When applying for RDOF you say what service tier you are targeting and instead of shooting for the minimum 25/3, Starlink applied for 100/20. When they didn't reach those speeds[1], they were ineligible but not just because they didn't hit the required speeds on their existing network. There are more details here[2] but the jist is that Starlink bid to supply 100/20 internet to over half a million subscribers and the FCC was required to assess if Starlink was reasonably, technically capable of supplying those speeds by 2025. Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch. On top of this, the statistics that were available at the time showed that Starlink transfer speeds were already trending down and the network is a lot less utilized than it would be in 2025. There are technical challenges that need to be solved before Starlink is remotely capable of meeting that obligation and the challenges don't appear to be resolved yet. Giving Starlink money is a gamble and the FCC would rather play it safe.
>RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2]
At this point, T-Mobile is likely serving more rural high speed internet customers with greater speeds (T-Mobile has 4.2M home internet customers and Ookla's stats show 34% to be rural for 1.4M; Starlink has 2M customers and assuming two-thirds are in the US and of those 83% are rural would make for 1.1M).
For good reason: We can't have politicians regulating the speech of the critics and opponents. Nothing is more protected in the US than political speech, esp (afaik) by someone running for office.
You could just prosecute a politician if he didn't deliver what he promised, you know.
Outside politics (and depending on the context) this is called breach of contract, fraud, misrepresentation or, say, false advertising or consumer protection violation.
It's also colloquially called "holding someone accountable".
> You could just prosecute a politician if he didn't deliver what he promised, you know.
What you’re asking for is a dictator. Politicians can’t unilaterally decide what happens by design. I think what you mean to say is that you want to prosecute politicians if they don’t vote in alignment with their stated goals, but even that is loaded in the US.
Let’s assume we’re talking about a liberal politician.
If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
No, I'm asking for the judicial system to prosecute politicians who make promises that they don't keep. Like they prosecute politicians in other instances of illegal behavior.
To be clear, I'm not saying that currently, it is illegal for politicians to make promises they don't keep. I'm saying it should be, in some form.
> If he or she ran on banning guns, introduced legislation to ban guns, but some conservative added a rider to ban abortion, should he or she be prosecuted for voting against their own bill? Because that kind of nonsense happens all the time.
Obviously not. I'm not advocating for putting politicians in prison willy nilly. But we should at least prosecute the obvious, egregious instances of the kind of wrongdoing I'm talking about.
Besides, the whole concept of a "rider" is stupid, corrupt and should be illegal as well (just like it is in other areas of the law). Then you wouldn't have that problem.
That's not being fair, that's making excuses. If the problem is that hard, don't be running your mouth about you'll have it done in six months, and charge people money while you work out the bugs.
Also, lots of examples of "this year" stated in various Januarys, and multiple instances along the lines of "complete autonomy in 2 years" going back 8 years.
I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar.
> I suspect his statements are carefully made to not technically meet the legal definition for fraud, but colloquially he's absolutely a liar.
They're probably not carefully made, but fraud requires knowledge of falsity, and short of an internal report saying "this feature won't be ready before XYZ," it is going to be extremely difficult to prove Tesla knew the claims were false.
The other thing you'll run into is reasonability of reliance--at this point, with so many deadlines repeatedly blown through, it would be hard to demonstrate that a reasonable person could rely on a representation that a promised deadline would be met.
The reason people follow Musk is that even though he over-promises and under-delivers; the under-delivered product is still better than the alternatives (or at least was for a while).
People are not complete fools and can learn to discount over-the-top rhetoric; sure, some people are harmed by believing everything verbatim, but those people also fall for scams, etc, etc.
His statements are parsed as statements of intent more so than actual timeline commitments. We'll have FSD in 6 months = FSD is our main priority at the moment. And sure it also makes for PR/free advertising. Is it scammy? Probably. But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
I have real trouble with "the ends justify the means" arguments.
> Is it scammy? Probably.
It's the behavior of a con artist.
> But he likely got more out of people by pushing this false narrative than would have been otherwise accomplished.
Even if that's the case, he could have had the same, or better, effect without the lying. The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.
> The lying is clearly aimed at gaining investment money and preorders, though, not at some bizarre attempt at motivating engineers.
It would be dumb to be caught "lying" over and over and Musk is not know to be dumb. Consider the possibility Musk is using reflexivity to accelerate progress. When people become convinced something is possible and work towards that goal their strong belief changes reality because there is a feedback loop between reality and beliefs.
It would be dumb to be caught agreeing with anti semitic tweets, and telling advertisers to "go fuck yourself", yet here we are. Your argument is invalid.
Intelligent people have faults and make mistakes like the rest of us. What sets them apart is they are often better at seeing this and fixing things. Did Musk not make amends for that tweet? Do you think advertising should control social media? Do you genuinely believe Musk is dumb?
"Dumb" isn't the word I'd use; "incurious" is better. It's not that he's racist or antisemitic, I believe, but rather he doesn't have enough knowledge of history to recognize classic antisemitic tropes (or signs that someone is an outright Nazi) combined with some beliefs close enough to racist that he's liable to agree with antisemitic creeds without recognizing them as antisemitic tropes.
Compared to a same aged person does Musk do more dumb things each day? Perhaps his few dumb things get amplified by his haters?
Any normal person that manages to earn themself what Musk has earned might that affect their personality? Maybe make them more narcissistic etc? Large wealth would not affect your psychology?
Regarding bipolar: It would not surprise me but is there evidence? Did he admit it?
Of course wealth affects one’s mental state, this is pretty well studied.
Also “earned” is a bit generous, he’s had a lot of “right people, right time, right place” in his life (not to mention a great start from the emerald mines).
Also why look at dumb things per day when what matters (to me) is the enormity of dumb actions? He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit. He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word. He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy. I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
> Also why look at dumb things per day when what matters (to me) is the enormity of dumb actions?
Elephant does what elephant does and ants complain. What do you expect?
> He bought Twitter for way more than it was worth because he had a hissy fit.
You don't make mistakes? Your ability grow wealth is superior? How then do you judge?
> He’s “concerned” that AI isn’t allowed to say the n-word.
Might he be concerned about censorship in general? If something against the law it is against the law but what gives you the right to impose your notion of "proper" speech on others? Do people have a right not to be offended? The attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper office in Paris by Islamic extremists you think they were justified due to being offended by cartoons?
> He did a live public call with Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Now you want to impose rules on others about who they are allowed to talk to in public?
> I could do one simply dumb thing every day for my entire life and not live up to the sheer stupidity of this man’s actions.
Elephant does what elephant does. Ant does what ant does. You can not compare them. I believe strong feelings cloud your view.
Hater or fanboy does it matter? Do you not understand the concept of reflexivity? Intelligence can show truth. Intelligence can support some existing bias and hide truth. How does your intelligence serve you?
When someone's entire argument is "doing x would be dumb, and we know this guy isn't dumb", I see value in pointing out that this is a rather circular logic
I had to look up reflexivity, as I was not previously familiar with it. I fail to see how it salvages your claim, and suspect you're fixating on this bit of economics trivia because you dislike that I made fun of the thing you said, and think I'm trying to get into a pissing contest about "intelligence", and like most ridiculous children who get into pissing contests about intelligence, seem to think that asking me to explain a concept with which I may then admit unfamiliarity might score you some points in such an undertaking. That about right?
That is not correct. My words above require intelligence to understand and my ability to explain them in simpler terms is limited. This explanation from GPT4 is good. Hope it helps.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
The former seems to clearly be a more parsimonious explanation of what we've seen. After all, what is often at stake, as in the case of the linked article, is financing based on concrete promises of progress, and the claims made by Musk are never about problems no one else thinks are possible to solve at all, so the reflexivity position here seems more like a defensive motte rather than a meaningful strategic analysis
My post above requires some explanation so here is GP4 explain it.
------
The reply you've presented suggests a debate about the intentions behind Elon Musk's public statements, specifically regarding whether he's misleading people for financial gain or using a strategy known as "reflexivity" to motivate progress.
1. *Lying for Financial Gain*: The first part of the reply posits that Musk might be making false or exaggerated claims ("lying") to attract investment and preorders for his projects. This view implies that Musk's primary goal is to secure funding by convincing investors and customers of the feasibility and near-term success of his ventures, even if those claims are not entirely grounded in current realities.
2. *Reflexivity to Accelerate Progress*: The second part of the reply introduces a different perspective, suggesting Musk might be employing a concept known as reflexivity. This idea, often associated with financier George Soros, posits that market participants' beliefs can shape market realities. Applied here, it means Musk could be making ambitious or seemingly unrealistic statements with the intention of inspiring his teams and the broader public. The underlying belief is that if people are convinced that a challenging goal is achievable, their collective effort and belief can actually bring that goal closer to reality, creating a positive feedback loop between belief and outcome.
The reply seems to be wrestling with the notion of whether Musk's statements are purely manipulative for financial gain or part of a sophisticated strategy to create self-fulfilling prophecies that drive technological and scientific breakthroughs. It reflects on Musk's reputation for not being "dumb," suggesting that his repeated bold claims might have a deeper strategic purpose rather than just being simple falsehoods.
Tell that to the disembodied pulverized head that was attached to somebody who took his claims at face value, and try explaining to his widow that her late husband was a complete fool to fall for it, so it's not Musk's fault.
The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash:
A reconstruction of the wreck shows how human error and emerging technology can collide with deadly results
And I think it's safe to say that sycophants bending over backwards to carry Musk's water like DoesntMatter22 aren't reasonable people, don't base their opinions on facts or reality, and shouldn't be taken seriously.
What I've said is completely factual. Surprisingly a lot of people like who won't actually prove that he said that. Because the fact is that he didn't.
> with so many deadlines repeatedly blown through, it would be hard to demonstrate that a reasonable person could rely on a representation that a promised deadline would be met.
That enables fraudsters, of course. Also, what about people who don't spend all their time on the Internet, on HN, reading about Elon Musk? They buy stocks and cars too.
This question was not asking about when FSD was going to work but when Enhanced Autopilot would noticeably depart from FSD. No where in there did it say "FSD will be working completely in 6 months".
They did in fact diverge, no where was that a statement that FSD would be complete by then.
It's ironic you are calling him a liar when your response seems to either be completely dishonest itself or you are not aware of the subject at hand.
> By the end of next year, said Musk, Tesla would demonstrate a fully autonomous drive from, say, a home in L.A., to Times Square ... without the need for a single touch, including the charging.
So you're technically right- he said three months, not six.
Thank you for posting this. More proof of what I said. He did not say that they would definitively do it, he said exactly at the timestamp that you gave: "Our goal is".
So clearly didn't say that it would happen for certain
Confronted with evidence that nowhere supports the claims. We really are in bizarro world here, rife with sloppy thinking and fuzzy smears. Certainly Elon shoots off his mouth and has underestimated timelines, but the specific claims being made about those mistakes go way beyond and into lala land.
I watched a panel discussion on self driving cars in 2015 with several legit experts in the technology (I believe Sebastian Thrun was one of them). There were also some CEOs. The experts all said there’s no way the tech would deploy before 2025, potentially later. The CEOs were saying 2018 or 2019.
The experts had a clear view way back then, the CEOs just don’t want to listen.
This is always a game of boundary-setting. In one way that's true, in another way Waymo is 21+ years behind[1]. People have been setting up 'particular vehicles' to navigate 'particular areas' for decades. If the Waymo "self driving car" is an expansion of older site-specific tech, then there's nothing new under the sun. If their car is can be put anywhere then it just being able to drive in Tempe isn't proof of that.
IMO the truth is more with the experts. Each new location seems to require a lot of tuning to get right and function in a way the company is happy with. If a "self driving car" is one we can drop anywhere and have it drive we are still waiting on that.
By the way, Particular Vehicles have been safely serving Particular Areas for decades: airport driverless shuttles. Slowly expanding from there is the right way to go, not "New York to Palo Alto by 2017", as Musk promised.
Yah, without any evidence to back it up my personal suspicion is that we'll arrive at a local maxima of "full self driving on highways and instrumented roads" in ~20 years. I think the area has a lot of potential, but so much of the hype (and stock price) is tied up with "a car that can drive better than a human everywhere" which seems impossible for anyone to produce.
Just like with IoT we'll eventually arrive at a boring, useful state...it will just take a while.
Oh, come on, these kinds of false analogies don't help to elucidate, only to confuse.
There is a universe of difference between something like ParkShuttle (its own right of way, using magnets in the road to detect position) and modern autonomous vehicles. Saying modern autonomous vehicles have environmental constraints is valid, saying that makes then no different than a "people mover on wheels" is not.
The point is that "deployed to a limited area" is not what people are thinking when they talk about a "self driving car." Of course ParkShuttle isn't the same as Waymo (or any other modern self-driving car) - but the question is how far we've come!
Are you claiming Waymo is ready to drive anywhere in the world? I do not think that's Waymo's position. So where are we? Cut through the rhetoric and tell it like it is - or join the rest of us who are speculating from the sidelines with incomplete information.
I'd argue even waymo is still far away from FSD. Driverless cars on a restricted set of roads with a remote operator monitoring things (and the ability to quickly resolve issues), is nowhere close to what I (and the general public I would argue) understands as fully self driving.
IDK, the Waymo cars that drive around SF meet my definition of full self driving. They handle a ton of weird traffic patterns, pedestrians, pickup zones, and very dense urban environments much better than I think you realize. Unless you live here, you probably aren't aware of their capabilities.
The goal is to replace a human driver in every situation where a human driver could or would drive, with an equivalent or (ideally) better safety record.
Are you suggesting that Waymo is there? I don't think the evidence would support that. Even if we relax that goal a bit so the self-driving car can disengage and refuse to drive in, say, the most difficult 20% of situations, I don't think we can say Waymo is there, either.
Sure but the panel discussion was talking about consumer release of self driving cars, which really requires level 5 capabilities in a wide variety of conditions, not just ideal weather.
Not many people, even experts, predicted the success of ChatGPT even five years ago - and most have moved their timeline for AGI up significantly because of its release.
Right but "hard to predict" does not mean "it will happen whenever I want it to happen". You can't look at a very hard problem, where a good sample of the world's experts say it will take more than 10 years to solve, and just say "I bet we can do it in 4 years" just because you want that to be true.
Do you have sources on those predictions moving up “significantly” because of ChatGPT? Predicting words that sound good together, as a result of a prompt, based on a pre trained set of data is vastly different from AGI.
I can't find the exact article I read it in at the moment, but ChatGPT was definitely a turning point where a bunch of people reeled in their predictions by a decade.
(The median expert prediction was between 2040-2060 previously, now quite a few people have moved that timeline to before 2035).
Experts are wrong all the time. The experts said that solar prices would come down but were off by nearly an order of magnitude in how long it took.
With something this hard it's extremely tough to tell for sure when it will happen and often progress goes in chunks where it seems like it's going to happen but then doesnt.
Many experts predicted price declines with pretty fair accuracy. The large groups of experts that were making these forecasts for purposes of global planning for mitigation of climate change were often intentionally conservative because the danger of planning with that assumption outweighs anything you lose by making more conservative predictions.
Experts have a narrow, deep view while CEOs have a wide, shallow view.
If the expert works in a lab developing new experimental solar panels they probably don’t see a clear path to mass production.
The CEO might know another manufacturing expert that does see a path to production and have enough high level understanding to know the methods are compatible.
In this case yes, but in this case we have to assume the research side has achieved it's goal (its proven a material exists with the desired properties), now it is a manufacturing problem. If the lab can't produce the material, the manufacturing lines have nothing to manufacture with. And that seems to be the case with FSD. CEOs make wild claims, but the tech isn't there. The material has not been proven to exist in a lab with the desired properties.
Like a CEO saying, I have a material that can protect wearers from nuclear fusion blasts and it will be on the market in 6 months, but the experts in the field have yet to actually prove that material exists and create it in a lab.
But the point is that we are all equally capable of being wrong. Especially when we step outside our area of expertise. CEOs are just another type of expert but their domain is organization. We have to consider the source’s experience relative to the domain in question before we can decide if their prediction is trustworthy.
Both might be equally capable but the incentives are entirely different. An Engineer is motivated to deliver accurate predictions because that's their job. A CEO is not motivated to deliver accurate predictions because their main job is to hype their product and services.
