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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   28046 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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Here is the letter where the FCC denies Starlink's long form application. The relevant paragraph (emphasis added):

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. 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 nonRDOF 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.

Sounds like the FCC was skeptical Starlink could deliver the speeds it promised on the required timeline for the program.

So they are merely incompetent and not corrupt? My money is on both.

I like that they had some data, but I can't help but feel like they were searching for post-facto justification.

How reliable is Ookla data compared to actually testing the networks themselves? I only speed test when I know something's wrong or when I hook up a new line, initially.

AFAIK their data is fine; the proposal was for 100/20 Mbps down/up, and Starlink currently only promises 25-100 down and 5-10 up on their standard plan; even the priority plan is still 40/8 at minimum.

The timing of the data is what had everybody stunned. In the FCC's START DATE FOR PERFORMANCE MEASURES TESTING last year they say, "For the carriers participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), pre-testing will begin on January 1, 2025, and testing will begin on January 1, 2026." You'd think this was a first draft, but I can't find the final version with "unless we don't like you in which case we started testing in 2021 and what are you going to do about it" added for accuracy. Must have been a version control snafu.

I mean, I'm on Starlink, and depending on usage, my upload varies from 10 Mbps to 20-ish Mbps. Right now it's 17.90 Mbps. I've never noticed. It's been life changing. Satellite is the only thing available where I am, and the competition is dog shit. 700 ms latency versus 20 ms, maybe enough bandwidth for SD video content versus the 320 Mbps down I just measured. It was straight up impossible for me to do Zoom meetings from home half the time. I don't know how the FCC arrived at 20 Mbps up being the litmus test, but I think it largely fails to capture the enormous improvement Starlink is over all the competition. I live in an area where subsidies have been promised for rural broadband for over a decade, and absolutely fucking zero has ever come of it. The money goes somewhere, and nobody ever gets internet.

I'm not shocked Starlink got cut out, they threaten to end someone else's corrupt grift. I can draw no other conclusion.

I'll be honest, I assumed they were talking about download speeds, I misread. That makes it a lot worse.

Demanding 20mbps upload is stupid for rural internet. I barely use that as a software expert in an urban area. It seems like this was specifically designed to exclude even the most state-of-the-art satellite systems from the jump.

A lot of the initial theory was based around small business and education web services, such as video streaming, collaborative media work, so on, and at that often included multiple simultaneous users per residence.

I'm a real severe skeptic of that -- and the Cloud focus that drives no small part of it -- but having set up remote users or small offices on <5 Mbps lines or long chains of P2P microwave links, there genuinely are a surprising number of really common functionality that either doesn't work, or doesn't work consistently, in those environments. Even if you're focused on atoms rather than bits, 'simple' things like security cameras, backup systems, file shares, and all pretty much have to be hosted locally for all but the most minimal of setups.

The more you get into bits, the harder, even for stuff you wouldn't think of as online. A short internet outage can turn building a Java program into an ordeal; even moderate packet loss can make OnShape unusable for collaborative CAD, and gods help you if someone turns on OneDrive for their machine.

I think it's wrong, but it's not self-evidently crazy.

(On the gripping hand, it's very far from clear that StarLink won't be able to achieve these results by 2026, if it doesn't already.)

I think it was pretty clearly written to encourage investment in running fiber in rural areas. Except in case of backhoes, good fiber should last decades with minimal maintenance and an frequently can be updated with only new parts on each end. I know relatively rural folks that have gotten fiber in the last decade funded by programs like this and they are all pretty happy with it.

While Starlink might meet some of the listed requirements, it seems in some ways not the investment they were trying to push, and doesn't necessarily end up with a durable infrastructure product to point to as a success even if the company folds. Free space RF also has inherent bandwidth limits compared to point-to-point fiber.

Granted at this point it seems on slightly better footing than a few years ago -- I have my doubts about it's financial case, but as a private company they don't have to publish the numbers and they do seem to sell like hotcakes.

I also am not entirely sure how the economics of Starlink work out. Supposedly it's profitable. But I don't know how many red numbers have been moved from the "Starlink" column to the "SpaceX" column. However they do the accounting, the fact that Starlink gets to take advantage of Falcon 9 launches virtually at cost is enormous. The fact that SpaceX has dropped the $/lb cost by almost a factor of 10 helps a lot too.

Yeah, even if they've cut the launch costs by a factor of ten, they've still launched something like 200 flights just for internal use -- around two thirds of total flights this year. And as a LEO constellation that is (at least in part) an ongoing cost to replace satellites over time. And that's presumably all getting paid for (plus the satellites themselves, the ground stations, and operations) by a bunch of users paying around $1400/yr. I haven't recently run numbers on that, but it feels at least ambitious without a deep-pocketed anchor customer willing to guarantee the bills get paid (which they may quietly have, so I'm not betting against them).

And performance degrades (something folks funding them for rural bandwidth care about!) as they start oversubscribing areas.

it feels at least ambitious without a deep-pocketed anchor customer willing to guarantee the bills get paid (which they may quietly have, so I'm not betting against them).

That customer is supposed to be high-frequency traders once they get the inter-satellite laser-link running -- light in a vacuum is enough faster than light in glass that it's attractive for comms between (for instance) NYC and London.

I think the latest version of the satellites is capable of this, but there aren't enough in the constellation supporting it yet? Haven't heard recently.

The most obvious anchor customer is the DOD, IMO. But neither side there is going to shout about it. Low-latency, worldwide comms, resistant to anti-satellite weapons by sheer numbers. Directional antennas are more robust against jamming and detection, too.

So, Bing's AI response to "Starlink Customers" was

1.5 million customers Starlink has "well over" 1.5 million customers worldwide, including consumer users and businesses. Around 80% of Starlink’s customers are located in North America, while 18% are located in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. Starlink's Roam plan alone has over 300,000 customers subscribed, which likely nets SpaceX a minimum of $30 million in revenue every month.

Although I see a more recent PCMag article says 2.7m customers. Assuming they are all paying the same $120 a month I am, that puts them closing in on $4B in revenue per year. If I did my math right (2.7m * 12 * $120 = $3,888m).

$1400 a year... deep-pocketed anchor customer willing to guarantee the bills get paid

Airlines (United and Hawaiian air have deals), Starlink is $10k per month per airframe, and cruise lines at $5k per month. Combined with other corporate operators (biz jets, oil platforms, etc) all of whom are frigging starved for reliable high speed internet in-transit and on remote locations, frankly Starlink is going to be printing money in exponentially increasing volumes.

Starlink is almost certainly a 100b plus company standalone. You almost wonder if they will be spun out to go public at some point.

It also has substantial value in crisis contexts, in the 'natural disaster just cracked the ground-based infrastructure, can anyone tell me what's going on' sort of system.

The whole thing was a grift of the worst kind. $45 billion for rural internet? And they didn't even connect anyone?

And now they're going after the person who did what they couldn't, for a fraction of the headline cost, and at no taxpayer expense.

It's like "Atlas Shrugged" is a true story.

Personally I demand that the little postage-stamp-sized picture of my face on Teams be downsized from Blu-Ray-quality video. If you're only throwing away DVD-quality data when downsampling what's even the point?

I had the same thought. Presumably they have some type of detailed records and it's not just an intern running SpeedTest on their browser. Also, one might presume that part of the investment would be to bring more routers online to increase bandwidth and some amount of service decrease could indicate the need for greater funding. Of course, a For-Profit compnany should have it's own money so I'm not that sympathetic.

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