US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink
reuters.com
reuters.com
>RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
1. https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/what-do-starlinks-la...
Read the article you are referencing
> To justify its motivated reasoning, the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not. Undeterred by the facts, the Commission now resorts to twisting SpaceX’s words. For example, SpaceX said in a letter to the Commission that it had “reached a point in the development of its Starship launch vehicle and Gen2 satellites [such] that it can concentrate solely on Configuration 1 and no longer pursue Configuration 2” (emphasis added). Configuration 1 involves launching with Starship, and Configuration 2 involves launching with Falcon 9. Nothing in this sentence suggests that SpaceX needed Starship to launch Gen2 satellites, but that’s exactly the interpretation that the majority now relies on
Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V2 at 22 per launch regularly for a while now
>SpaceX asked the FCC to expedite approval now that it has settled on the Starship-launched configuration.
Regardless, to reach those obligatory speeds by 2025 they would need to launch an insane amount of satellites with no failures. If the FCC doesn't think they can do that, they don't get funding.
1. https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
The second round was designed to eliminate providers who didn't seem able to deliver on their promises even with the subsidies. It was made to prevent a situation where either party (but mostly the US Gov and tax payers by extension) was on the hook for unsuccessful delivery.
I'm not sure what happens with the funds that would have gone to Starlink.
There are two rounds of funding so it's possible unspent funds from the first round may roll over to fund the second round.
There are processes in place to gauge progress and viability along the way before handing over the bags with money.
SpaceX is hardly the only one who didn’t end up getting their share of the subsidies, it’s just the biggest with a very vocal person at the helm.
If Starlink bid for 25/3 they might have made it.
For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to believe. They can barely service what they have and the cost/benefit of laying 30 miles of wire to reach someone in the woods is never going to make sense.
https://www.internetforall.gov/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
https://spacenews.com/senate-armed-services-committee-to-pro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/30/elon-musk...
https://www.cnas.org/press/in-the-news/elon-musks-control-of...
https://babel.ua/en/news/98461-elon-musk-partially-transferr...
(disclosure: starlink customer)
That's an insane statement given the unprecedented success of SpaceX.
For someone who is such a fan, do you not know who your hero is?
As if this were a trivial task
I do see the benefit in resilience of building out fiber even to moderately unprofitable (from a unit economics point of view) regions, just like we also build roads to communities that will never "pay the investment back" in taxes. But there are cases where it just can't be justified.
But it's also not a simple either-or: There are other technologies than fiber and satellite; there can be more than one high-throughput LEO provider; we can have a few GEO satellites for redundancy (although with significantly worse latency) etc.
The "payback period" might well be infinite (with non-zero interest rates), in which case we're talking about a subsidy, not an investment. (Which might still be a good idea! It won't "pay for itself", though.)
I worked provisioning internet for the Telco that serves basically all of Northern Canada. 33% of Canada's landmass and only 0.3% of its population.
We're not talking about cities or even towns here, we're talking about very rural customers. Have you been to rural Alaska, or Montana or Wyoming?
I have, and you drive for hours with no cell service, let alone wires in the ground.
You are seriously underestimating the expense to run fibre to each of these customers. Some of our communities it was well over $1mil per customer.
Customers will have to pay for their own StarLink where the FCC won’t. Perhaps we should not be subsidizing folks where it costs $1M to deliver terrestrial connectivity to you. Cheaper to pay them to move.
They are not going to move. Period. I know this sounds snarky, but in all honesty if you had been to Alaska you would understand.
> Perhaps we should not be subsidizing folks where it costs $1M to deliver terrestrial connectivity to you
Or serve them with fast, reliable internet that is not terrestrial, and does not cost anything remotely close to $1M.
Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds ~61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches.
I don't think the FCC was wrong when they said Starlink could not reach 650,000 people at 100/20 by 2025. There aren't enough days to launch one rocket a day to even try to catch up.
At least without Starship, which I _personally_ think that they will manage to iron out their problems of the course of next year. But even then _this_ timeline they won't be able to keep
The 260 is a significant underestimate. It's likely 4-10x more
ISPs are not buying anywhere near that much transit bandwidth.
DISSENTING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER NATHAN SIMINGTON
>I wholeheartedly agree with the entirety of Commissioner Carr’s dissent. I write separately to further highlight some of the meretricious logic that underlies the Bureau’s, and now Commission’s, rescinding of SpaceX’s RDOF award. ... >I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it
All of that to say: this whole point you're making about "40% disagreed" or "20% disagreed" because the decision wasn't unanimous is really fucking dumb. The decision by the Commission is the decision, it doesn't matter how many dissents there are.
https://connect.farmerstel.com/front_end/zones
Yes, it's fiber. Yes, to the home. Currently, 93Mbps down, 83 Mbps up (but I have the cheap service). And the service is a crap-ton better than that of Spectrum in NC.
When it says "at least $4.4 billion" that leaves the door open for phase 1 fund rollover. We'll see eventually. Maybe Starlink can get some money in phase 2.
Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.
Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.
Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.
So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.
It's permanent but it depends on what the word practical means. Often the cost of setting up infrastructure for such low density population means the infrastructure will never pay for itself, or that the same money spent elsewhere would service many more customers, so its not necessarily practical.
Not when you're 50+ miles from the nearest anything.
Don't think of people that live kind of near a town and still get LTE. Think of people that drive for hours and still don't get LTE.
Thats telcom speak for "the check is in the mail".
When you say it is most likely political, it certainly is, because Carr and Simington (who was rammed through the Senate at the last moment by the Trump administration) are pretty much the definition of partisan. People who were paying attention to the development of this situation back in 2020/21 saw it coming.
At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/news/elon-musk-promises-to-double-...
[2] https://www.ookla.com/articles/us-satellite-performance-q3-2...
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.
Can we please just call it what it really is? Lying. He's a pathological liar.
No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.
> Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident
The real world describing this is delusional. Which I don't think he is (or was at that point anyway).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, simply asking you to show me the space you speak of.
Really? You don't see anything between "we're certain to fail" and "were going to accomplish this thing (even though we haven't got the slightest clue how) in X months"? Would you feel differently about it if Musk said they'll do it in 3 weeks? Because I don't, besides "6 months" being slightly easier to believe.
2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.
Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter
He's not one though. He's a business executive, so someone who in theory who would have the job to reconcile those lofty dreams with reality.
However, I'd bet quite a bit that the actual engineers and software developers were that optimistic and certainly didn't believe they could achieve FSD in 6 months (they'd be horrible incompetent engineers if they actually believed that).
It definitely does, although I don't understand why.
One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?
To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?
Maybe because it's a kind of lying, and people who do it on a regular basis are untrustworthy people?
> JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts.
Remember that he didn't phrase it as "we will do this", he phrased it as "this is our goal". He referred to it as a goal we're choosing, not as an inevitability.
Musk isn't goal-setting, he's making promises. The difference between the two is critical. One is being a leader, the other is being a liar.
In general, they don't seem to get as much negative attention in the media, and I'm guessing that's because they pay a fair bit for advertising.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_swit...
Almost every manufacturer's claims about EV production, range, etc.
Almost every manufacturer's claims about how hard and expensive it would be to add different safety features and/or fuel efficiency improvements.
A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.
Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.
JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.
And certainly there's a "pile on" element as well. Musk is, to put it mildly, a controversial character in general. It's easier to take someone you already don't like, and criticize them more harshly for other faults than you would for someone (like JFK, perhaps) that you otherwise generally like. Maybe that's not fair, but it seems pretty human-nature-y.
Another point: is there a way to make bold forecasts in order to motivate your employees, without making it feel like a promise to your customers? If so, Musk generally fails at that.
Your anecdotal experience is not a refuting of statistical data from the overall population of users. Starlink consistently does not provide that level of service to a large swath of its users.
More traditional offerings have a much easier time demonstrating they can do that, even if they haven't started physically building yet. It's very easy for them to say x amount of fiber capacity at this location will meet the program specs, and this is how fast we can install it.
This stage was to focus on if the bid accepted based off of the short-form proposal was progressing and likely to deliver as described by reviewing additional information provided in the long-form application. That is going to be easier for tech with an established delivery history.
It is true that more traditional offerings have an easier time demonstrating that they should be able to do that. But decades of traditional telecoms failing to hit promised targets demonstrates that they are unlikely to perform as promised.
