satellite internet services i was referring to. A 5G tower alone is a trivial cost compared to the cost of laying fiber to the middle of nowhere to connect said tower. There is nothing for ISPs to “tap into”. Just like rural postal service, rural internet is never going to be profitable and should be provided as a service by the state to all the Americans who grow our food and harvest our lumber and all the other things people do outside urban areas. Do you think we should bother to connect these people or not?

> Half a million is cheap compared to other satellite internet services i was referring to.

I don't know that, but it is still more expensive than deploying 5G towers, as I have explained in my previous comment.

> Do you think we should bother to connect these people or not?

I never said rural areas don't deserve broadband service, I'm not sure where you got that from.

I'm saying that their best chance to get fast, widely available broadband services, is to force telecom companies to deliver on the promises they made when they received billions in subsidies.

I'm also saying that Starlink is not the solution, because it is more expensive, slower, and less reliable than 5G, and unless a significant investment is made, it will get even less reliable over time for a number of reasons.

Also, we seem to be forgetting that Starlink is not even profitable as of 2023, and will need hundreds of millions of dollars in new investments to finally break even. Since, as you said, rural internet is not profitable enough to invest money in it, unless Starlink gets some federal money, their chances of providing a sustainable, long term service to rural communities, is next to nil.

At a competitive cost?

No. It will have to be subsidized and should be. There is no excuse for not spending the few billion dollars needed to connect these people.

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