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Comment by pbkompasz | Hacker News Reader

FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to Musk's Starlink

FCC: high standards are unfairly prejudicial against subpar infrastructure.

> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”

I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.

Bloody hell, what’s next? “The requirement for 300km/h for high speed rail is unreasonable prejudicial to technologies such as steam”.

it's a regulatory change that opens up fiber infrastructure money for other uses, so it certainly is another Starlink handout, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars they've already received from taxpayers

though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently

The Gigabit Project (edit: should be BEAD) has allocated 40 billion since 2021 and still has not finished any last mile projects.

Why lie? The Gigabit Project is a £5 billion project, not $40 billion. It has delivered last mile interconnects to 296,770 residences.

It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.

Ezra Klein would point how how dangerous it is. In New York we had really big talk about a fiber buildout where it was clear they kept spending money and spending money in multiple rounds but nobody I knew was getting fiber well past the 2017 deadline the program claimed. They did lay a wholesale fiber to a place where I could get FTTN at 20Mbps and 10 years late they fixed up the poles by my house and say they’re going to give me real FTTH.

Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.

I was referring to BEAD by the short hand name of gigabit, my b

Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.

The cause of the delay or the blame doesn't really matter. The fact is Starlink could serve all of these users' internet now with no extra build-out cost at a 50th of the price. It's almost certainly time to rethink the plan and have the government take some of the money back.

Any money given to Starlink now for subsidies is burnt up in the atmosphere in 5 years.

Any money given to fiber rollout is still paying dividends in 40 years.

I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't understand where this notion that Starlink is an acceptable alternative to fiber comes from.

I mean given that effectively all other ISPs delivered nothing under these programs, it's a lot better for folks living in rural areas to get Starlink than nothing...

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