That said, regulatory capture has let them regularly get away with the argument that you describe. Regulators motivated by politics and corruption have pretended to believe them. Non-incumbents therefore struggle to navigate their higher bar.
That is why I actually like the approach in the RDOF. It has regular progress check-ins built in, instead of the seemingly no strings attached grants given historically. This stage two review was "are you likely to succeed based on progress since stage one", but there are further delivery checkpoints that come with penalties and bonuses for under and over delivering.
Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.
It’s terrible.
Apparently Comcast has been experimenting/offering higher upload speeds for a while now, but it's still not available where I am.
The mountains are sparsely populated and heavily forested. Driving up and out of the valley you enter into a different world complete with legends of murder cults.
Its a car and motorbike mecca. Drive down the coast from San Francisco. Climb up the mountain at San Gregorio or further south, stop at Alice’s to look at the superbikes and super cars, and drive back down into the valley.
I'll say! In high school and college I had a 1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and I grew up on Highway 9 in Ben Lomond. I went to college at Santa Clara University and continued dating someone who lived off Highway 9 in Boulder Creek. I got to rip it over HWY 9 a few times a week! Such a lovely drive. Tho I lost a dear friend to a car accident on that road and I slowed down a lot since then.
According to three speed tests with the command line speedtest application I am getting these speeds with Starlink:
Download: 59.79, 88.52, 104.76 Mbit/s
Upload: 6.45, 11.42, 15.79 Mbit/s
You are benefiting from the rural broadband subsidies being applied well. A coworker of mine has lived in various rural Oregon towns through his career and regularly gets faster, more reliable, and cheaper broadband than I do in Portland. Not only that, but it's run by municipalities or coops and so you can often get to know the operators personally!
I think something that's often overlooked is when the Starlinks or TMobiles of the world win these subsidies: rural communities lose the potential to provide decent local tech jobs and offer customer service those of us in cities can't dream of.
If we're going to subsidize things, let's subsidize publicly owned infrastructure!
Related, "Tesla FSD Timeline":
> September 2014: They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [at the wheel] in a six-year time frame
* https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38625380 (earlier today)
but please, keep defending in bad faith
When asked the question "At what point will "Full Self-Driving Capability" features noticeably depart from "Enhanced Autopilot" features?"
Elon responded "3 months maybe, 6 months definitely"
Also, lots of examples of "this year" stated in various Januarys, and multiple instances along the lines of "complete autonomy in 2 years" going back 8 years.
I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar.
They did in fact diverge, no where was that a statement that FSD would be complete by then.
It's ironic you are calling him a liar when your response seems to either be completely dishonest itself or you are not aware of the subject at hand.
> By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.
So you're technically right- he said three months, not six.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5SfDmL0sv3w
At ~6:20.
So clearly didn't say that it would happen for certain
If you have proof of a direct quote where he says that FSD will be done withing 6 or 3 months for certain than please post it.
Otherwise, attacking me is dishonest
They're probably not carefully made, but fraud requires knowledge of falsity, and short of an internal report saying "this feature won't be ready before XYZ," it is going to be extremely difficult to prove Tesla knew the claims were false.
The other thing you'll run into is reasonability of reliance--at this point, with so many deadlines repeatedly blown through, it would be hard to demonstrate that a reasonable person could rely on a representation that a promised deadline would be met.
Somehow, this sounds like shifting blame from the liar to others ...
People are not complete fools and can learn to discount over-the-top rhetoric; sure, some people are harmed by believing everything verbatim, but those people also fall for scams, etc, etc.
His statements are parsed as statements of intent more so than actual timeline commitments. We'll have FSD in 6 months = FSD is our main priority at the moment. And sure it also makes for PR/free advertising. Is it scammy? Probably. But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
> Is it scammy? Probably.
It's the behavior of a con artist.
> But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.
It would be dumb to be caught "lying" over and over and Musk is not know to be dumb. Consider the possibility Musk is using reflexivity to accelerate progress. When people become convinced something is possible and work towards that goal their strong belief changes reality because there is a feedback loop between reality and beliefs.
Any normal person that manages to earn themself what Musk has earned might that affect their personality? Maybe make them more narcissistic etc? Large wealth would not affect your psychology?
Regarding bipolar: It would not surprise me but is there evidence? Did he admit it?
Also “earned” is a bit generous, he’s had a lot of “right people, right time, right place” in his life (not to mention a great start from the emerald mines).
Also why look at dumb things per day when what matters (to me) is the enormity of dumb actions? He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit. He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word. He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy. I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
Elephant does what elephant does and ants complain. What do you expect?
> He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit.
You don't make mistakes? Your ability grow wealth is superior? How then do you judge?
> He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word.
Might he be concerned about censorship in general? If something against the law it is against the law but what gives you the right to impose your notion of "proper" speech on others? Do people have a right not to be offended? The attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris by Islamic extremists you think they were justified due to being offended by cartoons?
> He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now you want to impose rules on others about who they are allowed to talk to in public?
> I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
Elephant does what elephant does. Ant does what ant does. You can not compare them. I believe strong feelings cloud your view.
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The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash: A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/t...
Does it? Is there no "average person should be aware" level?
The civil tort of fraud (criminal fraud is different) generally requires either knowledge of falsity or reckless indifference to the truth.
Or recklessness as to falsity - like not caring whether the statement was true or false.
That enables fraudsters, of course. Also, what about people who don't spend all their time on the Internet, on HN, reading about Elon Musk? They buy stocks and cars too.
2017 was before the infamous "funding secured" tweet, so I imagine there was no care in crafting his statements.
Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a measure of AGI), then, by definition, it would be close to as hard a problem as AGI itself.
Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.
So you look at what's left to do and as long as you don't run into any unforeseen issues you say, looks like about six months from now.
Sometimes you don't run into any unforeseen issues and it turns out to be about six months.
Sometimes you do, and then it takes longer. So a year later you found an unexpected problem that delayed you by a year. Someone asks you how long you think it will take again, that issue delayed you by a year but that was a year ago, so you say, looks like about six months from now.
Eventually the estimate will be true but nobody knows when because nobody knows how to make an accurate estimate. Because you have to know how hard it is to do in order to know how long it will take, which nobody knows until after somebody has actually done it.
- less than 3 months
- 3 months
- 6 months
Anything less than 3 months - is an accurate estimate. Otherwise, 3 months is the amount of time it takes to do _anything_, right? If it's a really hard problem, then we say, okay, it's 6 months. At the end of the day, those 3 months and 6 months means "NFC", which goes back to the estimation technique that everything is either a "1", "TFB", or "NFC". 3 months = TFB, 6 months = NFC
On a more serious point, we (as software engineers) generally feel we can solve almost any problem with 3 months worth of resources and effort. 3 to 6 months sometimes (IMO) can be a bit of the scariest estimate to give or receive.
For reference & more on NFC/TFB/1 estimation technique: https://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/26218/how-to-implemen...
Perhaps. Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months. I doubt Musk wasn't aware of that, so the only alternative that he was lying.
How do we know this?
Waymo has had this "almost" working for years. In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time, if you're sufficiently smart or lucky and have the right resources.
Or you could hit a wall for years.
The things currently happening with LLMs and image generation were the sort of things many people said were many years away, if not impossible, but we got there by basically throwing a lot of compute at some clever but relatively simple ML algorithms. Nobody knows until you try.
It's obvious that his estimates are optimistic, but optimism isn't inherently malicious.
Some life experience + common sense?
> In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time,
In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months.
> if you're sufficiently smart
If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself)
> LLMs and image generation were the sort of things many people said were many years away,
Does that include the people who were actually working on them in OpenAI?
> It's obvious that his estimates are optimistic, but optimism isn't inherently malicious.
In some cases it's either malice or stupidity/delusion.
If you asked people with "life experience + common sense" if generative AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong.
> In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months.
Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
> If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself)
I don't think he, or anyone, believes that it will definitely happen in six months. He's giving the optimistic end of the range, but everybody knows that.
> Does that include the people who were actually working on them in OpenAI?
Before they had them working internally? Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
GPT 3.5 / 4 were an iteration of previous models, their performance wasn't that exceptionally surprising if you were working in the field.
Also, these are fundamentally different problems. Self-driving requires massive amounts of real-world testing and then you have all the regulatory and safety/legal stuff to do. That's simply infeasible in 6 months no matter what. Generative AI has no such constraints.
> Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
So? I don't see any link to what we're discussing. Kennedy didn't really have that much direct involvement in the moon program.
What we're discussing is an equivalent of the head of NASA, in ~1966 or so publicly declaring that they'll send a crewed mission to the moon in 6 months (even though everyone knew that wasn't possible no matter how hard everyone worked).
> He's giving the optimistic end of the range,
He's just saying random unsubstantiated stuff because that's just what he does all the time (or because he wants to sell more cars IDK).
> Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
I'm pretty sure that was an iterative process, so they knew quite a while before it actually "worked" (could be released to the public).
The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.
- even human drivers cannot safely operate in all locations/conditions
- all self-driving cars will need a mechanism for cops to talk to a human
Are you suggesting that Waymo is there? I don't think the evidence would support that. Even if we relax that goal a bit so the self-driving car can disengage and refuse to drive in, say, the most difficult 20% of situations, I don't think we can say Waymo is there, either.
One can quite reasonably point out that level 5 autonomy has not yet been achieved without moving the level 5 goalposts.
IMO the truth is more with the experts. Each new location seems to require a lot of tuning to get right and function in a way the company is happy with. If a "self driving car" is one we can drop anywhere and have it drive we are still waiting on that.
There is a universe of difference between something like ParkShuttle (its own right of way, using magnets in the road to detect position) and modern autonomous vehicles. Saying modern autonomous vehicles have environmental constraints is valid, saying that makes then no different than a "people mover on wheels" is not.
The point is that "deployed to a limited area" is not what people are thinking when they talk about a "self driving car." Of course ParkShuttle isn't the same as Waymo (or any other modern self-driving car) - but the question is how far we've come!
Are you claiming Waymo is ready to drive anywhere in the world? I do not think that's Waymo's position. So where are we? Cut through the rhetoric and tell it like it is - or join the rest of us who are speculating from the sidelines with incomplete information.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
citation required
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
If I wanted to defend Musk I would do it explicitly. You don’t need to read between the lines.
Even CEOs who are an experts are by their very nature too biased to take at face value.
AI is a hard field to make predictions in.
Right but "hard to predict" does not mean "it will happen whenever I want it to happen". You can't look at a very hard problem, where a good sample of the world's experts say it will take more than 10 years to solve, and just say "I bet we can do it in 4 years" just because you want that to be true.
(The median expert prediction was between 2040-2060 previously, now quite a few people have moved that timeline to before 2035).
https://medium.com/@paul.k.pallaghy/chatgpt-did-any-one-remo...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k/forecastin...
https://research.aimultiple.com/artificial-general-intellige...
Check out for more predictions by experts:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/truth-advertising
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/investor_protection_guide_py...
You could just prosecute a politician if he didn't deliver what he promised, you know.
Outside politics (and depending on the context) this is called breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation or, say, false advertising or consumer protection violation.
It's also colloquially called "holding someone accountable".
What you’re asking for is a dictator. Politicians can’t unilaterally decide what happens by design. I think what you mean to say is that you want to prosecute politicians if they don’t vote in alignment with their stated goals, but even that is loaded in the US.
Let’s assume we’re talking about a liberal politician.
If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
No, I'm asking for the judicial system to prosecute politicians who make promises that they don't keep. Like they prosecute politicians in other instances of illegal behavior.
To be clear, I'm not saying that currently, it is illegal for politicians to make promises they don't keep. I'm saying it should be, in some form.
> If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
Obviously not. I'm not advocating for putting politicians in prison willy nilly. But we should at least prosecute the obvious, egregious instances of the kind of wrongdoing I'm talking about.
Besides, the whole concept of a "rider" is stupid, corrupt and should be illegal as well (just like it is in other areas of the law). Then you wouldn't have that problem.
It doesn't take very many doublings for this comment to go down with "why would anyone want Dropbox."
As a matter of full disclosure, being from Wisconsin, (home of the great FoxConn boondoggle), I now find myself firmly against corporate welfare. Giving a guy who's supposed to be the richest man in the world a billion dollars to provide me internet service? Nah, that doesn't smell right to me. Something's off about that.
These things are for people to deliver. Not people who don't have money to deliver.
That's why the billionaires kid working at the grocery counter gets paid the same even though he's chauffeured to work in a Bentley
I live exactly 13 miles away from T-Mobile HQ (one city over) and their service was unusable. I know, I know, anecdotal. But funny!
For a while I was tweeting at them regularly with screenshots, but got bored of the "DM us so we can resolve this right away" bots and realized I was screaming into the void. I ultimately wound up switching to Verizon.
Interestingly, T-Mobile service was far better in the 3 other major cities I lived in, but it's still pretty embarrassing that their service is so bad right in their own backyard.
You’re giving me PTSD here lol
The service and hotspot were quite reliable.
While at home - a rural area of northern CA, my fiber provider (which is also the backhaul for Verizon - my primary cell provider) went down for a couple days. The TMo hotspot was reliable, performant and served up both the work I needed to do and streaming TV just fine.
$50/mo with no penalty to activate/deactivate made me a fan. Years ago, TMo sucked a lot in the Santa Cruz area.
Delivered millions of EVs that everyone said would never work, dragging the entire car industry out of its stupor.
Delivered a vast electric charging network and made it available to the competition.
Delivered the best satellite internet.
Delivered rockets that NASA uses.
Delivered the most payload to space, more than even China.
Gee, imagine under-delivering that badly.
Starlink delivers a usable service that far exceeds hughesnet and other crappy alternatives.
Granted this is a five year old take and I haven't followed things, but as a rural in flyover country starlink is amazing.
It's not even 2024, and the targets are for 2025.
How long has T-Mobile been ramping up their program to achieve this 1.4M vs. 1.1M, and how much does the government subsidy ACP cover for this 1.4M in order to have those customers under T-Mobile? And it seems they are being fined $200M for not complying with the subsidy's rules [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tmobile-fine-idUKKBN27K25...
How dare they during a globally-disruptive pandemic?
"Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch."
From one of the dissenting opinions:
> the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the initial plan.
The dissenting letter unfortunately just says "no they didn't", but doesn't point to any documentary evidence. It's hard to accept it at face value when compared to the long form explanation. Especially when much of the "corrective action" taken by Starlink has come after the initial denial.
So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start properly estimating costs up front. Or maybe nothing would ever get done again.
I do wonder what the FCC is planning to do with these funds if they aren't funding Starlink. Are they going to go towards a "safer" project like Project Kuiper? Or maybe dumping it into Inmarsat?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancelled_military_pro...
F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list
Someone else pointed out the performance in Ukraine, but IMO this was already a settled point in 1991, when they collectively destroyed more enemy armor than the Abrams and only lost 3 vehicles to enemy fire.
The tests were a huge waste of money that conclusively proved that the Bradley couldn't survive an anti-tank missile, which is irrelevant because 1) the Bradley isn't a tank and was never required to survive one, and 2) the Pentagon already knew that; they'd tested the components individually already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gOGHdZDmEk
(28min 20sec)
And, no, that one set of photos from Ukraine of Bradleys damaged in a minefield has zero bearing pro or con given the 40 years of experience we have otherwise with it.
These days? The Bradley fucking rocks. My friends out in harms way love them.
The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones.
Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial budget is a bit moot since the point is to pay for a capability. That obviously doesn't apply here and the FCC wasn't offering a Cost+ program.
I wish it was; lol. The initial estimate was $18B [1]. I suspect you saw the $1.5B number for some sub-component of SLS. That's another common problem with government projects. The media will read some government report that says a new railroad will cost $1B and then report that the entire project will cost $1B while the report only talked about track cost and not about land acquisition, even environmental studies, or etc.
That said, yes SLS is over ($23B) the $18B budget and not done.
I do wish NASA would move closer to how DARPA does things where you payout a reward to companies that achieve some milestone. Somewhat close to what the FCC did here except the FCC is giving the money ahead of milestone. But there are pros and cons to this as government contracting is a pia so when you get into the situation of a single competitor it gets awkward.
Contractors not meeting their bids is a problem though. At the personal/corporate/government level I don't think people account for enough the fact that the contractor might not uphold their side of the bargin. Similar to how many people choose the cheapest insurance and then :surprise-pickachu-face: all their claims get denied.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System#Funding
SpaceX seems to have done well out of how NASA does bids for contracts. And that's for actual work done, not for fudgeable project milestones?