In this case the actual CEO we all know we're talking about is a serial confabulist who publicly agrees with anti semitic conspiracy theories and tells his advertisers to go fuck themselves, so your abstract hypothetical arguments generously giving some unspecified billionaire CEO the benefit of the doubt don't hold any water.
He also does dubiously claim to be an expert in many fields, although despite the success of the engineers working for him, his greatest personal expertise appears to be sycophant creation — competence can only propel one so far.
Although one should never believe the ravings, useful work does surprisingly often nucleate around them, just not to the degree or with the speed promised.
FSD is a substantial subset of AGI: driving is full of edge cases where you need to be able to reason about unusual conditions or behavior by other drivers, understand what someone like a flagger or police officer is saying, etc.
It is not obvious that even level 5 FSD will require either self-awareness or a theory of mind: adequate modeling of the possible behaviors of nearby actors in the immediate future may be "all" it takes, and current systems are struggling with that.
Of course, if one were to define FSD in terms of being so capable that it could also likely pass the Turing test (or whatever better replacement we come up with as a measure of AGI), then, by definition, it would be close to as hard a problem as AGI itself.
I said “substantial subset” precisely to avoid this kind of tangent. My point was simply that there are a lot of edge cases we have no clear path to solving which are masked at the current level by punting the problem to the human driver. We are a very long time from being able to build cars without manual controls even if we might hit the point where a majority of driving miles are automated long before then.
Cars without manual controls are closer than you think. The Waymo cars do just fine without a human driver in the seat, and before they got suspended, Cruise was just starting a pilot program with vehicles without manual controls called the Cruise Origin. Sale of such a vehicle to the general public is a ways off but for a taxi service we're pretty close.
Cruise reportedly had human interventions every 4-5 miles. I haven’t seen a similar figure for Waymo, who are generally believed to be considerably better.
"Substantial subset" is precisely the claim here that I have my doubts about. I think it is entirely possible (for the reason I gave previously) that AGI is at least as far beyond level 5 autonomy as level 5 autonomy is from the current state of road vehicle automation.
This is important to consider when judging Tesla's engineering capability, but not when judging Elon Musk's highly optimistic promises.
Either Elon is aware of the fact that FSD is really hard and he's lying repeatedly about being able to deliver it "later this year". Or he is not aware that FSD is as hard as you say and needs to "hit the books" and understand the problem better. I don't really see an "out" here after so many missed promises.
Software timelines are notoriously hard to forecast because you're essentially trying to predict how long it will take to do something nobody has done before.
So you look at what's left to do and as long as you don't run into any unforeseen issues you say, looks like about six months from now.
Sometimes you don't run into any unforeseen issues and it turns out to be about six months.
Sometimes you do, and then it takes longer. So a year later you found an unexpected problem that delayed you by a year. Someone asks you how long you think it will take again, that issue delayed you by a year but that was a year ago, so you say, looks like about six months from now.
Eventually the estimate will be true but nobody knows when because nobody knows how to make an accurate estimate. Because you have to know how hard it is to do in order to know how long it will take, which nobody knows until after somebody has actually done it.
Just reminded of the an old trope for estimates, either:
- less than 3 months
- 3 months
- 6 months
Anything less than 3 months - is an accurate estimate. Otherwise, 3 months is the amount of time it takes to do _anything_, right? If it's a really hard problem, then we say, okay, it's 6 months. At the end of the day, those 3 months and 6 months means "NFC", which goes back to the estimation technique that everything is either a "1", "TFB", or "NFC". 3 months = TFB, 6 months = NFC
On a more serious point, we (as software engineers) generally feel we can solve almost any problem with 3 months worth of resources and effort. 3 to 6 months sometimes (IMO) can be a bit of the scariest estimate to give or receive.
> Software timelines are notoriously hard to forecast
Perhaps. Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months. I doubt Musk wasn't aware of that, so the only alternative that he was lying.
> Of course, we all know for a certainty that this had almost nothing to do with you're describing. The people how were actually designing the software knew that it won't happen in six months.
How do we know this?
Waymo has had this "almost" working for years. In theory you could get from the status quo to actually working in a short period of time, if you're sufficiently smart or lucky and have the right resources.
Or you could hit a wall for years.
The things currently happening with LLMs and image generation were the sort of things many people said were many years away, if not impossible, but we got there by basically throwing a lot of compute at some clever but relatively simple ML algorithms. Nobody knows until you try.
It's obvious that his estimates are optimistic, but optimism isn't inherently malicious.
If you asked people with "life experience + common sense" if generative AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong.
> In theory we could build a rocket that would fly a person to the moon in 6 months.
Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
> If that's the case, you wouldn't be making such bold claims (or rather actually believing in them yourself)
I don't think he, or anyone, believes that it will definitely happen in six months. He's giving the optimistic end of the range, but everybody knows that.
> Does that include the people who were actually working on them in OpenAI?
Before they had them working internally? Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
> the AI would soon be possible six months before it actually was, they'd have said no and been wrong.
GPT 3.5 / 4 were an iteration of previous models, their performance wasn't that exceptionally surprising if you were working in the field.
Also, these are fundamentally different problems. Self-driving requires massive amounts of real-world testing and then you have all the regulatory and safety/legal stuff to do. That's simply infeasible in 6 months no matter what. Generative AI has no such constraints.
> Kennedy said it would be done by the end of the decade, people called him crazy, and then it happened. The people saying it couldn't be done were still saying it right up until the day it happened.
So? I don't see any link to what we're discussing. Kennedy didn't really have that much direct involvement in the moon program.
What we're discussing is an equivalent of the head of NASA, in ~1966 or so publicly declaring that they'll send a crewed mission to the moon in 6 months (even though everyone knew that wasn't possible no matter how hard everyone worked).
> He's giving the optimistic end of the range,
He's just saying random unsubstantiated stuff because that's just what he does all the time (or because he wants to sell more cars IDK).
> Yeah, it did. Nobody knew it would work until it actually worked.
I'm pretty sure that was an iterative process, so they knew quite a while before it actually "worked" (could be released to the public).
I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal. Don't really care that they didn't hit the ambitious goal of providing 300+, it is already more than 15x better than the next best option available for me.
T-Mobile has a three decade head start (maybe four if you count their Sprint Wireless acquisition's history), so hardly surprising if there is currently more T-Mobile home internet users than Starlink users. But I also doubt that their rural base is as large as Starlink's currently is. Mobile broadband speeds heavily depend on the strength of the signal available in area, and in many rural areas, the 5G coverage is extremely spotty, or non-existent.
Yeah there's a pretty common routine of SpaceX & Tesla having some of the best results in the world for what they are trying to accomplish AND being much worse than what was promised.
And that's one of the (many) frustrating things with Musk: he fairly consistently overpromises and underdelivers. Even if that underdelivering is better than what you can get elsewhere, it still leaves a bad taste in people's mouths.
It definitely does, although I don't understand why.
One thing making bold forecasts does is motivate your people. JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts. Would we have got there as soon if he had said we'd get to the moon eventually?
To the other responder: JFK also had no tangible justification to say we'd get there so soon, and the most likely outcome was that he was going to be wrong. Does that make him a pathological liar?
> It definitely does, although I don't understand why.
Maybe because it's a kind of lying, and people who do it on a regular basis are untrustworthy people?
> JFK told us we'd get to the moon this decade which is absolutely nuts.
Remember that he didn't phrase it as "we will do this", he phrased it as "this is our goal". He referred to it as a goal we're choosing, not as an inevitability.
Musk isn't goal-setting, he's making promises. The difference between the two is critical. One is being a leader, the other is being a liar.
General Motors, a company that advertised how safe their vehicles were, knowing about faulty ignition switches in their products but only deciding to perform a recall 10 years after they became aware of them.
Except Musk was goal-setting, and there's literally a comment upthread that responds to this factual correction by stating that published goals need to be held to the same standards as promises. Can't win against critics willing to bend reality and forgo consistency of beliefs...
You don’t think there was any consultation between JFK and NASA before he gave that speech?
A simple search for more information provides this. Kennedy asked Johnson to consult with NASA.
Johnson consulted with officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Its new administrator, James E. Webb, told him that there was no chance of beating the Russians to launching a space station, and he was not certain that NASA could orbit a man around the Moon first, so the best option would be to attempt to land a man on the Moon. This would also be the most expensive option; Webb believed it would require $22 billion (equivalent to $166 billion in 2022) to achieve it by 1970. Johnson also consulted with Wernher von Braun; military leaders, including Lieutenant General Bernard Schriever; and three business executives: Frank Stanton from CBS, Donald C. Cook from American Electric Power, and George R. Brown from Brown & Root.
JFK was stating an experts opinion in a speech not spitballing random estimates that were changing yearly in order to make him and the US seem awesome.
I think there are some lines you shouldn't cross. Like having people pre-pay a bunch of money for FSD, claiming it's going to be ready in a certain amount of time, but wildly missing that deadline and not offering to refund people's money.
And certainly there's a "pile on" element as well. Musk is, to put it mildly, a controversial character in general. It's easier to take someone you already don't like, and criticize them more harshly for other faults than you would for someone (like JFK, perhaps) that you otherwise generally like. Maybe that's not fair, but it seems pretty human-nature-y.
Another point: is there a way to make bold forecasts in order to motivate your employees, without making it feel like a promise to your customers? If so, Musk generally fails at that.
Perhaps, but he does deliver. As a rural internet customer who has been told for a decade now that "fiber is coming to our area" by the local telco, I am more than happy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt as one of the cleanest players in a filthy industry full of lies and graft.
For the record, I am ecstatic with my Starlink service, no bad taste whatsoever. I upgraded from a rural wireless broadband service that gave me peaks of 10Mbit, for pretty nearly the same price.
I don't know who these ungrateful people are with the bad taste in their mouths? Starlink is the only game in town for me at this point for broadband: my only other option is DSL from Centurylink at 3Mb/.5Mb - they've had 30 years to improve service here and hundreds of millions in taxpayer subsidies, and they haven't done it. The nearest T-Mobile signal is about 7 miles away. I for one, am grateful.
No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do things, and it’s integral to the task of building cool shit. It’s simply not lying. It may look that way to those on the outside, and you can say it’s irresponsible not to recalibrate, but even the adjusted estimates are optimistically recalibrated. The estimating well is poisoned by vision. Lying is something very different.
2) Musk is particularly bad about it & does it in places that directly financially benefit him.
Telling people that if they fork out 15k now they'll have full self driving in X timeline, completely missing it and then doing the exact same thing for years on end seems less like the planning fallacy and more like fraud, but I guess we can just wait to see what the courts decide on the matter
> No, engineers and software developers tend to be overly optimistic about the ability and speed to do
He's not one though. He's a business executive, so someone who in theory who would have the job to reconcile those lofty dreams with reality.
However, I'd bet quite a bit that the actual engineers and software developers were that optimistic and certainly didn't believe they could achieve FSD in 6 months (they'd be horrible incompetent engineers if they actually believed that).
How many startups start by telling investors, employees and customers, "We're going to fail"? They know the odds are that's going to happen. Are they pathological liars?
No one can predict the future. Musk is what plenty of entrepreneurs are...over-confident. That's part of the profile. That doesn't make him or any of them liars.
I think plenty of entrepreneurs emphasize that they are scrappy underdogs, that it’s a long shot, and that it’s going to take hard work. That’s you know, the optimistic side of the truth that they’re going to fail. I’m sure Musk has said things like this. He’s also just lied about stuff. He’s remarkably careless about what he says/tweets for a CEO. Might have something to do with his drug use, who knows.
Careless? Oh yeah. A bit of filtering would improve the public's perception of him. But when you've gotten to where you are because of who you've always been *and* it's worked out well, very well, there's simply no incentive to change. At some point it's simply unreasonable for anyone to expect it to happen.
I'm not seeing that space. In fact, given what we know about startups, "in 6 months" has better odds of happening than pitching and ignoring the high risk (i.e., failure is inevitable).
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, simply asking you to show me the space you speak of.
Really? You don't see anything between "we're certain to fail" and "were going to accomplish this thing (even though we haven't got the slightest clue how) in X months"? Would you feel differently about it if Musk said they'll do it in 3 weeks? Because I don't, besides "6 months" being slightly easier to believe.
However if Starlink can't compete with mobile broadband in medium (and sometimes even lower than that) density areas they don't really have much of a market. While there are certainly quite a few people in the developed world living in remote areas who don't have any better options for > 50/5 Mbps besides Starlink are there really enough of them to justify such a massive investment?
> I regularly get 150+ Mbps on my Starlink terminal.
Your anecdotal experience is not a refuting of statistical data from the overall population of users. Starlink consistently does not provide that level of service to a large swath of its users.
That's just a brand name of their 5G service. They have been providing hot spots for close to two decades. Their customer base goes back about 3 decades (easier to upsell your existing clients on a 5G hot spot than start from scratch to build a customer base like Starlink had to), and Sprint's (whom they acquired/merged with, and gained a lot of valuable wireless spectrum from) customer base goes back much further than that.
LTE hotspots have not been a viable option since..well, basically any time. They have extremely high costs vs the amount of data you get. I guess it's better than absolutely nothing and may be manageable if you don't stream video, but it's not considered home broadband for a good reason
>In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022 (and about two million in September 2023)
That argument is a red herring. The RDOF program is concentrated in specific geographic areas. Starlink onboarding subscribers in other areas doesn't really have a bearing on this program if they can't prove they can extend that to the areas in scope and hit the service levels they bid at. It might even hurt their argument if performance degrades as they focus on areas outside the RDOF locations.
More traditional offerings have a much easier time demonstrating they can do that, even if they haven't started physically building yet. It's very easy for them to say x amount of fiber capacity at this location will meet the program specs, and this is how fast we can install it.
It is true that more traditional offerings have an easier time demonstrating that they should be able to do that. But decades of traditional telecoms failing to hit promised targets demonstrates that they are unlikely to perform as promised.
That said, regulatory capture has let them regularly get away with the argument that you describe. Regulators motivated by politics and corruption have pretended to believe them. Non-incumbents therefore struggle to navigate their higher bar.
That is why I actually like the approach in the RDOF. It has regular progress check-ins built in, instead of the seemingly no strings attached grants given historically. This stage two review was "are you likely to succeed based on progress since stage one", but there are further delivery checkpoints that come with penalties and bonuses for under and over delivering.
A rule of thumb is that big infrastructure projects are always significantly behind schedule and budget. Fiber rollouts are big infrastructure projects. They'll be late, almost guaranteed. Therefore demonstrating that they can hit a schedule is very difficult.
It is difficult, but the program (theoretically, since the program isn't at that stage yet) has checkpoints to address failure to actually deliver.
This stage was to focus on if the bid accepted based off of the short-form proposal was progressing and likely to deliver as described by reviewing additional information provided in the long-form application. That is going to be easier for tech with an established delivery history.
Hell I work at a farm on the coast near Silicon Valley in San Gregorio (designing a farming robot) and Starlink is the only decent internet option we’ve ever had.
Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.
> Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.
You are benefiting from the rural broadband subsidies being applied well. A coworker of mine has lived in various rural Oregon towns through his career and regularly gets faster, more reliable, and cheaper broadband than I do in Portland. Not only that, but it's run by municipalities or coops and so you can often get to know the operators personally!
I think something that's often overlooked is when the Starlinks or TMobiles of the world win these subsidies: rural communities lose the potential to provide decent local tech jobs and offer customer service those of us in cities can't dream of.
If we're going to subsidize things, let's subsidize publicly owned infrastructure!
Bay Area’s fiber and broadband network is a joke. That it’s the tech capital of the world makes it so much worse. Things are improving - I got fiber in 2020 - and speeds are trending upwards with some local completion. AT&T and Comcast are finally getting a bit better with speed. Coverage still sucks. Number of available options still suck. Not to mention weird collusions between Comcast and apt management companies and other anti-competitive behaviour. Then there’s PG&E using various excuses to block using their poles to expand the network.
The future is here,
it's just (very) unevenly distributed. There's an IPX in downtown San Francisco so if you have the money for it, you can get 10-gig business class Internet. But if you're principled and don't want to get Comcast, and are in a shorter building so you can't get monkey brains, the local WISP, you get DSL, even in the heart of San Francisco so a friend is on 3Mbit down/128kbps up. Watching streaming at her place is a roll of the dice, so I torrent it at my place and walk it over on a USB drive. She pays for Paramount+ which is where the show we're watching is on, so monetarily I'm okay with myself.
