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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reasoning that is there is all subjective.

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