NASA already does this for a lot of things around ISS and Artemis. SLS is legacy bondoogle pushed by US Senate.
It's way more valuable, usually, to get it done quickly and done well the first time, so you can move onto another project. You leave a few people on the original program pull in tons of super easy maintenance contract money for what essentially ends up being a skeleton crew.
Or, I suppose, you could try and inflate costs by a couple percentage points (not too much - you'll get caught and the risk here is MASSIVE), keep working on the same program, and hope the opportunity cost doesn't get too high.
I'm sure it happens, but I doubt it happens often.
Cost+ at face-value isn't that bad of an idea. An alternative to it is the government hiring a bunch of people to do a project and ideally the government only pays Cost in that case. For people that don't believe the government can do anything this is a pretty good trade off.
IIRC, the `+` part is capped at 15% profit so IIUC that's similar to an operating margin of 15%. Although IIUC, executive expenses and a ton of other things come out of the `+` part so it should be lower than 15%. But the point I'm going to make here is that an operating margin of 15% isn't really impressive and that's the best that the contractor can do.
Actually, no, they seem to have been acting as a (predictable) monolith for at least the past three years...
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
this is not a true statement for a huge country with oceans on 2 sides and nukes. it is a true statement about people relying on the us military to make money tho
Having two oceans is great, but now you need at least two fleets.
Nukes are only worth something if you have a lot of them and can credibly delivery them in multiple ways. Now you need subs, long-range bombers and the fighters to protect them, and missile silos.
Now add in reliance on a global supply chain (many types of oil and minerals, grades of steel not made in the US, TSMC), and all of a sudden you need to be able to help protect your partners on the other side of the world.
Now sprinkle in a couple of crazy dictators with nuclear arsenals and huge armies of their own, and it's starting to make sense why the US military needs constant re-investment.
That was the CIA's plot, which the Navy vehemently objected to. The Navy said it was farcically complicated, too large of a plot to keep secret and likely to fail. Both proved true. The Navy offered to recover Intel from the Soviet submarine using DSVs and ROVs, low risk operations they could have easily kept secret. But the CIA won this dispute and fumbled the submarine and got putted by the press.
the "crazy dictator" theory is a conjuring of the govt and media in service of empire. they are acquiring nukes because they are afraid of being invaded by us!
Some sponsor anti-US terrorism.
Some are chomping at the bit to invade Europe (Russia) or Taiwan (China).
Some are just nuts (North Korea).
But now that these nutjobs have nukes, they’re all the more dangerous.
The role of the long-range bombers in the nuclear triad is heavily questioned. It is not quite certain that you "need" them.
The risk is just much higher with satellites than with buried fiber. If the FCC is trying to build more permanent networks, fiber in the ground is much more permanent.
It seems weird to me that we can run Cable TV to fairly remote locations but not fiber.
Plus they've shown themselves to be not trust worthy after they stole previous funds for fiber expansion.
This is, in fact, precisely the issue with government contracting. But not in the way you think.
For all practical purposes, every single government contract can be cancelled without warning and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Consequently, every single government contract is executed with that in mind.
This leads to all the pathological behaviors that everybody bitches about.
1) The money was granted in 2020 based on an inaccurate map (leading starlink & others to get funding for covering places like Target's and major airports)
2) This Starlink-FCC debate has been a protracted process, since then the program has essentially failed (a third of the money has gone to companies that didnt deliver)
3) Since then significantly more funding has been given to states for broadband, making this FCC program relatively small
It seems like the FCC is clawing back as much money as possible to try and recover from the initial auction design.
https://communitynets.org/content/worries-mount-rural-digita...
The latter is hitting the same problems everyone in the industry knew would happen. It costs too much money to maintain the launch cadence, speeds will suffer as the network gets congested, and latency will grow. All of these happened and are continuing to get worse.
https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...
https://www.speedtest.net/apps/cli
works good.
speedtest -f json -I eth0
Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.
Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.
Then my rural power company saved the day by stringing fibre to EVERY single drop in their system. 1000 symmetric but really more like 950/800 but I'm doing fine, thanks.
I really think fiber is it for rural internet. They have the will to do it and it's rolling out all over in some states.
While this is usually a bit more bandwidth than I get, that isn't consistent and the ping is much worse. I pretty consistently get 50/15 with 15ms ping at about $90/mo after tax+fees. Based on some of the hype and press Starlink gets I assumed it would have had much better bandwidth, even if the latency is about inline with my expectations. Thanks for gathering and sharing this.
Previously was on the only local competitor without data caps, 6 mbps via DSL. All others are either cell or satellite based and would destroy my wallet at my usually usage (<=1TB/mo).
Starlink has been a godsend.
A business/industry gets subsidies and is able to grow faster than it would have or just simply grow where nothing would before. Those businesses are then subject to taxes which the government collects and puts to use, which then benefits the populace at large.
But the point of a subsidy is to create a business where one did not, possibly could not exist before. Therefore the tax revenue coming from companies created by subsidies is in addition to other businesses tax revenue, not replacing it.
Tax expenditure in the ideal setting would be spent on clean water, education, etc. things that increase your welfare. And successful companies paying lots of taxes hopefully increase the welfare of a country.
So it is kind of like taxes emulate welfare increase...is the way I see it.
Culture is becoming so focused on only the money: I guess because capitalism appears to optimise for the single dimension of dollars so that is all we see.
Let's not forget the value of what we are buying: called "consumer surplus" in economics.
So often commenters seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities, but completely forget what we receive that isn't measured in dollars: in this case access to the internet for people in the boondocks ⃰.
Albeit I am not a US tax payer (however the USA charges me in many many other joyful ways).
⃰ 1940s: boondock from Tagalog bundok 'mountain'.
I want to make a counterproposal that should be perfectly in tune with that philosophy:
How about instead of receiving billions in subsidies, these corporations do the funding themselves and provide broadband internet to these rural communities at no cost?
Let’s not forget the value these corporations buy, which they call “goodwill” in economics.
So often, corporations seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities but completely forget what they receive that isn’t measured in dollars: in this case, provide a service to the society they benefit so much from.
You're just wrong end to end
Elon took over Twitter on October 27, 2022.
Where is the coincidence exactly?
But wouldn’t it something if we’d give that argument any merit.
You could be a billionaire that goes around and makes lofty promises that are never realized, treat your workers like shit, have the common populous play death by auto lottery, and so much more and the government couldn’t do anything about any of it because of *gasp* …the optics.
That would be a billionaire snake oil salesman’s wet dream right there.
It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have no problem profitably laying fiber where they are legally allowed to do so.
Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago).
I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….
Indeed, it is hard for me not to read this thread in that light; I’m guessing those that seem to oppose subsidizing rural fiber either already have theirs or have simply given up all hope of it ever happening.
<I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money
If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant.
>because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
My ISP has applied for these funds to bring fiber to my property. The original statement asserts they should not be allowed to receive funding. You seem to feel the same way, unless you genuinely believe that Starlink is in any way comparable to fiber. To be clear, it is not even close, and it never will be.
Rural citizens do not deserve to be left behind with speeds that are an order of magnitude slower than what everyone else has. We subsidize other utilities to reach everyone, and we have decided internet is critical to our society. It is time for everyone to pony up to fund access for everyone.
I dont think starlink is the same as fiber, but I also dont think fiber is a human right or even relevant for most people given a reasonable alternative.
It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
We spend millions of dollars on shiny buildings, parks, and other infrastructure in the city. Is it ridiculous that rural taxpayers massively subsidize those things just because you have made the decision to live there?
It’s a free country and you can live in the city if you want, but you shouldn’t demand the government provide more services for you than it does for its rural citizens.
Or do you think people should be given fundamentally and grossly differently opportunities, based solely on where they happen to live? Remember, before you annswer: not everyone gets a choice where they were born or live.
Even in the tiny rural village I lived in the last couple of years before I moved to the US, they did pretty much what you’re talking about (with the details being slightly different). Still, in true US fashion, this problem is deemed “uniquely American” and thus can’t benefit from the plethora of wheels invented overseas to solve this issue.
In my case, the fiber was paid for 50% by the municipality and 50% by a group of ISPs accessible for any ISP that would like to offer services, only realized if at least x amount of households would sign a promise they’d sign up for a contract with one of the ISPs for at least a year once infrastructure was completed.
