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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

That's the point of the subsidy: to make the equivalent of fiber runs to rural areas (and presumably local WISPs) cost-effective. The main intent of the subsidy was not to subsidize the development of new, uncertain technologies.

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.

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By no means does the program make the claim "to make the equivalent of fiber runs". You're just making claims up to rationalize what in all likelihood, was politically driven. Even the votes from the FCC members were along party lines.

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 did you get this idea spacex has been paid any money? This article is a denial of said subsidy

"Musk still managed to slide in and loot a few billion dollars before they realized that Starlink can't meet their definition of "broadband.""

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.

Starlink is basically a WISP with an actually scalable business model, just the towers (and soon a lot of the backhaul) are up in space.

WISPs rely on a local enthusiastic person to make it work.

It sounds as though these new mitigating standards were brought out after the grant was already awarded which is where accusations of political malfeasance come into play.

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