Yep, completely terrible. My only high-speed choice in a well-developed neighborhood in San Francisco is 1000/35 from Comcast (not like I ever see that 1000, though). AT&T's fiber trunk is a block away from me, but they want $20k+ to run that fiber to my home.
Apparently Comcast has been experimenting/offering higher upload speeds for a while now, but it's still not available where I am.
There is something to be said for this. Didn't Marissa Mayer refuse to get broadband at home for a long time to make sure the tech she was managing was usable on dialup?
There is a slim sliver of coast that has farms, then mountains, then the valley.
The mountains are sparsely populated and heavily forested. Driving up and out of the valley you enter into a different world complete with legends of murder cults.
Its a car and motorbike mecca. Drive down the coast from San Francisco. Climb up the mountain at San Gregorio or further south, stop at Alice’s to look at the superbikes and super cars, and drive back down into the valley.
I'll say! In high school and college I had a 1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and I grew up on Highway 9 in Ben Lomond. I went to college at Santa Clara University and continued dating someone who lived off Highway 9 in Boulder Creek. I got to rip it over HWY 9 a few times a week! Such a lovely drive. Tho I lost a dear friend to a car accident on that road and I slowed down a lot since then.
Just remember (this isn’t directed specifically at you), because apparently this needs reinforcing: public roads are not a racetrack! If you want to drive recklessly go to a track day. If you can afford a fast car and tires you can afford a track day. Public roads have wildlife, and the public on them.
As a SpaceX shareholder since 2006, I can confirm that they’ve been turning the impossible into the late, very consistently. There is no more impressive company anywhere
When I was living in Seattle I found the service to be shockingly bad. I "upgraded" to 5G and my service got substantially worse. I'd often have "full signal 5G" and barely be able to watch videos in Capitol Hill. I worked in SoDo and I found multiple dead zones between the train station and my work (just a few blocks).
For a while I was tweeting at them regularly with screenshots, but got bored of the "DM us so we can resolve this right away" bots and realized I was screaming into the void. I ultimately wound up switching to Verizon.
Interestingly, T-Mobile service was far better in the 3 other major cities I lived in, but it's still pretty embarrassing that their service is so bad right in their own backyard.
I activated a tmobile hotspot for when I spend time in the San Juan Islands, because on at least one island TMo is the only provider.
The service and hotspot were quite reliable.
While at home - a rural area of northern CA, my fiber provider (which is also the backhaul for Verizon - my primary cell provider) went down for a couple days. The TMo hotspot was reliable, performant and served up both the work I needed to do and streaming TV just fine.
$50/mo with no penalty to activate/deactivate made me a fan. Years ago, TMo sucked a lot in the Santa Cruz area.
At those growth rates, they shouldn't need the 900 Million. So this decision by the FCC shouldn't make a difference.
As a matter of full disclosure, being from Wisconsin, (home of the great FoxConn boondoggle), I now find myself firmly against corporate welfare. Giving a guy who's supposed to be the richest man in the world a billion dollars to provide me internet service? Nah, that doesn't smell right to me. Something's off about that.
"under-delivering" was paired with "over-promising". Elon has done some cool stuff, yeah. He promised cooler stuff and so far it hasn't been possible for lots of reasons. So you are both correct.
<<Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now.
It's not even 2024, and the targets are for 2025.
How long has T-Mobile been ramping up their program to achieve this 1.4M vs. 1.1M, and how much does the government subsidy ACP cover for this 1.4M in order to have those customers under T-Mobile? And it seems they are being fined $200M for not complying with the subsidy's rules [1].
> Starlink (and Musk in general) have been over-promising and under-delivering for years now. Starlink claimed 150Mbps back in 2020 and that speeds would double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.[1] Instead, speeds have halved.[2]
How dare they during a globally-disruptive pandemic?
I find it impressive that the government is actually punishing a project for running late and underdelivering. They should expand this to all parts of the government. Can you imagine if the F-35 was cancelled the first time it fell behind schedule? The Space Launch System? The Littoral Combat System? The USS JFK?
So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money. Maybe contractors would have to start properly estimating costs up front. Or maybe nothing would ever get done again.
I do wonder what the FCC is planning to do with these funds if they aren't funding Starlink. Are they going to go towards a "safer" project like Project Kuiper? Or maybe dumping it into Inmarsat?
I think you may not understand what the government is.
The government is a collection of individuals. It is not a single borg instance. Some individuals within that collection are going to act different than other ones.
Also the government does a lot of funding through different mechanisms. Many miltiary programs are a cost+ program where they pay the contractor the cost of development plus a profit% so the initial budget is a bit moot since the point is to pay for a capability. That obviously doesn't apply here and the FCC wasn't offering a Cost+ program.
As if cost+ contracting hasn't been a major factor in projects going overbudget and behind schedule. Even with cost+ the contractor needs to provide an estimate up front of both the time and money needed. While it is understood that it is just an estimate, having projects come in for 5x or more of the original estimated cost is egregious. SLS for example was estimated to cost $1.5B, but instead costs $11.2B and still hasn't launched.
I wish it was; lol. The initial estimate was $18B [1]. I suspect you saw the $1.5B number for some sub-component of SLS. That's another common problem with government projects. The media will read some government report that says a new railroad will cost $1B and then report that the entire project will cost $1B while the report only talked about track cost and not about land acquisition, even environmental studies, or etc.
That said, yes SLS is over ($23B) the $18B budget and not done.
I do wish NASA would move closer to how DARPA does things where you payout a reward to companies that achieve some milestone. Somewhat close to what the FCC did here except the FCC is giving the money ahead of milestone. But there are pros and cons to this as government contracting is a pia so when you get into the situation of a single competitor it gets awkward.
Contractors not meeting their bids is a problem though. At the personal/corporate/government level I don't think people account for enough the fact that the contractor might not uphold their side of the bargin. Similar to how many people choose the cheapest insurance and then :surprise-pickachu-face: all their claims get denied.
It was $1.5B per launch. But that figure keeps going up as they have to amortize even more development cost into each launch, and the total number of launches remains constant or even drops.
The problem with cost+ is that contractors can inflate the actual cost of things, and pocket the difference. Obviously they can't do this to an unlimited extent, but the cynic in me would have a hard time believing this isn't a common practice.
It's much more likely that this stuff is difficult to do, and thus difficult to price out, than that somehow the managers of these companies are working with the finance people to secretly steal money from the government and hide it in their books, the government never catches it, and these very amicable ties between the government and defense contractors continues - and all of that is before we even get to what happens when you try to steal and your project falls behind.
It's way more valuable, usually, to get it done quickly and done well the first time, so you can move onto another project. You leave a few people on the original program pull in tons of super easy maintenance contract money for what essentially ends up being a skeleton crew.
Or, I suppose, you could try and inflate costs by a couple percentage points (not too much - you'll get caught and the risk here is MASSIVE), keep working on the same program, and hope the opportunity cost doesn't get too high.
I'm sure it happens, but I doubt it happens often.
I mean there's almost certainly crime that happens in contracting but there is a real risk of being caught if you commit fraud. Do remember that companies such as Google do pay out literally millions of dollars to random people that send in invoices for work never requested or done.
Cost+ at face-value isn't that bad of an idea. An alternative to it is the government hiring a bunch of people to do a project and ideally the government only pays Cost in that case. For people that don't believe the government can do anything this is a pretty good trade off.
IIRC, the `+` part is capped at 15% profit so IIUC that's similar to an operating margin of 15%. Although IIUC, executive expenses and a ton of other things come out of the `+` part so it should be lower than 15%. But the point I'm going to make here is that an operating margin of 15% isn't really impressive and that's the best that the contractor can do.
If the Marines hadn't insisted on adding STOL/VTOL capabilities wrt the F35B, the project would have been much more straightforward and successful. Even despite that crazy requirement, it's still a success for NATO exports.
Most of those weren't cancelled because they ran behind schedule, they were cancelled for political reasons or because the role they were designed for went away. Sometimes because some other project was overrunning their budget so badly that they had to be cancelled to free up the money for the boondoggle.
Those lists would be far more informative if they had some years associated with them. Many of the cancelled projects were prop-planes cancelled in the 1940's and 50's.
Because the Bradley IFV was only a boondoggle within the almost completely fictionalized setting of Pentagon Wars.
Someone else pointed out the performance in Ukraine, but IMO this was already a settled point in 1991, when they collectively destroyed more enemy armor than the Abrams and only lost 3 vehicles to enemy fire.
Former Bradley guy here. Like others have mentioned, it’s done far better then expected. It (along with any other IFV) are pretty much the ultimate Swiss army knife of a military vehicle. It can pretty much do almost any ground role even though isn’t insanely awe inspiring for any one. And the 25mm autocannon is prob the easiest thing in our existing arsenal we have to adapt for an anti-drone role.
And, no, that one set of photos from Ukraine of Bradleys damaged in a minefield has zero bearing pro or con given the 40 years of experience we have otherwise with it.
I find it quite amusing how proud American guys are defending their MIC... which took 15 years to produce Bradley. This thread is not about how good/bad M2 is. Please re-read the comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38632482
My friends in Ukraine fucking love the Bradley. It fills a lot of roles, being very useful for casevac under fire (much better than many alternative options).
The Pentagon Wars was misleading bullshit and the Bradley IFV was a good idea that was slated to come in under budget (before James Burton demanded his tests).
The tests were a huge waste of money that conclusively proved that the Bradley couldn't survive an anti-tank missile, which is irrelevant because 1) the Bradley isn't a tank and was never required to survive one, and 2) the Pentagon already knew that; they'd tested the components individually already.
Say what you want about the Bradley, and criticism of the military is very healthy! I think the war in Ukraine shows that while the project may have been wasteful the end result is still useful.
To be fair, defense is an existential risk for the US and its allies. NATO can’t really afford to not have a reasonably up-to-date combat jet. They also need to continually feed money into the military industrial complex so that suppliers don’t go under/downsize too much/etc.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, just think that certain fields like defense, healthcare, etc have slightly different priority lists.
this is not a true statement for a huge country with oceans on 2 sides and nukes. it is a true statement about people relying on the us military to make money tho
Oceans are only a defense if you can float a navy on them. The British Islands got invaded a couple of times... until they built a big navy.
Having two oceans is great, but now you need at least two fleets.
Nukes are only worth something if you have a lot of them and can credibly delivery them in multiple ways. Now you need subs, long-range bombers and the fighters to protect them, and missile silos.
Now add in reliance on a global supply chain (many types of oil and minerals, grades of steel not made in the US, TSMC), and all of a sudden you need to be able to help protect your partners on the other side of the world.
Now sprinkle in a couple of crazy dictators with nuclear arsenals and huge armies of their own, and it's starting to make sense why the US military needs constant re-investment.
Don't forget satellites and SIGINT (which just might involve crazy submarines and big "scientific" radio astronomy dishes). Or cover stories about ships and manganese extraction worthy of James Bond.
That was the CIA's plot, which the Navy vehemently objected to. The Navy said it was farcically complicated, too large of a plot to keep secret and likely to fail. Both proved true. The Navy offered to recover Intel from the Soviet submarine using DSVs and ROVs, low risk operations they could have easily kept secret. But the CIA won this dispute and fumbled the submarine and got putted by the press.
this is hyperbolic. there are various coastal defenses and naval deployments that are not nearly as intensive as you describe.
the "crazy dictator" theory is a conjuring of the govt and media in service of empire. they are acquiring nukes because they are afraid of being invaded by us!
I looked a bit more into this program and its all a lot more complicated
1) The money was granted in 2020 based on an inaccurate map (leading starlink & others to get funding for covering places like Target's and major airports)
2) This Starlink-FCC debate has been a protracted process, since then the program has essentially failed (a third of the money has gone to companies that didnt deliver)
3) Since then significantly more funding has been given to states for broadband, making this FCC program relatively small
It seems like the FCC is clawing back as much money as possible to try and recover from the initial auction design.
> So many boondoggles could be killed off before they spend money.
This is, in fact, precisely the issue with government contracting. But not in the way you think.
For all practical purposes, every single government contract can be cancelled without warning and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Consequently, every single government contract is executed with that in mind.
This leads to all the pathological behaviors that everybody bitches about.
The FCC didn't even give Starlink a chance to run late or underdeliver, they assessed the program and capability and decided it wasn't where they wanted to spend grant money. So they aren't being punished, they are being passed over for a better option.
The FCC originally didn't want to include fixed wireless or satellite internet for RDOF consideration, so from that fact alone I believe they were intending it to be fiber optic. A fiber plant is pretty immutable, even if you end up upgrading the things connected to the fiber for higher speeds. Once it's buried, it's pretty reliable (unless a passing herd of excavators get hungry and smell the fiber buried underground) while a satellite system is hard to upgrade and subject to the unpredictability of space. For example, mission Group 4-7 deployed 49 satellites and a geomagnetic storm killed all but 10 of them.
The risk is just much higher with satellites than with buried fiber. If the FCC is trying to build more permanent networks, fiber in the ground is much more permanent.
Buried fiber is never going to happen for the rural folks serviced by Starlink. It's hard to get companies to put fiber down in well populated suburbs, getting them out into the country is pure wishful thinking, especially if you're only talking about a billion dollars.
Part of the issue is that some of these companies are the only companies in the US capable of this scale of manufacturing, which is expensive to maintain, and only the government really uses. In other words, they're too big to fail. If we penalize them, and they go out of business or even just downsize, and then we need something urgently, we're SOL. And so we keep ponying up so that, should we need it, we keep their manufacturing capabilities.
"Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds. As of yet Starship hasn't had a successful launch."
From one of the dissenting opinions:
> the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
The Commission decision does address this. Unfortunately the section is redacted of specific details, but it appears Starlink argued that it's second gen satellites would be launched via Starship and address these issues.
However, they didn't successfully launch Starship yet as they described in that plan, and only announced Falcon 9 would launch second gen satellites after they were already denied based off of the initial plan.
The dissenting letter unfortunately just says "no they didn't", but doesn't point to any documentary evidence. It's hard to accept it at face value when compared to the long form explanation. Especially when much of the "corrective action" taken by Starlink has come after the initial denial.
> Starlink reportedly argued that once they can properly launch Starship, they can surely hit the required speeds.
Read the article you are referencing
> To justify its motivated reasoning, the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s
Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would
be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this
argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF
obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not. Undeterred by the facts, the Commission now
resorts to twisting SpaceX’s words. For example, SpaceX said in a letter to the Commission that it had
“reached a point in the development of its Starship launch vehicle and Gen2 satellites [such] that it can
concentrate solely on Configuration 1 and no longer pursue Configuration 2” (emphasis added).
Configuration 1 involves launching with Starship, and Configuration 2 involves launching with Falcon 9.
Nothing in this sentence suggests that SpaceX needed Starship to launch Gen2 satellites, but that’s
exactly the interpretation that the majority now relies on
Falcon 9 is launching Starlink V2 at 22 per launch regularly for a while now
They are just using what SpaceX/Starlink has said in the past[1].
>SpaceX asked the FCC to expedite approval now that it has settled on the Starship-launched configuration.
Regardless, to reach those obligatory speeds by 2025 they would need to launch an insane amount of satellites with no failures. If the FCC doesn't think they can do that, they don't get funding.
Then why decide now that SpaceX won't get the money? Does another company get the contract? Otherwise would have assumed to simply check at/after the delivery date...
They decided a while ago (2022) that Starlink wouldn't get the RDOF grant. This was essentially an appeal to see if the decision would be reversed, and they upheld the original decision not to fund Starlink. It's not a check after deployment thing, it's a "check if they actually can deploy in the first place" situation.
There are two rounds of funding so it's possible unspent funds from the first round may roll over to fund the second round.
They didn't decide now. The program was created as a two step process initially. Starlink succeeded in the first round, but was denied in the second, more in depth, review that lead to the rejection. This was basically an appeal of that rejection.
The second round was designed to eliminate providers who didn't seem able to deliver on their promises even with the subsidies. It was made to prevent a situation where either party (but mostly the US Gov and tax payers by extension) was on the hook for unsuccessful delivery.
I'm not sure what happens with the funds that would have gone to Starlink.
These are future speed metrics, not current speed thresholds. And the performance metrics have been a constant shifting goalpost. You can read FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr's letter on this matter here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A2.pdf This is most likely political.