This was easily accomplished because the ISPs offered a €30/month 1Gbps symmetrical connection in an area with shitty sub-10Mbps DSL that was at least twice that price and expensive asymmetrical DOCSIS at more than triple that price.
Here in the US, I’m in a rural area where the “best option” is 1Gbp down/20Mbp up at 4x that price.
Also, don’t underestimate how much people in the US hate taxes and governments spending money on useful things. My area has a volunteer firefighter department that cannot handle the entire area and has been trying to expand its tiny little footprint for the last decade.
Aside from the lack of equipment, the firefighters can’t even park at their fire station and instead have to park at a paid parking spot.
Just last month, there was a ballot initiative to raise the property taxes by $0.02, averaging to an annual property tax increase of a few dollars, so that they could fund the much-needed expansion of the fire station.
Of course, it failed. If the county were willing to fund fiber for the community here, there would be riots. Still, at the same time, everyone is always bitching about the internet and the lack of any cellular signal from any of the carriers.
If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here.
I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back?
And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground.
Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.
How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber
I use Starlink in my rural area and am grateful for it. But hopefully the $900M will be better spent on other ISPs. A particular problem with Starlink is if it fails, there's no infrastructure left behind. The fiber installs that RDOF is paying for should outlive the companies getting the grants.
[1] https://www.starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1400-28829-70
This happened in the past all the time, particularly in Ajit Pai's version of the FCC. But the RDOF process seems different. In particular the FCC is actually measuring performance, not just relying on ISP's self-reported numbers. AT&T was really good at strategically lying about those in the past.
https://gist.github.com/LukeLambert/dd722e49bc773bcb27e859d9...
I’m looking at Lambert’s data, but aside from the problem of sample size, it seems to support the FCC’s reading of the situation.
There are barely any samples that hit the required >= 20Mbps up and while it’s easier to spot >= 100Mbps down, it’s far from consistent and seems to be more of a “once a day” occurrence.
Odd that they'd include comments about Starship in it, though. That doesn't seem like a requirement for continued development of Starlink and seems very speculative. There could be details on that aspect that I'm missing though.
I think the metric is 'more likely than not meet peformance goals in 2025'. The technology itself is capable of the goals of latency and bandwidth.
There’s a set of metrics to meet. Starlink is moving the wrong way against those metrics. As such, they’ll need to succeed unaided in the marketplace, instead of getting a government handout.
That would just move it from private company suck to nation-state suck. It needs to be regulated by the International Telecommunication Union (UN).
no, because the only reason Starlink doesn't currently hit the metrics is due to them having so many users joining. They could hit the metrics by temporarily halting signups, cutting off users, or delaying the Pentagon's massive deployment project.
Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
>U.S. defense officials had previously estimated that the annual cost for Starlink in Ukraine, which Musk mostly had been donating, will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/...
The tech is proven to work, the FCC is just playing politics.
I’m actually curious, what is their userbase and where can I find the info?
Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)
Its nearest ground station bounced off nearest satellite, or some inter-satellite laser links to make some hops, then to the user. It's optimized to be shortest route, just like routers with the wired internet you're using now: if you stream a movie, that request goes to in a short path from the server to you. You streaming doesn't slow down someone in China, because the data never approaches any equipment in China. Same with Starlink. Their data never approaches any starlink satellites in the US. When they get the whole grid laser link working, then it might, but it will still approach being optimal, with ground stations used as needed.
Ground vs laser is a latency thing, more than a bandwidth thing. No need to stream Netflix with low latency.
I admittedly don't know much about this process, but with a billion dollars on the line, why wouldn't they have presented these options? It's not like this came out of nowhere, Starlink knew that they were not meeting their obligations and was given a chance to present their case.
I don't know, it just seems like it would be pretty easy to halt signups for a month, show that speeds increased drastically as my launches got ahead of my signups, and then explain to the FCC why this would be the normal state of affairs at some point in the future. Or, don't even actually halt signups, just make a convincing case about why halting signups would drastically increase speeds, and by 2025 you plan to do whatever you need to do to hit that 100/20 metric, but right now you're trying to do the most good for the most people, which means more signups and lower speeds.
For a billion dollars, these all seem like easy & obvious arguments to make if they were at all viable.
Anyway, I think that if Starlink can prove that they're making progress towards their commitment, they become eligible for the subsidy again, so if halting signups is really a viable strategy and they really care about the billion dollars then it seems like they should do that.
Are you talking about the SDA Starshield constellation? That isn't launching yet, the contract is for development. Starshield has nothing to do with Starlink except using the same platform and taking up launch slots.
I like how you didn't mention that Starlink could solve capacity problems by launching more satellites.
Yes it does. See [0]:
> SpaceX is providing a best effort and global subscription for various land, maritime, stationary and mobility platforms and users... The task order for Starshield services is provided by the Starlink satellite constellation but is differentiated from the commercial Starlink service based on unique Department of Defense terms and conditions that are not found in commercial service contracts.
Translating the bureaucratese, the US military is buying access to the existing Starlink constellation under the umbrella of "Starshield". They have a special contract and no doubt lots of additional paperwork and oversight of Starlink operations.
I can understand your confusion, because there's also SDA's plan to build its own in-space communications backbone, for which SpaceX has been contracted, and SpaceX's plan (under Starshield) to build custom satellites on a Starlink bus to host defense payloads, so it's easy to get the impression that there will be the civilian Starlink and military Starshield constellations and they'll be entirely independent.
But that's not the case, and it would be really dumb if it were. The Starlink constellation's sheer size provides an immense amount of resiliency and reserve bandwidth that is of great military benefit, and that's been funded by commercial customers. Just like how the DoD no doubt tunnels its secure networks over the civilian internet rather than laying its own transoceanic cables etc., there's no reason for it not to make use of the existing Starlink constellation and many reasons to.
[0]: https://spacenews.com/spacex-providing-starlink-services-to-...
That doesn’t sound right. Satellites over Ukraine cannot be reached anywhere from the US and they also wouldn’t use the same gateways. So I could see the use of starlink in Ukraine possibly slowing service in Europe. But I cannot see how it would affect customers in the US.
> "...implement an operations plan for the orderly de-orbit of satellites nearing the end of their useful lives (roughly five to seven years) at a rate far faster than is required under international standards.
Obviously there are many unknowns in factors like hardware reliability or fuel consumption.
The new satellite designs got a bit mired in regulatory complications until December of 2022, but it turned out to be moot since they’re too big and heavy to get up to orbit without Starship’s lift capacity and Starship isn’t there yet (and might not be within the period the subsidy contemplated). After the decision to cancel the subsidy (which is on appeal here) was taken back in 2022, Starlink seem to have rejiggered the 2.0 satellites into a “2.0-mini” configuration suitable for launch via Falcon 9 [2].
Apparently they would like for the FCC to reconsider the subsidy decision in light of them engineering around the Starship dependency?
[0] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/spacex-starshi...
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/starlinks-current-pro...
> What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead? In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022 (and about two million in September 2023). The majority’s only response to this point is that those other recipients were relying on proven technologies like fiber, while SpaceX was relying on new LEO technology.
Unfortunately, most of the public won’t know or care about this blatant corruption and crony capitalism
The revolving door between regulators and industry keeps on turning
Seems straightforward and doesn’t seem to matter, as far as I can tell, how many other companies couldn’t meet the requirements or don’t have the hardware to meet those requirements or whatever.
Unclear why this is “blatant corruption” or “crony capitalism” and in fact seems to be based in facts. Can you explain?
But I must admit that I haven't read all of the history here.
For starters, last year (when this initial decision was made), a total of 22 applicants defaulted (i.e., didn’t meet the requirements)[0].
Some didn’t get their funding in order, others didn’t get their ETC certification arranged in time, others didn’t provide a viable proposal, and some withdrew their bid.
SpaceX falls in the latter category.
It’s important to understand that throughout the process, viability and progress are looked at, and rightly so; we’re talking about billions of dollars in taxpayer monies, and it would be silly to only look at the deadline and go “Whelp, you didn’t make it, guess the money is gone now.” Particularly when clawing back the money would be very cumbersome with someone notorious for not paying their bills and what they owe.
There are a couple of minimum requirements; for this debate and simplicity, I’ll highlight the minimum speed, which is 25/3Mbps.
You could’ve bid to provide service at that minimum level, but you also could bid for a higher speed tier (the speeds are divided into different tiers)[1].
