Goldtent TA Paradise

FCC Rejects $900 Million Subsidy For SpaceX Amid Concerns Of Gov’t Weaponization

1. pedro_deleon says:

   December 13, 2023 - 10:33 am at 10:33 am

   For SpaceX to receive funding from the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), it must deliver average download speeds of over 100Mbps and upload speeds of 20Mbps to rural America by December 2025.

   pdl — that’s beyond ambitious; many suburban users can’t get 100 in reality.

   Indeed, the Commission’s decision today to revoke a 2020 award of $885 million to Elon Musk’s Starlink—an award that Starlink secured after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses across 35 states—is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.”

   pedro — Well, what conditions from 2020 did they not meet?

   “Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale! They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it those who aren’t getting the job done. What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules.

   pedro — most rural users, absent Starlink, have no other options but HughesNet (high orbit long latency high cost pathetic service). FCC should have set staggered goals .. 10MBps to start, then rising. Most DSL users don’t get 100 and many cable users don’t either. (In reality, not that phony “up to” business)

   And WTF is “Wireline Competition Bureau” doing overseeing this issue? Politics. That’s the old regional Bell regulatory group (AT&T and SBC). They have no business running this regime. Starlink and other Sat operations are using wireless frequencies, so this oversight needs to shift.