I read that letter, and was unconvinced that it's anything more than the FCC not wanting to gamble with nearly 1/16th of the total RDOF grant money (for that round) and would rather give it to a company that can be reasonably expected to hit the obligatory throughput.
You can arrive at your own conclusion. I think its pretty obvious whats happening here (the commissioners voted along party lines right down the middle). And theres no other company thats even close to Starlink now or in the medium term future. So I dont know who would practically fill this spot.
For below comment: This is for "rural" connection. You're not laying wire for that regardless of what Comcast wants you to believe. They can barely service what they have and the cost/benefit of laying 30 miles of wire to reach someone in the woods is never going to make sense.
It's a letter from one FCC commissioner, of which there are currently 5. He dissents from the decision the commission as a whole came to. There are a lot of companies on the ground that could benefit from that ~$900 million so a single company replacing Starlink is not necessary. The main concern is if the FCC give Starlink money to reach 100/20 and they don't do it (because there are legitimate technical issues to solve before it's possible for Starlink to supply over half a million people with 100/20), it's wasted money. The FCC didn't think it was doable on that time scale.
Doing some math, currently each satellite launch sends up 22 satellites at around 2.8 Gbps per satellite. For each launch, Starlink adds ~61.6 Gbps of capacity. If we cut that up into 100/20 slices, each launch supports 616 customers at 100/20. To support 650,000 subscribers at 100/20, it would take about 1055 perfect launches.
I don't think the FCC was wrong when they said Starlink could not reach 650,000 people at 100/20 by 2025. There aren't enough days to launch one rocket a day to even try to catch up.
Did you miss the other dissent which would mean 40% of the commission disagreed with the decision?
DISSENTING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER NATHAN SIMINGTON
>I wholeheartedly agree with the entirety of Commissioner Carr’s dissent. I write separately to further highlight some of the meretricious logic that underlies the Bureau’s, and now Commission’s, rescinding of SpaceX’s RDOF award.
...
>I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it
Well if you want to really dig into the numbers here and get down to the gnat's ass of uselessness, Simington was confirmed with a 49-46 vote which means that less than 50% of the Senate agreed with him being on the Commission and hence he shouldn't even serve because he couldn't garner a majority of Senate approval. So, while 40% of the Commission disagreed with the decision, we should recognize that 20% of that 40% comes from someone undemocratically serving on the Commission and hence should be ignored. Meaning that, in actuality, only 25% of the democratically appointed Commission (1 out of 4) disagreed with the decision, not 40%.
All of that to say: this whole point you're making about "40% disagreed" or "20% disagreed" because the decision wasn't unanimous is really fucking dumb. The decision by the Commission is the decision, it doesn't matter how many dissents there are.
There are 5 FCC commissioners (as @I_Am_Nous's comment points out). @I_Am_Nous references one dissent. @hnburnsy links to another. That's 2 dissents. 2 out of 5 dissenting is 40%.
ok, so that still cuts down the amount of launches by 4x which takes them from 1055 launches to 260 launches. Over 2 years that would require doubling Starlink's launch cadence which is a lot, but does seem plausible.
So to make the 2025 deadline they would have had to perfectly launch more rockets than they ever have before...sounds like the FCC made the correct choice.
They need to do 180 a year to put enough satellites up to even try to hit the 2025 deadline. That's not even counting any satellites which may fail between now and then and need replaced. This is a major reason why the FCC didn't think they could have met the 2025 obligation to reach ~650,000 subscribers with 100/20 and rejected their application.
That will be sweet when they can get it done and reliably launch Starship! Starlink isn't bad, it just wasn't capable of meeting the RDOF deadline according to the information available at the time.
The calculation above assumes all satellites are available to provide bandwidth to the customers. That means essentially the 260 satellites need to be above the US (let's ignore that the visible horizon is different across the US). Now starlink are LEO, so 260 essentially we need to divide the 260 by the fraction the globe area the US is.
The 260 is a significant underestimate. It's likely 4-10x more
Sure but the assumption made already say, that SpaceX uses _all_ capacity for this program (and nothing else) and it doesn't require any double hops (I would think you need to at least add a factor of two for the up/down thing). And that you can see all satellites all the time. So it was a _very_ conservative assumption. And it would still require ~all launch capacity of 2024 and 2025. SpaceX calculations is extremely optimistic to the point of being delusional.
At least without Starship, which I _personally_ think that they will manage to iron out their problems of the course of next year. But even then _this_ timeline they won't be able to keep
I'd rather the federal government just roll out fiber and not put Starlink and Elon in a position of power. That fiber will always be in the ground and available. Elon has shown himself to be unworthy of any position where trust and good judgement is required. If it costs more, that is a premium worth paying. Fool me once.
The success of SpaceX is placing Musk in a position to decide where America's allies have access to the internet and choosing what region of the world can be cut off just through meeting politicians he likes.
That doesn’t negate the fact that he wields power against others when it meets his needs. He’s effective, I don’t dispute that, but still needs a metaphorical cage built around him to protect others.
Indeed, satellite or long haul fixed wireless will be the only option for some locations. I have been to rural Montana and Wyoming, but not Alaska.
Customers will have to pay for their own StarLink where the FCC won’t. Perhaps we should not be subsidizing folks where it costs $1M to deliver terrestrial connectivity to you. Cheaper to pay them to move.
This is in comparison to launching satellites into space. I think most people would agree it's probably more along the lines of "trivial" when compared to that.
Neither are trivial, the two just scale very differently.
I do see the benefit in resilience of building out fiber even to moderately unprofitable (from a unit economics point of view) regions, just like we also build roads to communities that will never "pay the investment back" in taxes. But there are cases where it just can't be justified.
But it's also not a simple either-or: There are other technologies than fiber and satellite; there can be more than one high-throughput LEO provider; we can have a few GEO satellites for redundancy (although with significantly worse latency) etc.
Outside of truly rural areas the question with fiber is how long is the payback period, not "will it be profitable". Especially if deployment is integrated with routine highway re-pavement projects (roads need torn up and redone roughly every 30 years, after all), the majority of the cost becomes the fiber bundles themselves - perfect for even a smaller county or city government to handle with a modest bond issue.
> the question with fiber is how long is the payback period, not "will it be profitable".
The "payback period" might well be infinite (with non-zero interest rates), in which case we're talking about a subsidy, not an investment. (Which might still be a good idea! It won't "pay for itself", though.)
Instead of a simple comment about historical grants, you perhaps could educate yourself on current state grants and efforts. Trying and failing previously doesn't mean trying something different shouldn't be done, you know? Should we just give up because of previous mistakes? No, absolutely not. That is failure.
You're replying to an accurate comment about how government funding works. I am educated on this, I have worked off of government grant money often, it's 100% who you know, not what you do.
Also involved in government procurement, also provide guidance to several Congressional reps gratis as a technologist subject matter expert. Change is possible, to believe otherwise is to give up. If you want to give up, head to the bar and make way for people who give a shit. I give a shit, so I am admittedly biased.
The simplest and best way to ensure change is to fund a competitor who has a different approach. Not wanting to mindlessly throw money at the same people forever isn't giving up.
You're being incredibly optimistic. Show me a non-greedy person in Congress, with the exception of Thomas Massie, and I'll believe you that change is possible.
Hope is in short supply, but not at empty yet. Make sure to vote every election. 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year in the US, and 4M voters age into voting at 18. Demographics are inevitable. As I tell the young folks, Hold Fast.
(disclaimer: I have maxed out my FEC political contributions to every rep enumerated due to my belief in their character; if someone's character changes or evidence surfaces they are not a good person, my support changes accordingly)
Oh, I see. I agree that these are people who deeply embody the Democratic ethos, and Bernie is one of the poorer members of the Senate. I seriously dislike Fetterman's "working class" act, though.
However, considering that they hate me, I will pass.
We may disagree politically, but I still want the best for you (although the debate lies in what that looks like). Take care, and I enjoyed the conversation regardless.
I understand and appreciate that perspective. I usually want the government to leave me alone, but if they won't, I want the most principled people duking it out. It sounds like we both value principles in office, maybe not to the exclusion of ideology, but it's a major factor.
I did as well, good to have some old-style HN conversation.
Verizon was able to lay fiber all over rural New York in a pretty short amount of time due to a New York law for similar rural funding. Places that couldn't even get cable have fiber now. Just laying fiber is an alternative to satellite.
Do want to point out buildout requirements that are actually enforced in NY would be strongly compelling. Spectrum was heavily fined and had their license suspended on cable for failing to meet these commitments a few years back. Other states just dole out the money without punishing the companies that cash out dividends and use it for mergers.
Yes, it's fiber. Yes, to the home. Currently, 93Mbps down, 83 Mbps up (but I have the cheap service). And the service is a crap-ton better than that of Spectrum in NC.
Anecdotally, my dad lives in a rural area with no cable/DSL broadband available.
Cellular broadband only got him 10-15 Mbps. He was excited when Starlink was available. I think he was pretty early on the preorder list. Once he finally got access to Starlink (Feb 2022) the speeds were close to the advertised ~100 Mbps.
Now the price has increased and on average he's back to getting like 15-20 Mbps down.
Luckily, the EMC that services the area received some rural broadband grant money to roll out FTTH and that build out has been pretty quick. They have already run fiber down his road and said that service should be available in a couple of months. The EMC is offering 2 Gbps down / 1-2 Gbps up (!!!) for $100/mo.
So this money is actually being spent effectively when it goes to the right place. Starlink made a bunch of promises that they couldn't fulfill and the money is being redirected, as it should be.
I feel like in 90% of Starlinks use cases it is only the best option because they are the most motivated to succeed. Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution but the telecoms have made far to much money by taking money then not delivering.
>Running traditional wired service is the more practical and permanent solution
It's permanent but it depends on what the word practical means. Often the cost of setting up infrastructure for such low density population means the infrastructure will never pay for itself, or that the same money spent elsewhere would service many more customers, so its not necessarily practical.
Not necessarily. This round of grants is closed. There is no guarantee that this money will be rolled into the next round. In fact, that seems quite unlikely to me.
>Phase 1: Will provide up to $16.4 billion
>Phase 2: Will provide at least $4.4 billion
When it says "at least $4.4 billion" that leaves the door open for phase 1 fund rollover. We'll see eventually. Maybe Starlink can get some money in phase 2.
This letter is junk, to put it lightly. I lived in a rural area with copper lines that were destined to stay that way because of classist inaction by the FCC - one that rewarded cities with new, expanded internet lines repeatedly and required vast parts of rural America to be torn up for backbones that they weren't allowed to tap, or could only be tapped with inexpensive copper lines mandated through telephony requirements. To put it less lightly, 100/20 is still a joke and a clear discrepancy between what's offered in most US cities and suburbs. The Biden Administration is trying to fix that history with the FCCs mandate; I don't care about whether Elon's satellite business is worth it in the end. I do care whether rural people get stable, dependable, fast internet that doesn't become irrelevant the moment it's laid.
Just FYI, in case it makes a difference to your assessment of credibility, but this is the same commissioner who opposes net neutrality, wants to rework the CDA to deal with the way "the far left has worked to weaponize social media platforms", hopes to have TikTok banned in the interest of national security, and appeared on Fox News to talk about how "the far-left has hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax to explain how it lost to President Trump at the ballot box".
When you say it is most likely political, it certainly is, because Carr and Simington (who was rammed through the Senate at the last moment by the Trump administration) are pretty much the definition of partisan. People who were paying attention to the development of this situation back in 2020/21 saw it coming.
Thanks for the excellent summary. I said this in previous stories (not as eloquently) and got an angry mob for not praising spacex. There's a difference between respecting what they're doing for launches and what they're doing for Internet. The former is extremely impressive and groundbreaking.
The latter is hitting the same problems everyone in the industry knew would happen. It costs too much money to maintain the launch cadence, speeds will suffer as the network gets congested, and latency will grow. All of these happened and are continuing to get worse.
I just checked my Starlink and we have 150Mbps/6Mbps, by Speedtest.com, is that the same concept as the numbers you reference? Is the concern that if more users came online they wouldn't be able to maintain 100/20? I don't know much about the topic, FYI.
My parents in rural Northeast Texas use Starlink as their primary connection (they have a WISP as failover). Since Sept. 2022, I've been running automated speed tests four times a day (1 and 7, AM and PM). Speeds vary a lot throughout the day, but average about 100 Mbps down by 10 Mbps up.
Before starlink my only option was 3MB DSL from Verizon, it was literally life changing as a WFH person to get the 100-200Mbps downloads that Starlink gave me (for $99/month).
Fast forward and now I have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home.
Really nice to have that, but the leap from DSL to Starlink was life changing, the leap from Starlink to fiber was merely a minor improvment.
It’s also possible that you would not have gotten fiber in the same timeframe if Starlink hadn’t competed for your business. Companies like Windstream are notorious for gaining regulated monopolies in rural areas, gobbling up government subsidies, only to deliver low bandwidth, saturated service to customers.
when we first moved here we had 15/5 that was actually 6/1 if we were lucky, so Starlink seemed like a good idea, so I got in my reservation early. We finally were able to switch to Starlink and while things were better, it became obvious that they were possibly oversubscribe in our area. Then they put caps in. Then they raised prices.
Then my rural power company saved the day by stringing fibre to EVERY single drop in their system. 1000 symmetric but really more like 950/800 but I'm doing fine, thanks.
I really think fiber is it for rural internet. They have the will to do it and it's rolling out all over in some states.
I'm in very rural NW New Mexico on Starlink for the last 18 mo or so. I run a q 15 minute Fast.com speed test via HomeAssistant. Speeds are almost always between 60 and 80 mbps.
Previously was on the only local competitor without data caps, 6 mbps via DSL. All others are either cell or satellite based and would destroy my wallet at my usually usage (<=1TB/mo).
Note that the timestamps are UTC, while Texas is UTC-6:00 during Standard Time and UTC-5:00 during Daylight Saving Time. The biggest dip is during prime streaming hours.
Huh. It's really nice to see actual metrics. I live in a rural area and get my internet through a fixed wireless provider. For a while I'd been wondering if it was worth giving Starlink a try
While this is usually a bit more bandwidth than I get, that isn't consistent and the ping is much worse. I pretty consistently get 50/15 with 15ms ping at about $90/mo after tax+fees. Based on some of the hype and press Starlink gets I assumed it would have had much better bandwidth, even if the latency is about inline with my expectations. Thanks for gathering and sharing this.
Maybe a dumb take but I’d really like for the population to earn an ownership stake in the company for providing subsidies. I don’t know much about subsidies but it seems like it would be in the best interest of the population to be able to have an ownership stake in the companies that are providing a head start through monetary or policy subsidizing. Can someone tell me if there is a way for the US to recoup subsidy money or how this works?
We the people recoup the subsidy money in non-monetary rewards.
Culture is becoming so focused on only the money: I guess because capitalism appears to optimise for the single dimension of dollars so that is all we see.
Let's not forget the value of what we are buying: called "consumer surplus" in economics.
So often commenters seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities, but completely forget what we receive that isn't measured in dollars: in this case access to the internet for people in the boondocks ⃰.
Albeit I am not a US tax payer (however the USA charges me in many many other joyful ways).
This whole thread is about the govt handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to private companies; the topic couldn't be more about money. There are plenty of worthwhile non-monetary things that can be done to improve society, but a discussion about how to allocate government cash subsidies seems like an odd place to object to a focus on financial matters.
It’s funny how these corporations can hoover up billions of taxpayer dollars and only care about cold hard cash, but as soon as someone suggests that perhaps the people in whose name those subsidies are granted should get an ownership stake in the corporations receiving those subsidies if only to have a sliver of control into what those companies do with said subsidies, all of a sudden the guitar is whipped out, and people start singing Kumbaya because “it’s not all about the money.”
I want to make a counterproposal that should be perfectly in tune with that philosophy:
How about instead of receiving billions in subsidies, these corporations do the funding themselves and provide broadband internet to these rural communities at no cost?
Let’s not forget the value these corporations buy, which they call “goodwill” in economics.
So often, corporations seem to focus on the dollars or sometimes the negative externalities but completely forget what they receive that isn’t measured in dollars: in this case, provide a service to the society they benefit so much from.
Funny how you are complaining about a corporation receiving billions in subsidies, when the article is about Starlink not receiving subsidies. Especially when the corporation is providing the service without government help.