Bidding a higher tier comes with a higher amount of subsidies, but it also means you need to meet the requirements of that higher tier. There is no “Oh well, just give me the subsidies of the lower tier”; you either meet the requirements tied to your bid or you don’t.
SpaceX made a bid for the “Above Baseline” tier, which requires them to provide 100/20Mbps.
There are a couple of ways the FCC tries to evaluate if the applicant can comply with the FCC requirements.
For one, they look at the technology the applicant said they would use. Mature and more reliable technologies will provide a clearer picture than newer and less reliable technologies, of course. I don’t think anyone here will argue that LEO satellites can provide the same consistency and quality in experience as fiber, for example.
They also look at historical achievements, especially concerning newer technology such as LEO satellites. Most other applicants don’t use LEO satellites but instead use fiber, for example.
Whether the fiber equipment is in use in RDOR areas or not is irrelevant; if the applicant says they’ll use the same equipment they’re operating in a different region, you can pretty much expect the same performance.
Starlink’s performance has been declining, with upload already falling well below 20Mbps.
Another part they look at is the long-form applications by the applicant (i.e., their plan for achieving it all). If the strategies aren’t realistic or based on predictions and assumptions that rely too much on unlikely positive outcomes, they are not considered reliable.
Again, it’s easier to put a shovel in the dirt than it is to launch rockets, so the historical performance of laying the infrastructure is going to look different depending on the technology used.
The fact of the matter is that Starlink is still too much of a question mark in a lot of points and not performing as expected and required, coupled with customers needing to purchase a $600 dish[2] and the FCC is rightfully going to wonder if it’s all achievable or not and if they money they manage is being put to good use.
That’s why, back in August of 2022, when the original decision was made, they summed it up as such[3]:
> The Bureau has concluded its review of LTD Broadband’s (LTD) and Starlink’s long form applications. LTD proposes to deploy gigabit fiber to 475,616 estimated locations in 11 states.64 Starlink, relying upon a nascent LEO satellite technology and the ability to timely deploy future satellites to manage recognized capacity constraints while maintaining broadband speeds to both RDOF and non- RDOF customers, seeks funding to provide 100/20 Mbps low latency service to 642,925 estimated locations in 35 states. The Bureau has determined that, based on the totality of the long-form applications, the expansive service areas reflected in their winning bids, and their inadequate responses to the Bureau’s follow-up questions, LTD and Starlink are not reasonably capable of complying with the Commission’s requirements. The Commission has an obligation to protect our limited Universal Service Funds and to avoid extensive delays in providing needed service to rural areas, including by avoiding subsidizing risky proposals that promise faster speeds than they can deliver, and/or propose deployment plans that are not realistic or that are predicated on aggressive assumptions and predictions. We observe that Ookla data reported as of July 31, 2022 indicate that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, including upload speeds that are falling well below 20 Mbps. Accordingly, we deny LTD’s and Starlink’s long-form applications, and both are in default on all winning bids not already announced as defaulted. Because LTD has defaulted on its remaining winning bids, we also dismiss as moot LTD’s petition for reconsideration of the Bureau’s denial of its request for additional time to obtain an ETC designation in Nebraska and North Dakota.
Remember that by this time, SpaceX had hitched this wagon to their Starship configuration, abandoning the Falcon[4].
By now, when the FCC was looking if they should reconsider, the Starship program wasn’t doing so hot, only reaffirming their decision of last year.
0: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-proposes-over-8m-fines-agai...
1: https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904 under Fact Sheet
2: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-386140A1.pdf
3: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-848A1.pdf
4: https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
SpaceX has stated they’re going to use Starship for this, going as far as stating early last year that they were exclusively going to use Starship.
So obviously, when the FCC is going to weigh if SpaceX is going to be able to meet the requirements of their bid, they’re going to look at the plan presented to them by SpaceX. In the FCC’s defense, they apparently asked SpaceX questions regarding concerns they had, but SpaceX didn’t answer.
Meanwhile for the past 2 years Starlink is the only service I can actually use with any reasonable stability and low(ish) latency. They have at times delivered up to 200Mbps down and 20 up but it is not consistent. I have much more faith that they will deliver 100/20 consistently by 2025 than Charter will be delivering gigabit to me by then.
So now I have 3gbps fiber to the house, after 10 years of surviving on low bandwidth capped expensive Internet despite being proximous to the suburbs of the biggest city in Canada.
It may be in the end something like Starlink ends up being like Google's Fiber was in the cities it went into -- a fire lit under the bigger providers, forcing them to actually do something.
Seems like a shitty way to get society's infrastructure built though, doesn't it? Imagine if the power grid had developed this way.
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.
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.
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
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.
Under this program there's no option of another org replacing a denied org. Who's stepping up for LTD broadband for example?
Where do people get this from?
Maybe there will be a future award. But there's no rollover here.
1. Money is fungible
2. Grant applications are still open
So money not spent on SpaceX can go to a future application.
Which part is embarrassing to the FCC, exactly?
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.
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...
This isn't like cable or fiber where the technology is already mature and it's simply the business case.
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.
All, please disregard my comment and refer instead to this top comment instead:
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.
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.
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.
WISPs rely on a local enthusiastic person to make it work.
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
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.
It can work.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/cable-lobby-to-f...
No one else comes even close. You can't run fiber there, can't mount towers everywhere.
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.
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".
How are you getting phone/power?
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.
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 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.
This suggests that they are in the black, which they are not. They are losing a lot of money.
https://www.reuters.com/business/elon-musks-spacex-turns-pro...
For a company that doesn't need money, they seem quite upset that they aren't getting much of it.
You can see NEVI as an example.
Exactly - because they were/are getting boatloads of cash from the government. There is no shame in that.
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
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.
What I have seen is that the cell will start to fill up, speeds slow down a little (still better than our WISP and other Satellite providers), then the cell closes. More satellites launch, speeds go up, and the cell opens again. It's my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. I've had it since the original beta / before 100% coverage.
Most of the complaints I see are from people with existing cable options. It is not as good as cable/fiber, but a complete game changer for those of us who have had flakey connections.
SpaceX didn't apply for 25/3, they applied for 100/20. The rest of your comment matches my experience.
DISSENTING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER NATHAN SIMINGTON
In one paragraph he said Biden is targeting Musk politically, and in the very next he states, as proof of the quality of the internet service, that the Pentagon just signed a contract with Starlink for military applications.
I do hope that the companies that do get it are providing proper fiber service though rather than the many many years of companies who were way slower than Starlink getting it.
The FCC rural broadband program is an infamous boondoggle of vast overspending on bad services from third rate providers.
It's insane that they even mentioned Starship in this, when it was a test launch of the largest rocket in history, and has nothing to do with the Starlink launches.
The letter was even picked up by media who then reported on this early last year.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-goes-all-in-on-starship-configu...
SpaceX started launching V2 satellites on Falcon 9, but they can only fit 22 on each rocket instead of the 50 or so with previous version. Even with their increased launch rate, there is no way they can launch the tens of thousands of satellites they have planned.
> I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it.
Sounds to me like he’s encouraging SpaceX to sue the FCC
"If Mr. Musk follows through on his stated intention to ease Twitter's restrictions on speech, he would almost certainly enhance competition and better serve those Americans, the majority, who value free speech. ... We should instead applaud Mr. Musk for doing something about a serious problem that government has so far failed to address."
A very unbiased party who has no ulterior motives at all to consider things out of scope.
[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-382898A1.pdf
This wasn’t a special Starlink project, this was an entire auction with many participants.
NB.
Should =/= does
"Should" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence.
If Starlink dosen't meet requirements today, they can improve and meet them in the future. Meanwhile, this seems like more of an effort to unfairly pre-empt funds going to other competitors.
> the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
I think the metric was 'more likely than not achieve the metric by 2025' and the decision was made in 2022.
Given Musk's track record, it is very reasonable to treat any timeline with a shipload of salt. He literally took $thousands from thousands of customers for Full-Self-Driving upgrades that were to transform their Teslas into self-driving Uber/Lyft goldmines by 2021, not 2022, not 2023, no... oops, recall 2 million yesterday because of safety failures in "autopilot" that isn't. Even with the assumption that Starship is not part of the equation, Starlink still is falling down on bandwidth reliability as subscription exceeds capacity.
