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I don't want tax dollars given to Starlink, or anyone else, to subsidize rural broadband. But if we're going to have such an award, I'd rather not it be given out or not according to how much the various players suck up to the party in power. Especially when the quid-pro-quo isn't just campaign funds and endorsements but censoring the opposition.
To clarify: is this because you want rural people to not have broadband (e.g. because you want to keep SJ away from them), or because you don't think this is something the government should be meddling in (e.g. because you think this is basically pork)?
Rural broadband has been truly massive amounts of pork and government waste throughout the run of the program. The government’s actual goals are mostly not achievable and the things which work are not supported by the government.
By "the government's actual goals", do you just mean what they asked for, or are we talking bigger-picture like "get more people to live rurally"?
I mean the things the government asked for. Getting more people to live rurally is much easier than giving fiber access to rural dwellers.
How would you go about getting more people to live rurally?
(I mean, the answer is going to boil down to "incentives", but I'm asking which incentives you would think most cost-effective, since you think this one isn't.)
By moving jobs into rural areas or easy commuting distance thereof(probably through tax incentives). Universal WFH has shown us that there’s significant unmet demand for living out in the boonies and there’s lots of smaller towns that have spare room to move in a support office or whatever.
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It's pork.
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And StarLink isn't performing as previously claimed, so they don't qualify for this award. I don't want awards based on mean tweeting. I am fine with denying awards for failure to deliver as promised. I hope that is the criteria being used here.
The question isn’t “did Starlink underdeliver.” The question is did Starlink underdeliver compared to other parties that didn’t have their funding yanked.
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I don't actually know the criteria for this grant, but I'm a rural user who pays for it myself and it works very well for all the use cases mentioned. (meetings, streaming, etc)
It's possible that the criteria are jiggered to be greater than actually required for those things, which would make it a pretty blatant subsidy towards fibre/adsl providers.
It happens quite often in government contracting that the contracts are designed for a particular bidder. Starlink might have the cheapest rural broadband, but are their curtains the right shade of purple? Then the primary contractor who wins sublets the work out to whoever really had the best bid.
One company I worked for told me that my job would be very safe with them, because the owner was Puerto Rican and so we always "got primary" for being minority-owned. Another company I worked for was very happy when they got rejected for a contract but told their bid was the best -- great progress!
That's my suspicion, yeah -- individual government workers are often lazy (shocked, shocked I say) and just get proponents they've worked with in the past to essentially write their bid documents for them.
It's a form of corruption, but nobody seems to care that much with the possible exception of large military contracts. (which of course have other more obvious issues)
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It was annoyingly difficult to track down the exact terms.
https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904#technology
It looks like spacex bid specifically for the 100/20 tier, and that this is indeed a hard cutoff. It's unfortunate that there's no partial credit, and the inherent stability advantage of wireline over wireless means the former is more likely to maintain advertised speeds over time.
Hm, well that's tricky then -- certainly the tech is capable of those speeds; I see well in excess of 100 Mbits down and 20-30 up during low usage periods, but up is often more like 10-20 in the daytime, presumably limited by downlink capacity.
So is SpaceX required to meet those criteria now, or on the delivery date? (a year from now, AIUI?)
Also AIUI cable providers often pool their customers' downlink and provide much less that advertised speeds at peak times; is the FCC looking into this?
Requiring providers to not oversubscribe their link bandwidth would make broadband multiple times more expensive than it currently is and be wildly inefficient.
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I've had home internet since the mid 90s and I've never, ever had an ISP provide the advertised speeds. Not even in off-peak times. At this point I don't really expect them to either; I've just accepted that this is part of the business model.
Also, the FCC have been overt culture warriors for my entire life. They're one of the least accountable federal agencies and they know it.
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I'd suggest that both you and @TIRM (and maybe @jkf as well) read @gattsuru's reply to this top-level a few pages down below; there may or may not be issues with his info, but it seems highly relevant.
vs
Hard to square unless there's some wild spin going on. Which I wouldn't put past the FCC.
Trying to evaluate this clearly: the FCC claims that Starlink won't meet future projected targets even though they happen to be working fine at the moment. As Starlink expands it has throughput problems in rural areas. By some (foolishly naive?) projection from current trends they will underdeliver.
But then Starlink is launching ever escalating numbers of satellites. So presumably a short term slump in download speeds isn't indicative of long term performance.
Specifically, the FCC collected Ookla data from 2021 and 2022, highlighting that "that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022", and then cited a single drop in average-monthly-speeds in one month of 2023 during appeal. The FCC analysis quoted by Rosenworcel in that section was from August 2022.
By late 2023 those numbers were already vastly improved (median 79/9.2 Mbps). It's currently October 2024; while I can't find a specific Ookla report, tomshardware cites them saying in September "Speed test analysis by Ookla shows Starlink seeing major gains in speed in the past few months. Median download speed has jumped from 65.72 Mbps to 97 Mbps."
Anecdotally from those who've use it in rural areas near me, they've consistently seen 100/20 or higher. I can't say for sure what the current Ookla numbers area, but I'm not seeing any good evidence otherwise.
These are compatible claims. It's just one of them is stupid: taking a two data points and extrapolating with a ruler is the sort of thing I'd caution a high schooler about.
Contrast other RDOF defaults: the Starry (bankrupt), GeoLinks (blocked by California regulations) or LTD Corporation (severe financial chicanery, heavily delayed regulatory compliance mandated in the contract), all have far clearer and more certain problems.
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There are theoretical limits to how much bandwidth they can squeeze out of their spectrum allocation based on the physical aperture (size) of the antenna arrays on each side. And they keep selling smaller ground terminals, although those might get fractional performance. Something like a cell phone (which I've seen them rumoring support for) can't really do anything other than hit up every satellite in the sky.
Bandwidth has to be shared between every user in, effectively, an area of some size (I haven't run the numbers), and at some point even more satellites doesn't help. Bigger antennas on both sides would, though.
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I'm sympathetic to this. If we are going to incentivize rural internet, but the provider underdelivers according to original promises, then they shouldn't necessarily have the entire reward taken away.
To make up numbers: 80% of original promised speeds from Starlink is still an enormous benefit to rural communities. It's not like that is hard failure deserving of nothing.
If they consistently take an all or nothing approach to rewards then I'm fine with them doing it now. If they did it now to stick it to Elon then I'm not fine with it. I have no evidence they are spitefully sticking it to Elon.
Isn’t it worth looking at the folks who haven’t done as well yet didn’t get their grant pulled? Or all of the other legal nonsense against Musk?
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