I thought it was pretty obvious, and don't detect any snark.
A business/industry gets subsidies and is able to grow faster than it would have or just simply grow where nothing would before. Those businesses are then subject to taxes which the government collects and puts to use, which then benefits the populace at large.
Businesses that don’t get subsidies pay the same exact taxes. And businesses pay very little tax in the first place. Finally, tax revenue isn’t an ownership stake in a company; no amount of money is.
> Businesses that don’t get subsidies pay the same exact taxes.
But the point of a subsidy is to create a business where one did not, possibly could not exist before. Therefore the tax revenue coming from companies created by subsidies is in addition to other businesses tax revenue, not replacing it.
It’s really not all that obvious to me. In particular you’re saying the reason to hand SpaceX nearly a billion is so I can do business with them faster because the subsidy reduces their time to market? If so, that’s a bogus argument in my opinion. I’d prefer a more direct mechanism like ownership and profit sharing. There is plenty of venture capitalists out there, if we can float WeWork, I’m sure there’s people who can float SpaceX and other perhaps more valuable to society businesses.
well first you have to imagine, what is a gain from holding stake? At the end of the day, is it really a claim on future profits? Maybe more reasonably just a stock that you can trade/sell for money. And what does one do with that money? Buy things I guess to increase your welfare.
Tax expenditure in the ideal setting would be spent on clean water, education, etc. things that increase your welfare. And successful companies paying lots of taxes hopefully increase the welfare of a country.
So it is kind of like taxes emulate welfare increase...is the way I see it.
But wouldn’t it something if we’d give that argument any merit.
You could be a billionaire that goes around and makes lofty promises that are never realized, treat your workers like shit, have the common populous play death by auto lottery, and so much more and the government couldn’t do anything about any of it because of *gasp* …the optics.
That would be a billionaire snake oil salesman’s wet dream right there.
I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money, and also that accepting the grant automatically granted you the appropriate right of way via imminent domain.
It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places (they have little portable boring machines, so you don’t even have to trench), and independent ISPs have no problem profitably laying fiber where they are legally allowed to do so.
So, my tiny rural co-op ISP should barred from getting one of these, because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Laying fiber requires a small crew, and they don’t work for free. My driveway alone is over a 1/4 mile (400m), and it will take them a day to lay and terminate my branch due to all of the buried obstructions (based on how long it took them to lay new copper lines a decade ago).
I would be all for disqualifying the regional cable/telco monopolists, but who do you think lobbied their Congress critters to get these funds allocated in the first place? Ain’t never gunna happen….
<I wish they’d bar companies that have failed to build out their rural service areas for more than a decade from accepting this money
If your ISP already took millions and didn't do what they said they would last time, that should disqualify them for another grant.
>because they cannot afford to lay dozens of miles of fiber in order to serve a hundred households? You want to keep us country folk in the dark ages? Because that’s what it sounds like.
Sounds like starlink may make more sense for your home and community than fiber. There is obviously a density threshold where laying fiber is not cost effective.
They never qualified it as taking millions and not building out; the only qualifier included was not building out for a decade, which includes my ISP.
My ISP has applied for these funds to bring fiber to my property. The original statement asserts they should not be allowed to receive funding. You seem to feel the same way, unless you genuinely believe that Starlink is in any way comparable to fiber. To be clear, it is not even close, and it never will be.
Rural citizens do not deserve to be left behind with speeds that are an order of magnitude slower than what everyone else has. We subsidize other utilities to reach everyone, and we have decided internet is critical to our society. It is time for everyone to pony up to fund access for everyone.
I can see that reading. I took it the other way given the larger context of concern about paying providers like starlink for service that will never be delivered.
I dont think starlink is the same as fiber, but I also dont think fiber is a human right or even relevant for most people given a reasonable alternative.
If you choose to live away from civilization then you’ve chosen to forgo the benefits of civilization. It’s ridiculous that we massively subsidize people who made the voluntary decision to live in a way that makes providing infrastructure for them cost prohibitive.
It’s a free country and you can live in a cave on top of a mountain if you want, but you shouldn’t get to demand that the government spend millions of dollars to run fiber up the mountain to your cave.
That is exactly what we do for power and phone, which are no more difficult to bring in than fiber. If you live in the city, you have made the choice to subsidize rural citizens.
We spend millions of dollars on shiny buildings, parks, and other infrastructure in the city. Is it ridiculous that rural taxpayers massively subsidize those things just because you have made the decision to live there?
It’s a free country and you can live in the city if you want, but you shouldn’t demand the government provide more services for you than it does for its rural citizens.
Or do you think people should be given fundamentally and grossly differently opportunities, based solely on where they happen to live? Remember, before you annswer: not everyone gets a choice where they were born or live.
Indeed. Fiber as a last mile solution for true rural areas is a non-starter. Source: I also built a small WISP and still maintain my own microwave service, and use Starlink as a backup.
Fiber can even run aerial on those same power lines. It doesn't have to be buried, which could help some of the more remote areas that already have power.
Exactly. We decided internet is as important as any other infrastructure service. It is only infeasible when people decide that rural citizens do not deserve it.
Indeed, it is hard for me not to read this thread in that light; I’m guessing those that seem to oppose subsidizing rural fiber either already have theirs or have simply given up all hope of it ever happening.
I live in a small EU country, and we had the same issues here.... we solved them by municipalities building fiber (usually when (re)building the roads, because it's cheaper then) and ISPs just renting it out. There's actually EU fuding for that and ISPs aren't forced to invest where they don't want to (but have to pay rent to the municipality).
Don’t bother. I used to live in a small EU country as well.
Even in the tiny rural village I lived in the last couple of years before I moved to the US, they did pretty much what you’re talking about (with the details being slightly different). Still, in true US fashion, this problem is deemed “uniquely American” and thus can’t benefit from the plethora of wheels invented overseas to solve this issue.
In my case, the fiber was paid for 50% by the municipality and 50% by a group of ISPs accessible for any ISP that would like to offer services, only realized if at least x amount of households would sign a promise they’d sign up for a contract with one of the ISPs for at least a year once infrastructure was completed.
This was easily accomplished because the ISPs offered a €30/month 1Gbps symmetrical connection in an area with shitty sub-10Mbps DSL that was at least twice that price and expensive asymmetrical DOCSIS at more than triple that price.
Here in the US, I’m in a rural area where the “best option” is 1Gbp down/20Mbp up at 4x that price.
Also, don’t underestimate how much people in the US hate taxes and governments spending money on useful things.
My area has a volunteer firefighter department that cannot handle the entire area and has been trying to expand its tiny little footprint for the last decade.
Aside from the lack of equipment, the firefighters can’t even park at their fire station and instead have to park at a paid parking spot.
Just last month, there was a ballot initiative to raise the property taxes by $0.02, averaging to an annual property tax increase of a few dollars, so that they could fund the much-needed expansion of the fire station.
Of course, it failed.
If the county were willing to fund fiber for the community here, there would be riots. Still, at the same time, everyone is always bitching about the internet and the lack of any cellular signal from any of the carriers.
I love how the cost of directional drilling is completely discounted here. It's an expensive process that requires a ton of skilled (often union) labor.
> It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places
I'm sorry what? This part of your comment is so absurd that it calls into question anything else you might be saying here.
I lived through a fiber roll out only a short year or so ago, it was an entire summer of trucks, mostly contractors by the look of them, with trailers, with boring machines, stacks of boxes, and of course, spools upon spools of fiber and conduit. If that cost "essentially nothing" do you really assert that all of those workmen, all of those resources, all of those assets were simply brought forth from the void to perform their work and then sent back?
And that's just the actual work, I'm sure there was months if not years of permitting, working with the city engineers to plan things out, the logistics behind all of that shit, for actual months of work that was barely completed before snow hit the ground.
Holy fuck people. Infrastructure is HARD. It's one of the hardest things you CAN BUILD.
When you're rebuilding a road (so the old asphalt is dug out and new one put in place), laying an additional small pipe and running fiber through is actually very cheap. Here in my small country in europe the municipalites lay fiber along the road repair works and then rent it out to ISPs in rural areas. In some areas als private ISPs can apply to put their own fiber if they want.
Hmm, I would like to see a citation on that second comment. You can look at Frontier's last earnings release, they spent $168M of build Capex to pass 332k homes, or $506/home passed in the last quarter. Note that "passing" a home is not the same as connecting a home, there is additional cost involved there. And Frontier has tremendous cost benefit from the fact that they already own the telephone poles that they can reuse and have been doing this for decades at massive scale.
If you think the entire cost of laying fiber is just the cost of boring/digging, then you don't know what you are talking about.
The thing is they keep saying it IS the digging that is hampering them (we know that to be false). The one I saw a few weeks ago they ran about 1000ft of cable in under an hour. Most of that was getting the machine off/on the trailer and reterminating the lines.
I'd like to see a citation on the "imminent" domain comment as well. It seems far-fetched to me that the Federal government would take away local control from counties and municipal governments to issue permits and inspect their right-of-ways, just because a utility company was awarded a grant.
>>It costs essentially nothing to lay fiber in the ground in most places
How to tell us you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber, without actually saying you know absolutely nothing about the costs of running fiber
I don't want that. I don't think a lot of what OP made sense, but I was just correcting their typo since it's an understandable mistake and can be easily fixed.
I'm glad to see the FCC sticking to its requirements and having a testing regime for them. Starlink's own service specifications are far below the 100/20Mbps requirements. They currently are promising 25-100Mbps down, 5-10Mbps up. In congested areas they often don't even deliver that in the evenings. [1]
I use Starlink in my rural area and am grateful for it. But hopefully the $900M will be better spent on other ISPs. A particular problem with Starlink is if it fails, there's no infrastructure left behind. The fiber installs that RDOF is paying for should outlive the companies getting the grants.
Now if the FCC was actually principled when when choosing when to " sticking to its requirements" because ti seems large traditional companies can just do what ever the hell they want and get subsidies.
Do you have an example with the RDOF of a "large traditional company" doing whatever the hell they want and getting subsidies? It's a bit complciated since it's still under review.
This happened in the past all the time, particularly in Ajit Pai's version of the FCC. But the RDOF process seems different. In particular the FCC is actually measuring performance, not just relying on ISP's self-reported numbers. AT&T was really good at strategically lying about those in the past.
I’m looking at Lambert’s data, but aside from the problem of sample size, it seems to support the FCC’s reading of the situation.
There are barely any samples that hit the required >= 20Mbps up and while it’s easier to spot >= 100Mbps down, it’s far from consistent and seems to be more of a “once a day” occurrence.
I suggest reviewing this data again, especially with the understanding that the timestamps are in UTC. 0027 UTC corresponds to 1827 in CST (the timezone for Texas). During prime time, this user was often around 10mbps.
If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense?
Odd that they'd include comments about Starship in it, though. That doesn't seem like a requirement for continued development of Starlink and seems very speculative. There could be details on that aspect that I'm missing though.
An FCC commissioner indicates that the FCC is yoinking the award because it thinks SpaceX won't hit the 2025 targets, yet many other award recipients have no service and no rollout and no speeds to even measure:
> What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it
in 2022 instead? In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at
all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022
(and about two million in September 2023). The majority’s only response to this point is that those other
recipients were relying on proven technologies like fiber, while SpaceX was relying on new LEO
technology.
As far as I can tell in a cursory reading, SpaceX Starlink applied for subsidies with enumerated requirements. They cannot meet those requirements, so the subsidy is rescinded.
Seems straightforward and doesn’t seem to matter, as far as I can tell, how many other companies couldn’t meet the requirements or don’t have the hardware to meet those requirements or whatever.
Unclear why this is “blatant corruption” or “crony capitalism” and in fact seems to be based in facts. Can you explain?
I'm getting the impression that some of the competitors haven't built anything to test yet. Based upon that, using the current performance of Starlink and comparing it to the hypothetical performance of others might not be fair. If Starlink is losing an award because of supposition, that's bad.
But I must admit that I haven't read all of the history here.
I think they’re not comparing to hypothetical performance of others, but comparing it to the threshold the FCC set originally, which SpaceX decided was achievable and so applied for subsidies based on their believed ability to hit the numbers.
For starters, last year (when this initial decision was made), a total of 22 applicants defaulted (i.e., didn’t meet the requirements)[0].
Some didn’t get their funding in order, others didn’t get their ETC certification arranged in time, others didn’t provide a viable proposal, and some withdrew their bid.
SpaceX falls in the latter category.
It’s important to understand that throughout the process, viability and progress are looked at, and rightly so; we’re talking about billions of dollars in taxpayer monies, and it would be silly to only look at the deadline and go “Whelp, you didn’t make it, guess the money is gone now.” Particularly when clawing back the money would be very cumbersome with someone notorious for not paying their bills and what they owe.
There are a couple of minimum requirements; for this debate and simplicity, I’ll highlight the minimum speed, which is 25/3Mbps.
You could’ve bid to provide service at that minimum level, but you also could bid for a higher speed tier (the speeds are divided into different tiers)[1].
Bidding a higher tier comes with a higher amount of subsidies, but it also means you need to meet the requirements of that higher tier. There is no “Oh well, just give me the subsidies of the lower tier”; you either meet the requirements tied to your bid or you don’t.
SpaceX made a bid for the “Above Baseline” tier, which requires them to provide 100/20Mbps.
There are a couple of ways the FCC tries to evaluate if the applicant can comply with the FCC requirements.
For one, they look at the technology the applicant said they would use. Mature and more reliable technologies will provide a clearer picture than newer and less reliable technologies, of course. I don’t think anyone here will argue that LEO satellites can provide the same consistency and quality in experience as fiber, for example.
They also look at historical achievements, especially concerning newer technology such as LEO satellites. Most other applicants don’t use LEO satellites but instead use fiber, for example.
Whether the fiber equipment is in use in RDOR areas or not is irrelevant; if the applicant says they’ll use the same equipment they’re operating in a different region, you can pretty much expect the same performance.
Starlink’s performance has been declining, with upload already falling well below 20Mbps.
Another part they look at is the long-form applications by the applicant (i.e., their plan for achieving it all). If the strategies aren’t realistic or based on predictions and assumptions that rely too much on unlikely positive outcomes, they are not considered reliable.
Again, it’s easier to put a shovel in the dirt than it is to launch rockets, so the historical performance of laying the infrastructure is going to look different depending on the technology used.
The fact of the matter is that Starlink is still too much of a question mark in a lot of points and not performing as expected and required, coupled with customers needing to purchase a $600 dish[2] and the FCC is rightfully going to wonder if it’s all achievable or not and if they money they manage is being put to good use.
That’s why, back in August of 2022, when the original decision was made, they summed it up as such[3]:
> 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.64 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 non-
RDOF 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.
Remember that by this time, SpaceX had hitched this wagon to their Starship configuration, abandoning the Falcon[4].
By now, when the FCC was looking if they should reconsider, the Starship program wasn’t doing so hot, only reaffirming their decision of last year.
Starlink is nothing that you deploy and then you are done. When you have launched the last satellite, then the first ones launched will have reached the end of their lifespan and you essentially have to start over, deploy the entire constellation once again as the satellites reach the end of their lifespan one by one. With a lifespan of say 5 years, you will have to deploy the entire constellation once every 5 years, with 12k satellites you are looking at replacing 200 satellites each month, forever. That sounds possible without Starship but I can also imagine that being able to use Starship is necessary for the economical viability in the long run.
5 years to deorbit passively is correct, but the expected service life is in somewhat similar. Best quote i've got on hand right now is wikipedia:
> "...implement an operations plan for the orderly de-orbit of satellites nearing the end of their useful lives (roughly five to seven years) at a rate far faster than is required under international standards.
Obviously there are many unknowns in factors like hardware reliability or fuel consumption.
All the numbers I have seen were 5 to 7 years of operational lifespan but I can not find a primary source from SpaceX at the moment. I think I also read that there are plans to increase the lifespan eventually with larger satellites, deployed using Starship.
I’ve got news for you about Earth-based networking gear. You don’t just install it and forget about it forever - you replace and upgrade, almost continuously, and lifespans are frequently significantly less than five years.
Of course, any system will need maintenance. My point was that you need the capacity to do the maintenance and you have to be able to do it cost effectively. That means in the case of Starlink it might actually be important to have Starship available because only this way they have the necessary capacity or cost effectiveness to maintain the constellation while using Falcons might not be good enough. I also say might, I of course don't know, I was just addressing the question why availability of Starship might be a relevant factor.