Space X is not Elon Musk. It's a company with its own staff, with its own track record, so let's set aside any emotional arguments about FSD from Tesla, which is completely unrelated and which itself is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The "recall" from Tesla, again a completely unrelated issue to SpaceX and the Starlink internet service, was simply a required software patch. Millions of vehicles get recalled all the time from all car manufacturers:
"Ford is recalling 870,701 of the bestselling pickups from 2021 through 2023"
"About a quarter of a million 2016–2019 models are under recall for a connecting rod defect that can cause the engine to stall or not start, including the Pilot, Odyssey, Ridgeline, and Acura TLX and MDX."
"2013–2018 Toyota RAV4s Recalled Due to a Potential Fire Risk The increased fire risk stems from loose-fitting 12-volt batteries, with the recall affecting nearly 1.9 million RAV4s."
The Starlink service is popular, because it generally works, and it's better than what a lot of people even have available to them in many parts of the country or in specific situations (like fulltime RVers).
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/27/1202075844/kia-hyundai-recall...
Right. And the issue is the ratio of popularity to supply. A neighbor near a family cabin in rural Maine, where the service is only copper ~10mbps down/1 up and more expensive that FIOS at home just installed two Starlinks. They're generally satisfied, but the first thing they mentioned is occasional slow speeds.
The officials in charge of the contract must ensure that the required service level will be met. Granting nearly a Billion dollars to provide a level of service, and then having them say "sorry, it's too popular and everyone is slow" will not cut it. Everyone (I hope including you) would be screaming about wasting taxpayer dollars on a service that did not provide the service.
I'm sure one fix for Starlink would be to offer a prioritized service level for all of the rural broadband customers. Yes, this could mean that RVers might just wind up with no service at some times and locales, but if Starlink really wants that contract, perhaps they should offer that assurance.
Starlink+Falcon+Starship have so far cost less than SLS+Ares+Orion development.
The best you could have got would have been something like Oneweb. Prices available online.
It only makes sense to save taxpayers money by being subsidized even more.
If they need money to do their deployments, they can take their FCC awards to the bank and get a factoring loan. And if their plan is not solid enough to convince a bank, it's not solid enough for FCC money either.
Like you said, one just has a cult attached to it.
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/rdof-phase-i-dec-2...
didn't elon switch off starlink for ukrainian forces in the middle of an attack that one time?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
On Friday, Isaacson tweeted a clarification, writing that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/12/elon-musk-biog...
The government was refusing to pay their bills.
They've fattened his wallet with starshield.
This denial happened ages ago. This article is a response to the appeal.
Bezos got tax credits for having kids
Foreign nations think that they're going to use Starlink to commit further genocide; that they run the show for this American company.
"MUST DENY"
If you cut off Internet service to emergency service personnel (with the red crosses) here, is that a war crime?
The X beatings will continue until the tweeting improves.
I'd imagine that there are also concerns about the close ties Musk has to the Russians and how he's tried to insert himself into the Ukrainian conflict on numerous occasions.
[1] Not the largess of traditional government contractors Lockheed and Boeing, but the plethora of startups entering into this space.
Your argument is completely detached from reality, and devoid of logic.
> While Starlink faults the Bureau for relying on the most recent available data at the time of its decision to evaluate is existing network performance, Starlink does not explain what other data source the Bureau should have used in lieu of using the most recently available data. When the Bureau's decision was made, the most recent available evidence showed that "Starlink’s performance had been declining for download speed, upload speed, and jitter test performance." In other words, it was not only failing to meet the RDOF public interest obligations, but also trending further away from them.
(edited to fix formatting)
We no longer live under the rule of law, there is no equality brfore it, nor do the gears of justice turn without bias, lady justice isnt blind.
But yeah, we can all pretend and lie and make up bullshit excuses that will change on whim. Again, we have so much extensive documentation and people keep pretending it doesnt exist. Perhaps like my comment, does it exist for you?
I didn’t find the article especially clear on this point, but it sounds like Starlink says that if the decision were taken today rather than in 2022, the performance data wouldn’t look so dire, and the FCC might have more faith in their promise to launch high-performance payloads with Starship during the grant’s required timeframe, is that what you mean?
1. Tesla gets no invite to whitehouse EV summit despite being the sole reason for the current EV movement
2. Tesla model 3/Y initially barred from new EV subsidies
3. SpaceX being investigated by justice department for not hiring foreigners (literally illegal due to ITAR)
4. NASA awards blue origin more than it awarded SpaceX for lunar lander despite them having zero orbital rocket experience or even a proper roadmap to orbit
5. FAA drags heels on approving starlink tests preventing progress on the requirements they say were failed to have been met today
6. Today's news about FCC revoking subsidy for the only company that actually cares to provide highspeed internet to rural Americans, which congress has appropriated funding for several times in the past two decades, and rewarded companies have failed to deliver on
It's safe to say any kind of bullshit can be justified (with even more bullshit reasons), so it's hard to believe actions like this are made good faith. I'm not just going to trust criminals because they're robbing someone I don't like.
Why would Tesla be at a summit on union-made EVs? If you look at the actual speech Biden gave at the event, a lot of it is pretty counter to Tesla's anti-union stance: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
Anybody else but Trump would be in prison already for what he has done (urging his followers who he knew to be armed to "go to the capital and Fight Like Hell"). So it is true that equality before the law is definitely lacking in action.
Another thing that makes me agree with "there is no equality" is that when you follow the news you see things like Giuliani owes his lawyers over million dollars. So it seems you need over a million dollars to get justice. Or alternatively, you can try to avoid justice, by spending millions.
Trump says he has "over $100 million in legal fees"
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4282653-trump-s....
So again it seems you need $100 million to get justice, or alternatively to escape from it. How can justice that costs $100 million be fair and equitable to all?
1. It looks like the commission believes Starlink is trending away from the targets rather than toward them, and that can't help their case.
2. It's hard for me to see how there would not be at least some political considerations here. The fact that this program exists at all is a political decision. So it's part & parcel of the playing field — which is probably why most leaders work hard to not piss off their regulators.
It's like standing in front of a train and not moving because you asked the conductor to stop.
What happens when they reach 2025 and billions of dollars have gone down the drain? Why wait?
You have to show you can do most of it yourself i.e raise the money.
After a %age deployment the FCC checks if you've met the deployment timeline and checks your speeds then starts paying you and keeps testing as you deploy according to the timeline.
You don't get a dime upfront.
Until there's actual evidence, I would be inclined to dismiss them.
I've seen no evidence supporting that claim, and lots of evidence to counter it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38633303
IMO not political. I remember Ajit Pai didn't want starlink
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A3.pdf
> What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead? In 2022, many RDOF (the award in question) recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022 (and about two million in September 2023).
And this scathing conclusion:
> I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it. -- FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington
That said, how the dissenters characterize it is nowhere near how it works. They’d like you to believe that you won a bid, and from then on, it’s “OK, talk to you at the deadline, enjoy our money!”
Instead, it seems to me that it’s a continuous process where you must present plans along the way, and progress is measured, as it should be because we’re dealing with billions in public funds.
The idea that this is exclusively targeted at Musk is also just nonsense. This article[1] states that Terrestrial telco LTD Broadband also lost their allotment of subsidies, and a cursory glance at the documents on the FCC website shows that many other companies lost theirs either due to withdrawing or having “defaulted” (i.e., not followed through on the promises/requirements).
But none of that is compatible with the victim narrative of Musk et al., of course Musk was the biggest in the subsidies; the other companies won smaller projects.
0: https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904
1: https://spacenews.com/fcc-upholds-denial-of-starlinks-900-mi...
RDOF requires speed testing of the devices deployed under RDOF, not the entire network.
If say you have a 900Mhz network and you plan to deploy 5GNR for fixed wireless, they don't get to tell you you can only achieve 1 Mbps right now.
You don't need to start deployment till you get the money. And there's deployment and testing steps.
The point was that it’s not some conspiracy against Musk, there are others that defaulted. Other than LTD and SpaceX there are 20 others that defaulted last year for varying reasons.
> RDOF requires speed testing of the devices deployed under RDOF, not the entire network.
You’re talking about seeing if the requirements are met at the end, the FCC and I are talking about looking at how feasible and likely it is that the requirements are going to be met before handing the bag with money.
> If say you have a 900Mhz network and you plan to deploy 5GNR for fixed wireless, they don't get to tell you you can only achieve 1 Mbps right now.