A 1000Gbps cable laid down in the ground will be able to support 1000Gbps even 50 years from now provided that it doesn't get truncated by accident or Earthquake
It's hard to tell due to the redactions, but it seems like Starlink brought Starship into the discussion as part of the explanation of how it would have the technical capability to deliver the service.
I’m an unqualified casual observer and working from memory, but I seem to remember capacity and throughput promises related to the “Starlink 2.0” satellites, which Mr. Musk claims are “an order of magnitude better” than the current birds on unspecified measures [0], and without which Starlink couldn’t credibly deliver the promised service to the promised number of households in the promised time to earn the subsidy [1].
The new satellite designs got a bit mired in regulatory complications until December of 2022, but it turned out to be moot since they’re too big and heavy to get up to orbit without Starship’s lift capacity and Starship isn’t there yet (and might not be within the period the subsidy contemplated). After the decision to cancel the subsidy (which is on appeal here) was taken back in 2022, Starlink seem to have rejiggered the 2.0 satellites into a “2.0-mini” configuration suitable for launch via Falcon 9 [2].
Apparently they would like for the FCC to reconsider the subsidy decision in light of them engineering around the Starship dependency?
They came up with V2 Mini satellites that can fit on Falcon 9. The original V2 can only be launched on Starship. They can launch a lot more V1.5, 48-56, than V2 Mini, 22, on Falcon 9.
I'd think it would be because SpaceX probably argued that the trajectory with Startship launching 10s of thousands of satellites that it would meet the program requirements.
The reason Starship is brought up is because all of this hinges on SpaceX’s explanation on how they’re going to achieve the requirements of their bid.
SpaceX has stated they’re going to use Starship for this, going as far as stating early last year that they were exclusively going to use Starship.
So obviously, when the FCC is going to weigh if SpaceX is going to be able to meet the requirements of their bid, they’re going to look at the plan presented to them by SpaceX.
In the FCC’s defense, they apparently asked SpaceX questions regarding concerns they had, but SpaceX didn’t answer.
I feel like it's a fair decision, they had certain criteria. Even so, more broadband competition in rural areas would be better than subsidizing the incumbents.
Sure, and that makes sense if the competitors have proven approaches to meeting the requirements. While I expect Starlink to be able to improve, I can see their point that the outcome is far from certain.
The government shouldn’t give out billion dollar participation trophies.
There’s a set of metrics to meet. Starlink is moving the wrong way against those metrics. As such, they’ll need to succeed unaided in the marketplace, instead of getting a government handout.
Perhaps not billion dollar, but shouldn’t it give some participation trophies? How else to entice innovation in certain areas, especially when the interest rates are killing small tech outfits.
Agreed. The FCC shouldn't be giving out any funds. They should stick to their role as regulator. Starlink as a properly grounded libertarian outfit should have lobbied to have any subsidy role by the FCC discontinued. Starlink should have just competed in the broadband marketplace - as should have everyone else. In such a level playing field, I think Starlink would do just fine.
>If the goal is to get levels of performance that Starlink cannot provide, then this makes sense?
no, because the only reason Starlink doesn't currently hit the metrics is due to them having so many users joining. They could hit the metrics by temporarily halting signups, cutting off users, or delaying the Pentagon's massive deployment project.
Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
>U.S. defense officials had previously estimated that the annual cost for Starlink in Ukraine, which Musk mostly had been donating, will be hundreds of millions of dollars.
> no, because the only reason Starlink doesn't currently hit the metrics is due to them having so many users joining. They could hit the metrics by temporarily halting signups, cutting off users, or delaying the Pentagon's massive deployment project.
I admittedly don't know much about this process, but with a billion dollars on the line, why wouldn't they have presented these options? It's not like this came out of nowhere, Starlink knew that they were not meeting their obligations and was given a chance to present their case.
I don't know, it just seems like it would be pretty easy to halt signups for a month, show that speeds increased drastically as my launches got ahead of my signups, and then explain to the FCC why this would be the normal state of affairs at some point in the future. Or, don't even actually halt signups, just make a convincing case about why halting signups would drastically increase speeds, and by 2025 you plan to do whatever you need to do to hit that 100/20 metric, but right now you're trying to do the most good for the most people, which means more signups and lower speeds.
For a billion dollars, these all seem like easy & obvious arguments to make if they were at all viable.
Anyway, I think that if Starlink can prove that they're making progress towards their commitment, they become eligible for the subsidy again, so if halting signups is really a viable strategy and they really care about the billion dollars then it seems like they should do that.
> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
That doesn’t sound right. Satellites over Ukraine cannot be reached anywhere from the US and they also wouldn’t use the same gateways. So I could see the use of starlink in Ukraine possibly slowing service in Europe. But I cannot see how it would affect customers in the US.
> Or Musk could cut off Ukraine's capacity, which the US military admits is consuming hundreds of millions in Starlink capacity that could be allocated to US consumers to speed up their internet
Satellites in LEO over Ukraine can't provide service to the US. (and because of the way orbits work a LEO satellite that spends time over the US will also spend time over Ukraine)
Internet bandwidth in America and Ukraine are completely separate. Starlink is mostly bent-pipe, sending signals to station in view of the satellite. Over remote areas, the satellites need to talk to each other to relay signals. But my understanding is that goes to the closest ground station.
Its nearest ground station bounced off nearest satellite, or some inter-satellite laser links to make some hops, then to the user. It's optimized to be shortest route, just like routers with the wired internet you're using now: if you stream a movie, that request goes to in a short path from the server to you. You streaming doesn't slow down someone in China, because the data never approaches any equipment in China. Same with Starlink. Their data never approaches any starlink satellites in the US. When they get the whole grid laser link working, then it might, but it will still approach being optimal, with ground stations used as needed.
Ground vs laser is a latency thing, more than a bandwidth thing. No need to stream Netflix with low latency.
Wikipedia has some numbers [1] according to which they passed 2M users in September 2023 and are growing pretty consistently by about 100k users per month since mid 2022.
What Pentagon deployment project? I can't find any news stories about military rolling out Starlink. The only news is US paying for Ukraine's access; cutting off Ukraine would not be good for SpaceX. The military doesn't need Starlink with all their communications satellites. They are looking at it for polar use where Starlink has better coverage.
Are you talking about the SDA Starshield constellation? That isn't launching yet, the contract is for development. Starshield has nothing to do with Starlink except using the same platform and taking up launch slots.
I like how you didn't mention that Starlink could solve capacity problems by launching more satellites.
Starshield has nothing to with Starlink business. The only thing that might affect it is the military wants to launch lots of Starshield-based satellites and that keeps SpaceX from launching Starlink satellites. But then SpaceX would get paid lots of money for the launches. The military hasn't agreed to launch constellation; my suspicion is that they are waiting for Starship.
> Starshield has nothing to with Starlink business.
Yes it does. See [0]:
> SpaceX is providing a best effort and global subscription for various land, maritime, stationary and mobility platforms and users... The task order for Starshield services is provided by the Starlink satellite constellation but is differentiated from the commercial Starlink service based on unique Department of Defense terms and conditions that are not found in commercial service contracts.
Translating the bureaucratese, the US military is buying access to the existing Starlink constellation under the umbrella of "Starshield". They have a special contract and no doubt lots of additional paperwork and oversight of Starlink operations.
I can understand your confusion, because there's also SDA's plan to build its own in-space communications backbone, for which SpaceX has been contracted, and SpaceX's plan (under Starshield) to build custom satellites on a Starlink bus to host defense payloads, so it's easy to get the impression that there will be the civilian Starlink and military Starshield constellations and they'll be entirely independent.
But that's not the case, and it would be really dumb if it were. The Starlink constellation's sheer size provides an immense amount of resiliency and reserve bandwidth that is of great military benefit, and that's been funded by commercial customers. Just like how the DoD no doubt tunnels its secure networks over the civilian internet rather than laying its own transoceanic cables etc., there's no reason for it not to make use of the existing Starlink constellation and many reasons to.
Does anyone know how to find out information on progress or updates if you live in one of the RDOF auction blocks? I can see that Charter won a bid for my location 4 years ago. The FCC page also states "Winning bidders must meet periodic buildout requirements that will require them to reach all assigned locations by the end of the sixth year." We're going on 4 years now since the auction closed. I'm just curious if this is actually going to happen as it impacts my decision whether to move or not. The cynic in me says they haven't even started yet, and inevitably will push for extensions and do everything conceivable to take this money and not deliver within 6 years or possibly ever.
Meanwhile for the past 2 years Starlink is the only service I can actually use with any reasonable stability and low(ish) latency. They have at times delivered up to 200Mbps down and 20 up but it is not consistent. I have much more faith that they will deliver 100/20 consistently by 2025 than Charter will be delivering gigabit to me by then.
The moment Starlink started rolling out here (barely rural southern Ontario, just 5km-10km from town) -- along with more and more point to point wireless towers going up from indie ISPs -- the local telco (Bell Canada) suddenly found it in their heart to run fiber optic up and down the road. Which I'm sure promptly put all that out of business.
So now I have 3gbps fiber to the house, after 10 years of surviving on low bandwidth capped expensive Internet despite being proximous to the suburbs of the biggest city in Canada.
It may be in the end something like Starlink ends up being like Google's Fiber was in the cities it went into -- a fire lit under the bigger providers, forcing them to actually do something.
Seems like a shitty way to get society's infrastructure built though, doesn't it? Imagine if the power grid had developed this way.
Starlink service is so obviously phenomenal to anyone who's used it, this isn't going to change that or effect SpaceX's success one bit. The FCC's actions here are just embarrassing their agency by exposing their petty ineptitude and harming whomever this program was supposed to help.
I don't really see how it's embarrassing that the FCC set out a clear requirement for a low-latency, 100/20M rural service and Starlink (having failed to show a plan to achieve that) is not accepted into the program.
Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today. SpaceX is also capable of providing differentiated service speeds so looking at what an average user is getting today is not indicative of what could be provided if they were under some minimum speed obligation. The FCC's rational is clearly them twisting themselves into knots to try and get to the decision they want to satisfy their preferred politics.
When a government agency that is supposed to be impartial and fact based is clearly making decisions like this on a political basis that undermines it in the long term due to public mistrust.
> Because if you use the service you know it is capable of that and more today.
The numbers show otherwise and the FCC made it clear that Starlink presented no numbers to the contrary. This isn't even a case of the FCC's numbers saying one thing and Starlink's numbers saying another.
I totally believe that some places give you consistent 100/20 speeds, but aggregate numbers don't show that and Starlink made no attempt to argue otherwise.
Today your speed tier is based on what you pay. If you pay for the priority or business tier service you absolutely get over 100Mbps consistently, a lot more. If you pay for the basic service tier then yeah you might only get 3-4x DSL speeds which is still phenomenal for the purpose being discussed here.
That's not how it works, they just need to offer a service tier that provides a service with the required minimums by a particular date, it is obviously possible unless you are blinded by revenge politics.
The question isnt whether it is phenomenal. The question is if Starlink is meeting the obligations outlined in the grant, and if so, why they didn’t bother to dispute the numbers FCC showed.
So if all this is true, the embarrassing part is that SpaceX couldn't make a compelling presentation of the facts that support them. I'm sorry but "OK, yes, we are missing the target performance goals and trending further away from them but awesomeness" is ... not compelling.
This isn't like cable or fiber where the technology is already mature and it's simply the business case.
It doesn't. This was originally legislated as a hand out to legacy telecom companies that lobbied for it. Seeing as it exists though I would rather the money be spent with the best option instead of it being used as a political retribution fund.
Because the obligation was to meet the requirements in 2025 and FCC basically just subjectivity said 2 years before the deadline they don’t think they will.
I’m confused. Do you think that SpaceX, who demonstrably failed to make those arguments, doesn’t know what it’s capable of? Or that they’re not smart enough to explain it?
You seem to consistently ignore that SpaceX didn’t even make that case, and I’m confused why they didn’t, or why you know their business and fit better than they do.
Yes, but that is a function of satellite density or so the argument seems to suggest. SpaceX is launching rockets multiple times a week and has put more satellites into orbit that any entity in the history of human kind by an order of magnitude or more. Betting they won't be able to meet these speed goals is not a rational conclusion.
If you read through the decision, the reasoning is all there, it's absolutely rational. What's _not_ rational is preferring personal anecdotal experience over the aggregate analysis.
Their goals are only 100/20mbps? I'd say that part is embarrassing. Given the amount of money involved, I'd have expected them to push for higher than that.
It is certainly better than a lot of existing options, but so is Starlink. I'd have expected an option that excludes Starlink to be something fairly future-proof. And, IME, people in those remote areas are using Starlink pretty successfully now.
Instead, these standards are so low that it makes me wonder how Starlink doesn't qualify. The fact that they are just out of reach of Starlink in just enough areas to disqualify them does make the whole process a bit suspect looking.
Starlink, when originally launched, did hit the performance targets. It seems pretty clear that Starlink could've produced a plan that would've restricted user onboarding in a way that showed a commitment to continue hitting the targets. Instead, they added subscribers to the point that service deteriorated below the standards and was trending worse.
I don't know whether this was a purely commercial decision to generate mass adoption prior to building out the constellation and the rest of the required infrastructure, or whether there was some kind of underperformance vs engineer plan or whatever.
In either case, it's not a good look. Particularly if it was a commercial decision, then it's a case of "decisions have consequences".
I can understand that, but are they measuring Starlink's competitors by the same standard? Overloading backhaul, at least temporarily, is hardly a new problem.
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.
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.
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.
In my parents county (very rural), the local electric coop is running fiber on all their poles. Its possible that my parents living 10 miles from the nearest town (2 4-way stops, a grocery store and a couple of gas stations) will get gigabit fiber before my friends that live in a well off suburb in a dense urban area will.
About 5 years ago I moved from Silicon Valley to rural Vermont. I have 750 symmetric fiber on my dirt road, and have had more reliable internet here than I did in the South Bay for the decade I lived there.
Where politics doesn't impede the growth of municipal and co-op internet solutions, it is absolutely possible for rural communities to end up with very capable internet access.
same here. - I don't live far from you, in a town of less than 1000 people - and more than 40 miles from even a modest-sized city - and we now have 1GB symmetrical fiber-to-the-home for less than $100/month - and it hasn't gone out even once in over 2 years.
In my parents not-so-rural any longer home (although it was when I was a kid), despite being located less than a mile from a 100K+ population community, they still cannot get more than 1.5 Mbps and DSL is the only wired option available to them. They have an AT&T hotspot card that they use, but it gets throttled (dramatically) after 30GB of data usage, and itself has to be positioned in very specific areas of their house in order to get 1 or 2 bars to eke out a 10Mbps connection speed.
It's nice that your parents have a co-op that is actively rolling out such infrastructure. That's not the rule though, and the U.S. has massive swaths of low density population areas with substandard internet speeds.
There's some kind of disconnect here, because 85% of the service areas covered by the RDOF have winning bidders committed to providing at least 1000/500M service.
The only point I’d like to point out is that the minimum requirement is 25/3Mbps with the option to bid for a higher tier that comes with more subsidies but also locks you into the higher requirement.
Starlink made a bid for the higher tier that requires 100/20Mbps and now it turns out that its plans don’t sufficiently establish how they’re going to meet those requirements.
While Starlink was able to achieve 100Mbps down in some areas (albeit not consistently), it is nowhere near 20Mbps up.
But with everything this man is involved in, he has a loyal army of fans who will carry water for him, no matter how much the facts say otherwise.
Who knows, maybe if I’ve spent $600 on a dish, I too will try to rationalize it by becoming a cheerleader.
The embarrassing part is how they have been allocating subsidies to ISPs that don't provide rural connectivity improvements nearly as significant as what Starlink managed to actually pull off. A competent agency would do whatever they can to support Starlink's efforts or replicate them elsewhere. Instead, they're cutting off the one ISP that actually revolutionized rural internet access after 20 years of government-bankrolled stagnation and grift.
It's obvious to anyone who actually used the service or lives in a rural area how much good the service is doing. In many rural places there are literally no other options, or the options are so bad that it is laughable. This is one of those letter of the law vs spirit of the law things. Yes technically the speeds you currently get are not exactly at the promised level yet, but the service is a monumental success and is providing service that is definitely in line with the intent behind the subsidy.
I could see this making sense if there was any real competition or someone else who was realistically going to provide the service. But the only competition for this money are companies with a poor track records and that are notoriously bad.
VCs are falling over themselves trying to get in on SpaceX. If there were to go public they would immediately be worth hundreds of billions. It will likely be one of the biggest IPOs in history. They are not that strapped for cash.
Starlink has 2 million customers, likely with >$1000 ARPU and is growing quite rapidly. $1B annually would be material. $1B as a one time payment is significant but seems unlikely to affect viability. Musk has said that Starship and Starlink are each $5B-$10B investments.
This is a good point. So long as you define “government money” as “something other than money from the government”, SpaceX does not rely on government money.
You can see that this is true with other businesses as well, no business relies on getting “customer money” because “customer money” means when customers donate to you in exchange for nothing, not money that they pay in exchange for goods or services.
Ehh, their average speeds have gone down by half in the last 3 years (150 down -> 75 down). They chased profits by signing up more people at the expense of network saturation. Had they held this reduction to 100+ down, they would have remained eligible for the grant they applied for.
If the terms of the deal were that they didn't need to hit the performance benchmarks until 2025 and they have demonstrated that the technology was capable of those speeds it makes little sense to do this now except as a thinly vailed political punishment.
Looks like Starlink was supposed to be 40% built with their participation starting in 2020, that are consistent with their winning bid (in this case 100/20). It seems they clearly failed by that metric.
Seeing as they offer service basically everywhere in the US right now and the only quibble is that the average speed is only 75 Mbps instead of 100 Mbps I'd say they are well ahead of 40%.
That isn't a quibble, the 100/20 requirement was a key requirement they set themselves.
Regardless though, I was wrong about the buildout reasoning. The FCC just doesn't believe, based off the information provided by Starlink, they had a strong enough likelihood of success with the plan provided to stay in the running.
Yeah I messed that up. After reading more the denial was focused on the fact that Starlink didn't refute they were not consistently delivering speeds and latency that matched the tier they bid on, and their plan to bridge that gap wasn't convincing to the reviewers or the Commission.
The argument is if they had paid on time would they have been able to deliver to the particular customers by 2025? i.e not everyone. Just RDOF subsided users in the awarded areas
The Dems say no. Evidence is current state of network and absence of starship.
SpaceX says yes. V2 is already launching on Falcon. We don't need starship to meet our obligations but it will make it faster.
Republicans say both of you are talking nonsense. Until 2025 you can't find out. And there's a process for getting there. You only test devices that are under the RDOF plan, not everyone. And since SpaceX hasn't been awarded, you can't do any testing that's relevant.
Imagine SpaceX got awarded say Diomede and you're bringing up speeds in LA and Seattle or the Midwest.
I'm in a rural location. Not that rural, about five minutes away from a town of 10,000 people. I have exactly three internet choices: old-school satellite (with 600 ms latency), unreliable 10 Mbit DSL for $150/month, or Starlink for $120/month. Many of my neighbors aren't as lucky and don't even get DSL.
My DSL provider received hundreds of millions in government subsidies and did nothing to improve the service in the region, and brazenly lied about it to the FCC. I know that it's fashionable to criticize Elon Musk, and it's often justified, but Starlink is far more deserving of government funds than most of the grifter ISPs who actually get the subsidies.
If you start a WISP and service your neighbors, the FCC would probably be happy to provide you a subsidy now that they have an extra $1 billion that isn't going to Starlink.
This is dependent on the cell you're in. I've been on Starlink since Feb 2021 and dipping below 100 down is very rare. It' averages about 140 down and 20 up with about 30ms latency.
For this grant the 100/20 needed to be consistently available in specific geographic areas. So if the cells bring down the performance averages are concentrated in those grant areas, it makes sense for them to fail to meet the program criteria while still having a product that hits those metrics elsewhere.
Is it phenomenal? Not quite. In my experience speeds vary and brief dropouts are frequent. It's great to be able to access high speed internet from anywhere, but it has its limitations.
In truly rural or remote areas relative to any available alternative it is as close to a miracle product as one could imagine. If you haven’t had to use other satellite Internet services like BGAN, Iridium, viasat, etc… it’s hard to explain what a revolution Starlink is in every aspect.
If starlink would be a success regardless, why should it be subsidized with tax payer money. Isn’t the point of subsidies to support things that would otherwise not be a success?
From what I understand, this is a political hatchet job. Space X still had 2 years to meet the the mark but capricious new standards are being applied specifically to them.
or maybe speeds were dropping, requirements not met, and they didn't want to dump more money on self driving car man's company. Seems reasonable to me - if it also makes elon and his cult sad, that's just a happy accident.
This argument is too deeply rotted with bias to have value. This is going to slow the adoption of broadband and you’re happy because the guy you dislike might be harmed as a consequence.
You should reflect on this behavior, because you’re embodying everything you criticize this supposed “other side” of being.
> > This is going to slow the adoption of broadband
Just lay down fiber. Unlike satellites you only have to do it once, but that's not exciting enough for rocket man because unlike satellites you don't get the government to pay you to play with rockets.
This is all there is to it, like the Apollo program was. A bunch of techbros want to play with rockets and try really hard to reverse engineer an excuse for government to hand them cash for it.
For the Apollo program it was collecting moon rocks that were supposed to hold god knows what secrets, for the current age of space it's rural internet.
We’ve had companies with astronomical market caps and the wealthiest government in the world for a long time, both with the capability of laying fiber and none doing so. Space tech bro is actually solving it not just for rural areas but much of world.
What I’m saying is, feel free to step in if you can, but the market has spoken and the market is not interested in solving the problem your way.
> > We’ve had companies with astronomical market caps and the wealthiest government in the world for a long time, both with the capability of laying fiber and none doing so
Maybe because they are looking at the trends and are seeing that the number of people living in urbanized areas is increasing year after year constantly?
People are moving to cities for reasons that are totally unrelated to internet speed, or internet access, hence maybe, just maybe it makes sense to have them do so and then see how many people remain in the rural areas and then decide much to invest?
> > Much of the world
Much of the world, 90% lives in urban areas, they will always use 4G-LTE and 5G and Fiber because the density is such that the aforementioned technologies are and will always be superior
No they meet the targets just fine the FCC has determined that they don't see a path for SpaceX to meet the 2025 requirements despite the overwhelming evidence that they are keeping up on satellite launches.
That's why everyone is calling it political. The FCC has their opinion and based on that they are withholding not a failure to meet contract requirements.
> a private company that has failed to meet its agreed upon targets?
Starlink hasn't failed to meet any agreed upon targets. The agreed upon targets are for 2025.
Starlink is currently providing service that is below those targets, but has several more years to meet them. Meanwhile, other recipients haven't delivered any service yet.
> Otherwise we will just have broadband 2.0, with Comcast & co getting billions in subsidies and not doing even a fraction of the necessary work.
The argument that national average bandwidth for Starlink is probably worse than for those rural communities is a solid one. Not sure if it makes up for the large gap, but in my opinion Starlink is well suited because it works better the less other users are in your cell (ie better in less densely populated regions).
It has fluctuated over time, but has almost always been over the minimum limits (25/3) IMO. It is also vastly more reliable than our only WISP option in the area.
What I have seen is that the cell will start to fill up, speeds slow down a little (still better than our WISP and other Satellite providers), then the cell closes. More satellites launch, speeds go up, and the cell opens again. It's my experience, so take it with a grain of salt. I've had it since the original beta / before 100% coverage.
Most of the complaints I see are from people with existing cable options. It is not as good as cable/fiber, but a complete game changer for those of us who have had flakey connections.
I agree. I have a WISP and it is shite. $99/mo for up to (but almost never) 100 Mpbs down.
Charter's trucks are now running lines to my property and we will be switching to Spectrum as soon as we can.
Fuck Adaptive.
Reading that dissent felt as painful as reading a partisan reddit comment.
In one paragraph he said Biden is targeting Musk politically, and in the very next he states, as proof of the quality of the internet service, that the Pentagon just signed a contract with Starlink for military applications.
The President has a lot less control over independent agencies like the FCC. For example, the FCC commissioner currently attacking Biden is able to enjoy doing so from that position because Biden doesn't have the legal power to dismiss him.
Well at least it can now be confidently state that Starlink was developed entirely with private funding.
I do hope that the companies that do get it are providing proper fiber service though rather than the many many years of companies who were way slower than Starlink getting it.
Starshield is not "boatloads" of government funding. It's a rather small contract. And none of that money has even been delivered yet. Starlink was developed without it.
Yes indeed, those subsidies were intended to go to the major telcom companies who lobbied for them. Starlink (and Musk) receiving them would be an unintended consequence and ruin the plan.
The FCC cited among its reasons SpaceX's failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket, saying "the uncertain nature of Starship's future launches could impact Starlink's ability to meet" its obligations.
If there was any doubt this was purely political, that quote erases it.
The FCC rural broadband program is an infamous boondoggle of vast overspending on bad services from third rate providers.
It's insane that they even mentioned Starship in this, when it was a test launch of the largest rocket in history, and has nothing to do with the Starlink launches.
Starship is the only way that Starlink could meet its targets for capacity. The performance of Starlink depends on the number of subscribers and satellites. They have been growing subscribers faster than satellites which is why the performance in the report has been dropping. The only solution is to launch more satellites.
SpaceX started launching V2 satellites on Falcon 9, but they can only fit 22 on each rocket instead of the 50 or so with previous version. Even with their increased launch rate, there is no way they can launch the tens of thousands of satellites they have planned.
They did not say Starship was a requirement for Starlink, they said they could use it when ready to speed up the rollout.
SpaceX has been launching the Gen2 satellites, originally intended to be launched on Starship, on Falcon 9 instead.
They explicitly stated in the plan they submitted to the FCC that they would use Starship, going as far as to say that they’re completely going to stop using the Falcon for Starlink in a letter to the FCC.
The letter was even picked up by media who then reported on this early last year.
> I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it.
Sounds to me like he’s encouraging SpaceX to sue the FCC
Ah yes, the same Nathan Simington who made statements like this about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter [1]:
"If Mr. Musk follows through on his stated intention to ease Twitter's restrictions on speech, he would almost certainly enhance competition and better serve those Americans, the majority, who value free speech. ... We should instead applaud Mr. Musk for doing something about a serious problem that government has so far failed to address."
A very unbiased party who has no ulterior motives at all to consider things out of scope.
Starlink was revolutionary for my family. We ended up getting a better product (lower latency, less data cap restrictions) for a cheaper price than our previous Viasat satellite.
By the way, is the FCC's decision likely to improve rural access in the future or not (without Starlink)? Perhaps not, as the past has demonstrated. But with Starlink they will have better access anyway. So Starlink is a victim of its own success? And the FCC has acted in the best interests of the nation by saving 900 million taxpayer dollars, while rural access will still improve? What an irony!
>> : "SpaceX continues to put more satellites into orbit every month, which should translate to even faster and more reliable service."
NB.
Should =/= does
"Should" is doing a LOT of work in that sentence.
If Starlink dosen't meet requirements today, they can improve and meet them in the future. Meanwhile, this seems like more of an effort to unfairly pre-empt funds going to other competitors.
> the majority points to delays in the development of SpaceX’s
Starship launch platform—the largest, most powerful rocket ever built—as evidence that SpaceX would
be unable to launch enough Starlink satellites to meet its 2025 commitments. The trouble with this
argument is that SpaceX never indicated that it was relying on the Starship platform to meet its RDOF
obligations, and in fact it repeatedly stated that it was not.
I think the metric was 'more likely than not achieve the metric by 2025' and the decision was made in 2022.
Sure. Neither you nor I were in the room, and the evidence is that the committee that was in the room evaluated those plans and it seemed more unlikely to meet the goals.
Given Musk's track record, it is very reasonable to treat any timeline with a shipload of salt. He literally took $thousands from thousands of customers for Full-Self-Driving upgrades that were to transform their Teslas into self-driving Uber/Lyft goldmines by 2021, not 2022, not 2023, no... oops, recall 2 million yesterday because of safety failures in "autopilot" that isn't. Even with the assumption that Starship is not part of the equation, Starlink still is falling down on bandwidth reliability as subscription exceeds capacity.
Space X is launching Falcon 9 rockets multiple times per week with additional capacity for Starlink on the regular.
Space X is not Elon Musk. It's a company with its own staff, with its own track record, so let's set aside any emotional arguments about FSD from Tesla, which is completely unrelated and which itself is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The "recall" from Tesla, again a completely unrelated issue to SpaceX and the Starlink internet service, was simply a required software patch. Millions of vehicles get recalled all the time from all car manufacturers:
"Ford is recalling 870,701 of the bestselling pickups from 2021 through 2023"
"About a quarter of a million 2016–2019 models are under recall for a connecting rod defect that can cause the engine to stall or not start, including the Pilot, Odyssey, Ridgeline, and Acura TLX and MDX."
"2013–2018 Toyota RAV4s Recalled Due to a Potential Fire Risk
The increased fire risk stems from loose-fitting 12-volt batteries, with the recall affecting nearly 1.9 million RAV4s."
The Starlink service is popular, because it generally works, and it's better than what a lot of people even have available to them in many parts of the country or in specific situations (like fulltime RVers).
>> The Starlink service is popular, because it generally works, and it's better than what a lot of people even have available to them in many parts of the country or in specific situations (like fulltime RVers).
Right. And the issue is the ratio of popularity to supply. A neighbor near a family cabin in rural Maine, where the service is only copper ~10mbps down/1 up and more expensive that FIOS at home just installed two Starlinks. They're generally satisfied, but the first thing they mentioned is occasional slow speeds.
The officials in charge of the contract must ensure that the required service level will be met. Granting nearly a Billion dollars to provide a level of service, and then having them say "sorry, it's too popular and everyone is slow" will not cut it. Everyone (I hope including you) would be screaming about wasting taxpayer dollars on a service that did not provide the service.
I'm sure one fix for Starlink would be to offer a prioritized service level for all of the rural broadband customers. Yes, this could mean that RVers might just wind up with no service at some times and locales, but if Starlink really wants that contract, perhaps they should offer that assurance.
Isn't the DoD one of Starlink's top customers? The FCC can certainly pull their funds, but if the DoD has many - too many? - eggs in the Starlink basket - and no legit viable alternatives - and this funding pull-back compromises Starlink on a broader scale, isn't it likely the DoD steps in, in the name of national defense?
Tangent: a few months ago there was a huge bonfire party at the beach in my town (Duxbury, MA), and my friends and I were treated to the trifecta of the conflagration plus a gorgeous blood moon rise, capped off by a starlink satellite train passing directly overhead. It was unforgettable.
I don't understand with so much money being poured into NASA, rural broadband, and the Military why the Government cannot setup their own starlink. It will be less money in the end.
If the complaint is that Elon Musk has a history of not delivering on his promises, why the #%@# are telecom companies still getting money based on promises? They also have an awful track record on delivering on their promises. Nobody should get anything until after they've delivered.
If they need money to do their deployments, they can take their FCC awards to the bank and get a factoring loan. And if their plan is not solid enough to convince a bank, it's not solid enough for FCC money either.
They rejected that telecom company for the same underlying reason as this one - the company presented a challenge to legacy telecoms, and the industry dominated by regulatory capture defeated it. You’re celebrating a win for the Comcast and AT&T protection racket.
I have Starlink and live an hour from town in a national forest. If I did not have Starlink I would have no choice but to move. It is the only option for rural internet when you need bandwidth and data plans that permit daily video meetings and regular dowloading.
> The two Republican commissioners on the five-member FCC dissented from the decision saying the FCC was improperly holding SpaceX to 2025 targets three years early and suggesting the Biden administration's anger toward Musk was to blame.
didn't elon switch off starlink for ukrainian forces in the middle of an attack that one time?
No, Starlink services were never turned on for portions of Ukraine previously occupied by Russia such as Crimea.
On Friday, Isaacson tweeted a clarification, writing that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”
I wonder if behind the scenes this has anything to do with Elon’s Starlink shenanigans in Ukraine. He interfered with their military operations after a meeting with Putin and then pulled that nonsense where he basically extorted the U.S. government for more funding. Their options for dealing with him are somewhat limited because their relationship with him goes both ways. A good way to give him a little slap is in his wallet.