No they don’t. But they do get to tell you how feasible your plan is, how realistic your schedule is and how likely it is 5GNR is going to meet the requirements of your bid based on the knowledge of the technology and historical performance at prior implementations.
When you submit a LEO satellite bid with the exact same specifications as the ones you currently use, then you can’t then around and cry when they look at its current performance and performance trends.
> You don't need to start deployment till you get the money.
True, but you do need to present a plan that isn’t based on lofty promises and has a that explains why it’s likely you’ll be able to meet the requirements of your bid.
Edit: Just now realized that you’re wrong on not having to build anything, there are buildout requirements.
The build requirements, like the speed requirements are for 2025
Instead, use > *quote*. It’ll be unindented but readable, which is an improvement over being indented but unreadable:
> While Starlink …
Quote from the article:
>Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale! They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it (to) those who aren’t getting the job done
Are these other companies meeting the targets? If not then it seems pretty arbitrary to reject just SpaceX for not doing so yet.
>In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so
Maybe this is just more spin from people who want to turn this into another political battleground. It's not entirely clear to me, but it seems like there is room for doubt.
Lol, what is the FCC on? No one else comes even close to their launch record [1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He....
SpaceX themselves have said that the future of their satellite internet business essentially depends on being able to put up a bigger model to replace the current ones, so much bigger that they can't feasibly use their existing, well-proven rockets to launch them.
For the record: I'm not commenting on whether the government was right or wrong to cancel the subsidy for SpaceX. I'm simply explaining why SpaceX's inability (so far) to get Starship to orbit is referenced, and more specifically, why the launch reliability of Falcon 9 is specifically not relevant in a sentence that says "Starship".
Starlink is probably one of them. A perfect 'business' for Musk. You can show something great - high speed internet in remote areas - and then extrapolate that - just think about the whole world etc... Faster than fibre, with V2...
Thing is, this business is probably not economically viable. It can work if not a lot of people use it - but it's maintained afloat by government money. But if 10x customers sign on, bandwidth will completely plummet and it won't be such a great service anymore.
But in the meantime, and it's quite a long time, Elon can continue to extract billions $ of taxpayers money.
FSD is coming any day now right?
SpaceX have re-iterated this on many, many occasions.
Anyone who things otherwise simply doesn't understand the product.
Starlink is designed for people who live in remote areas that have no access to any of that.
Go out right now and see how life changing it is for those people. All across Northern Canada & rural Australia I've met dozens of people who previously had access to dial-up AT BEST in 2022, and now have solid broadband connections.
Elon advertised that in 2019 or something already.
I don't deny it is life changing for those people ! All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government.
No. It was never designed or advertised to offer "faster than fibre" connections to end users, and all along Musk and maintained it makes absolutely no sense for a person to use Starlink if they already have access to a ground-based option like fibre or cable or LTE.
> All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government
Those are wild claims.
Please post citations about how it's bleeding money or is supported by the government.
They are all based on re-inventing the wheel (quite literally) for political purposes and government money extraction.
You'll never find the guy developing something that customers really want such as self-checkout system that doesn't suck, because there is no Government money to be extracted from it.
Now let's talk SpaceX - people who are not familiar with the space industry don't realize how much SpaceX fundamentally changed the industry - before SpaceX it was like two players in the space launch area, and they used to charge government a shit ton of money for each launch, often using Russian engines. SpaceX made it so cheap that it was hard for anyone to compete, and their offerings are so cheap when compared to anyone else (and sometimes they are the only launch option US) that even competitors are compelled to use SpaceX. You being a Musk hater would argue that all the government launch contracts to SpaceX are 'subsidies' but nope, they launches were gonna happen whether SpaceX existed or not. SpaceX only saved government tens of billions of dollars by reducing the launch costs.
I can keep going on but it wouldn't matter to you. Customers really wanted SpaceX. Everyone who uses Starlink really wants it, go talk to actual users. Just because the products the guy is developing doesn't align with your notion of what customers really want doesn't mean if it's something useful.
Starlink would exist without this subsidy from the government. That doesn't mean that Starlink should not try to get a share of the subsidy that government offered to all the players in this market. If you have a problem with the subsidy complain about the government, not one of the many beneficiaries just because you hate the guy that owns the company.
It's the same old car ownership experience that our grandfathers experienced in 1970s, Tesla was founded in 2002 and I can find cars from that year on the used market which are more aestetically pleasing and have much better interiors quality and still beat Tesla cars (or should I say boats given how heavy they are?) around a racetrack which is the true measure of a car performance. Picture this , a 20 year old Mercedes or BMW with better interior and better looks can beat a brand new 2023 Tesla lap time around Laguna Seca or the Nurburgring , and also it will be able to go around the track for hours and hours whereas the Tesla would overheat and leave you stranded on lap 2.
We are going backwards in the name of politics, that cannot be accepted quitely, it's stupid and un-American. Solely done in the name of politics and Government money extraction.
> > Customers really wanted SpaceX
90% of global population lives in urban areas, that's only going to increase, so that's 90% who will never need SpaceX. You have to go and pick your sample with a searchlight to get the result you want, and even then only about 30% are going to be happy with the service considering that SpaceX is cutting their download speed all the time compared to what they clocked at the time of first installation, that's predatory.
This does not mean you should use it if you have fiber available at your house. This means you should pay for transit over it if you need to have low-latency overseas connections, for instance for HFT or piloting drones.
That's a nice story, but can you do some math to substantiate it? For instance, is there some fundamental limit between how much bandwidth a satellite can provide, how much it costs, and how much the monthly subscription is?
Ok let me rephrase my comment:
Maybeeeeeeee Musk shouldn't be helping America's enemies?
SpaceX interfered with the conflict by sending equipment and allowing them to be used for the conflict.
You're essentially saying SpaceX should have waited until the DOD contracted for services
There's a guy in the UK who sent his APC to Ukraine. He didn't just have it delivered via a truck. He handed it over to the UK MoD. That's how these things are meant to be done.
Is it perfect? No. Is musk being an asshole about it? Probably, haven't checked. Are the people complaining about it mostly NIMBYs who care largely because Musk has a (deserved) bad rap? Yes, absolutely.
This is a very marginal issue, folks need to calm down.
Is it? Why do we need to visually see, basically permanently, a ring or string of lights in the sky, unwittingly, just because of some billionaire?
> You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them.
That doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter if you know where they're at if they're in your way. Telescope time is extremely precious and expensive. Not to mention, these megaconstellations have basically permanently increased the background noise in various spectrums. Not all astronomy uses the visual spectrum.
> They're not even a problem for large portions of the night and sky at all because there's very little light for them to reflect.
That's not true. You can see them with your own eyes.
Your eyes can roll all they want. It doesn't make the problem go away.
That's so beyond false it's difficult to even respond to. Do you understand the size of the telescopes, both optical and radio?
Do you understand the complexity of space-based instruments like the James Webb and Hubble telescopes?
There are upsides also.
> You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them.
You could for example not collect from the relevant photosites during transit, we're not using photographic plates anymore. This is not some sort of insurmountable problem, I'm not claiming it's not a problem, but it is not an astronomy ruining problem. As an indirect result of starlink we have also vastly decreased the cost to put an telescope in space.
> That's not true. You can see them with your own eyes.
You absolutely can't see them in the earth's umbra, they're only 500km high, the umbra represents a significant portion of the sky.
I have seen them with my own eyes and they've been filmed. It's just not correct. It's particularly visible when the sun is hitting them. You can find several photos and videos of them from the ground.
https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-reaffirms-rejection-nearly-...
I'm pretty convinced that this ruling was a bit horseshit.
So what's horseshit about it?
It's supposed to only cover deployments under the award itself.
> Starlink in use on ‘all front lines,’ Ukraine spy chief says
> “They have proven themselves on the front lines. You can say what you want about whether [Starlink systems] are good or bad, but facts are facts. Absolutely all front lines are using them,” Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate, said Saturday, according to Interfax Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/10/europe/ukraine-starlink-not-a...
Crimea is under occupied territory and didn't have Starlink activated, so it's wrong to say they deacivated it.
Musk can't just randomly decide to give Ukraine access to Starlink on Russian territory without severe consequences, and this fcc bullshit isn't that.
When China takes over and sends all the current elite to the electric chair, the people ofnl the west will be chanting Xi Jinping's praises. That's what you get for weakness and moral deprivation.