> The FCC cited among its reasons SpaceX's failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket, saying "the uncertain nature of Starship's future launches could impact Starlink's ability to meet" its obligations.
The X beatings will continue until the tweeting improves.
OK, but that was far from the only reason. From the actual decision:
> While Starlink faults the Bureau for relying on the most recent available data at the time of its decision to evaluate is existing network performance, Starlink does not explain what other data source the Bureau should have used in lieu of using the most recently available data. When the Bureau's decision was made, the most recent available evidence showed that "Starlink’s performance had been declining for download speed, upload speed, and jitter test performance." In other words, it was not only failing to meet the RDOF public interest obligations, but also trending further away from them.
Is there any truth to the statement from two of the five FCC commissioners that SpaceX was not required to meet those benchmarks until 2025, and this is a political action?
> What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead? In 2022, many RDOF (the award in question) recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at
all, and they had no obligation to do so. By contrast, Starlink had half a million subscribers in June 2022
(and about two million in September 2023).
And this scathing conclusion:
> I was disappointed by this wrongheaded decision when it was first announced, but the majority today lays bare just how thoroughly and lawlessly arbitrary it was. If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it. -- FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington
As with all government projects, it’s a highly technical (in the bureaucratic sense) process. You can find the relevant documents on their website[0].
That said, how the dissenters characterize it is nowhere near how it works. They’d like you to believe that you won a bid, and from then on, it’s “OK, talk to you at the deadline, enjoy our money!”
Instead, it seems to me that it’s a continuous process where you must present plans along the way, and progress is measured, as it should be because we’re dealing with billions in public funds.
The idea that this is exclusively targeted at Musk is also just nonsense. This article[1] states that Terrestrial telco LTD Broadband also lost their allotment of subsidies, and a cursory glance at the documents on the FCC website shows that many other companies lost theirs either due to withdrawing or having “defaulted” (i.e., not followed through on the promises/requirements).
But none of that is compatible with the victim narrative of Musk et al., of course
Musk was the biggest in the subsidies; the other companies won smaller projects.
The point was that it’s not some conspiracy against Musk, there are others that defaulted. Other than LTD and SpaceX there are 20 others that defaulted last year for varying reasons.
> RDOF requires speed testing of the devices deployed under RDOF, not the entire network.
You’re talking about seeing if the requirements are met at the end, the FCC and I are talking about looking at how feasible and likely it is that the requirements are going to be met before handing the bag with money.
> If say you have a 900Mhz network and you plan to deploy 5GNR for fixed wireless, they don't get to tell you you can only achieve 1 Mbps right now.
No they don’t. But they do get to tell you how feasible your plan is, how realistic your schedule is and how likely it is 5GNR is going to meet the requirements of your bid based on the knowledge of the technology and historical performance at prior implementations.
When you submit a LEO satellite bid with the exact same specifications as the ones you currently use, then you can’t then around and cry when they look at its current performance and performance trends.
> You don't need to start deployment till you get the money.
True, but you do need to present a plan that isn’t based on lofty promises and has a that explains why it’s likely you’ll be able to meet the requirements of your bid.
Edit: Just now realized that you’re wrong on not having to build anything, there are buildout requirements.
That doesn't much help. Their main claim is that it is not normal (and hence political) for a subsidy to be canceled based for failure to make progress.
I've seen no evidence supporting that claim, and lots of evidence to counter it.
I don't feel knowledgeable enough about the expected process to comment on that. Two points of speculation though:
1. It looks like the commission believes Starlink is trending away from the targets rather than toward them, and that can't help their case.
2. It's hard for me to see how there would not be at least some political considerations here. The fact that this program exists at all is a political decision. So it's part & parcel of the playing field — which is probably why most leaders work hard to not piss off their regulators.
The reason individual speeds were trending down is because the number of users is increasing. Now that the service no longer has wait-lists and is fully available to everyone, one would imagine speeds increasing as more infrastructure is brought online.
The amount everyones quoting is the full fat amount over the life of the contract.
You have to show you can do most of it yourself i.e raise the money.
After a %age deployment the FCC checks if you've met the deployment timeline and checks your speeds then starts paying you and keeps testing as you deploy according to the timeline.
The part that makes me question the legitimacy of this decision is the fact that there are still other companies receiving the subsidy.
Quote from the article:
>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 (to) those who aren’t getting the job done
Are these other companies meeting the targets? If not then it seems pretty arbitrary to reject just SpaceX for not doing so yet.
Fair enough I guess, this could be total BS. FWIW the dissenting FCC commissioners made similar arguments.
>In 2022, many RDOF recipients had deployed no service at any speed to any location at all, and they had no obligation to do so
Maybe this is just more spin from people who want to turn this into another political battleground. It's not entirely clear to me, but it seems like there is room for doubt.
Amazing the arguments people make up when the obvious is well documented -- just another hoax people -- just another russian psyop -- it's all just so laughable. The us government has collapsed and lost all legitimacy and I'll be called the 'conspiracy theorist' or somen other inane response (if its even given one, likely shouted down or removed by the
Mods on whatever flimsy pretext).
We no longer live under the rule of law, there is no equality brfore it, nor do the gears of justice turn without bias, lady justice isnt blind.
But yeah, we can all pretend and lie and make up bullshit excuses that will change on whim. Again, we have so much extensive documentation and people keep pretending it doesnt exist. Perhaps like my comment, does it exist for you?
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. What is obvious and well-documented here, from your perspective? And of what do we have extensive documentation? The regulatory data at the time the decision was taken, or something in Starlink’s defense?
I didn’t find the article especially clear on this point, but it sounds like Starlink says that if the decision were taken today rather than in 2022, the performance data wouldn’t look so dire, and the FCC might have more faith in their promise to launch high-performance payloads with Starship during the grant’s required timeframe, is that what you mean?
It's clear the government has been actively attacking Musk and his companies for any and all reasons it can find. During the past couple years of this administration the following has happened and it's just what I can recall:
1. Tesla gets no invite to whitehouse EV summit despite being the sole reason for the current EV movement
2. Tesla model 3/Y initially barred from new EV subsidies
3. SpaceX being investigated by justice department for not hiring foreigners (literally illegal due to ITAR)
4. NASA awards blue origin more than it awarded SpaceX for lunar lander despite them having zero orbital rocket experience or even a proper roadmap to orbit
5. FAA drags heels on approving starlink tests preventing progress on the requirements they say were failed to have been met today
6. Today's news about FCC revoking subsidy for the only company that actually cares to provide highspeed internet to rural Americans, which congress has appropriated funding for several times in the past two decades, and rewarded companies have failed to deliver on
It's safe to say any kind of bullshit can be justified (with even more bullshit reasons), so it's hard to believe actions like this are made good faith. I'm not just going to trust criminals because they're robbing someone I don't like.
> We no longer live under the rule of law, there is no equality brfore it,
Anybody else but Trump would be in prison already for what he has done (urging his followers who he knew to be armed to "go to the capital and Fight Like Hell"). So it is true that equality before the law is definitely lacking in action.
Another thing that makes me agree with "there is no equality" is that when you follow the news you see things like Giuliani owes his lawyers over million dollars. So it seems you need over a million dollars to get justice. Or alternatively, you can try to avoid justice, by spending millions.
Trump says he has "over $100 million in legal fees"
So again it seems you need $100 million to get justice, or alternatively to escape from it. How can justice that costs $100 million be fair and equitable to all?
I'm not necessarily happy with the outcome here but the FCC never compared their current generation vehicle launch record to anyone else's. They're saying SpaceX planned to launch 12,000-42,000 satellites within a certain timeline using new vehicles to keep up with demand but are currently at ~5,500 with Starship's start not going as smoothly as SpaceX planned for. Starship (or a Starship class vehicle) will get there eventually, almost certainly IMO, but the point here is it is uncertain if it'll get there in time to meet the obligations (part of which is timing) Starlink has made.
You do understand that "Starship" is the literal name of a prototype space craft that is currently in development, but has not yet made a successful launch to orbit, rather than just a generic term, which may include the earlier, well-proven Falcon 9, right?
SpaceX themselves have said that the future of their satellite internet business essentially depends on being able to put up a bigger model to replace the current ones, so much bigger that they can't feasibly use their existing, well-proven rockets to launch them.
Sure, but if you were to bet on a company to achieve that goal and it comes down to SpaceX vs. <literally who>?, it's not far fetched to go with the first.
"Well it looks like no one else is going to achieve what you said you could do, and you got kinda close so fuck it, keep the money" doesn't really sound like how you should expect a government subsidy to be managed.
For the record: I'm not commenting on whether the government was right or wrong to cancel the subsidy for SpaceX. I'm simply explaining why SpaceX's inability (so far) to get Starship to orbit is referenced, and more specifically, why the launch reliability of Falcon 9 is specifically not relevant in a sentence that says "Starship".
We need more competition [1] in orbital launch and orbital internet. Backing SpaceX alone when they have the lead will not lead to a good outcome.
I'd imagine that there are also concerns about the close ties Musk has to the Russians and how he's tried to insert himself into the Ukrainian conflict on numerous occasions.
[1] Not the largess of traditional government contractors Lockheed and Boeing, but the plethora of startups entering into this space.
I don’t think moves like this, where the government acts in an adversarial capacity to successful businesses that it previously supported, will do a lot to attract new capital or technologists. If anything, I’d worry such capriciousness discourages investment in the area. If Musk can’t make it work, what odds do the rest of us face. At least that would be my concern, about how this is received by the wider tech community.
My argument is that perceptions matter more than reality. Disagreeing on the grounds that my argument is not reality is not a dismissal, but I certainly understand that you do not perceive things as such. You are only one anecdote out of many.
It looks like it's becoming apparent that Elon's empire is based on a lot of impossible promises.
Starlink is probably one of them. A perfect 'business' for Musk. You can show something great - high speed internet in remote areas - and then extrapolate that - just think about the whole world etc... Faster than fibre, with V2...
Thing is, this business is probably not economically viable. It can work if not a lot of people use it - but it's maintained afloat by government money. But if 10x customers sign on, bandwidth will completely plummet and it won't be such a great service anymore.
But in the meantime, and it's quite a long time, Elon can continue to extract billions $ of taxpayers money.
You mean you can BETA test this in a life or death situation and put non-consenting individuals at risk because you want to flex your toy right? It’s demonstrably dangerous and shouldn’t be allowed on public roads.
It was not targeted. They are not able to meet the constraints written out in the law. Are you saying we should ignore the law as it was written and give them the hand out anyway?
> They are not able to meet the constraints written out in the law.
Which constraints were they not able to meet? Brendan Carr, an FCC Commissioner, has publicly claimed that Starlink clearly met the traditional constraints, but that the FCC invented a new standard and claimed that Starlink failed to meet that. [0]
> Are you saying we should ignore the law as it was written and give them the hand out anyway?
It depends. Did the FCC apply their standard in a consistent way? And is it normal practice for them to revoke the contract of every partner for the mere possibility of their missing a deadline? If the answer to both questions is 'Yes', then this action is proper. If not, then it is not only improper, but would appear to be an act of blatant political corruption, aimed at someone who is clearly considered to be an enemy of the administration.
The selective enforcement of the law is the very definition of corruption.
Starlink was not the only provider that was excluded from the subsidy. Giving public money away to a service provider that cannot provide the service as described in the law is the definition of corruption. You can see the details that led to the commission making its decision here: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A1.pdf
Enough laws have been written that you are in violation of many of them by nature of existing.
There are also plenty of contradictory laws still on the books which are not enforced because it's considered ridiculous to the judicial system. Judges don't like it, and prosecutors have better things to do like going after criminals.
Perusing idiotic nonsense before putting all the murders and rapists in prison really does more to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system than any political adversary to the US could ever dream of.
The rule of law is important and trying to use nihilistic arguments to ignore the laws as they are written to give one of the world's richest people a free billion dollars even though his company is not able to provide the specified service defies all logic.
This isn't some arcane "no horse parking on Sundays" law. The whole purpose of the law is to deliver the specified speeds and the requirements are not being met.
To someone who's used to getting away with murder, enforcement of the rules as written seems like persecution. Consider the "Funding secured" mess Elon got himself into with the SEC[1].
Unfortunately Twitter doesn't function for me after loading it a few times earlier today. I max out my daily quota through precaching or something. It used to work a few years back!
How is it “maintained afloat” by government money, when it receives no subsidies? The only government payment for starlink that I am aware of is for the terminals in Ukraine.
>Thing is, this business is probably not economically viable. It can work if not a lot of people use it - but it's maintained afloat by government money. But if 10x customers sign on, bandwidth will completely plummet and it won't be such a great service anymore.
That's a nice story, but can you do some math to substantiate it? For instance, is there some fundamental limit between how much bandwidth a satellite can provide, how much it costs, and how much the monthly subscription is?
Starlink was never designed to be faster than fibre, and it was certainly never designed or intended for use by people that ave access to fibre (or cable, or LTE for that matter).
SpaceX have re-iterated this on many, many occasions.
Anyone who things otherwise simply doesn't understand the product.
Starlink is designed for people who live in remote areas that have no access to any of that.
Go out right now and see how life changing it is for those people. All across Northern Canada & rural Australia I've met dozens of people who previously had access to dial-up AT BEST in 2022, and now have solid broadband connections.
It was. The V2 that they are deploying is supposedly communicating directly between satellites, making it faster than fiber over long distances.
Elon advertised that in 2019 or something already.
I don't deny it is life changing for those people ! All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government.
No. It was never designed or advertised to offer "faster than fibre" connections to end users, and all along Musk and maintained it makes absolutely no sense for a person to use Starlink if they already have access to a ground-based option like fibre or cable or LTE.
> All I'm saying is that it's not economically viable to provide that to those people. And the only way it is, it's because it's either a business bleeding money, or supported by the government
Those are wild claims.
Please post citations about how it's bleeding money or is supported by the government.
This does not mean you should use it if you have fiber available at your house. This means you should pay for transit over it if you need to have low-latency overseas connections, for instance for HFT or piloting drones.
The proof is everywhere when you look at products manufactured by Musk companies
They are all based on re-inventing the wheel (quite literally) for political purposes and government money extraction.
You'll never find the guy developing something that customers really want such as self-checkout system that doesn't suck, because there is no Government money to be extracted from it.
Let's see, Tesla is reinventing the wheel for extracting government money extraction? They make a solid profit on each car they sell. You gonna bring up the loan. But that loan was repaid in full by Tesla, ahead of time, where as Ford and other who also got similar loans defaulted on it. You going to bring up EV subsidies - but that's open to every automaker and Tesla is probably the only company that can make a margin on their car even without EV subsidy.
Now let's talk SpaceX - people who are not familiar with the space industry don't realize how much SpaceX fundamentally changed the industry - before SpaceX it was like two players in the space launch area, and they used to charge government a shit ton of money for each launch, often using Russian engines. SpaceX made it so cheap that it was hard for anyone to compete, and their offerings are so cheap when compared to anyone else (and sometimes they are the only launch option US) that even competitors are compelled to use SpaceX. You being a Musk hater would argue that all the government launch contracts to SpaceX are 'subsidies' but nope, they launches were gonna happen whether SpaceX existed or not. SpaceX only saved government tens of billions of dollars by reducing the launch costs.
I can keep going on but it wouldn't matter to you. Customers really wanted SpaceX. Everyone who uses Starlink really wants it, go talk to actual users. Just because the products the guy is developing doesn't align with your notion of what customers really want doesn't mean if it's something useful.
Starlink would exist without this subsidy from the government. That doesn't mean that Starlink should not try to get a share of the subsidy that government offered to all the players in this market. If you have a problem with the subsidy complain about the government, not one of the many beneficiaries just because you hate the guy that owns the company.
Tesla is the signal that the American Empire is collapsing, it's a company that is based on the political idea that it's necessary to change the transportation pollutant from oil to lithium.
It's the same old car ownership experience that our grandfathers experienced in 1970s, Tesla was founded in 2002 and I can find cars from that year on the used market which are more aestetically pleasing and have much better interiors quality and still beat Tesla cars (or should I say boats given how heavy they are?) around a racetrack which is the true measure of a car performance. Picture this , a 20 year old Mercedes or BMW with better interior and better looks can beat a brand new 2023 Tesla lap time around Laguna Seca or the Nurburgring , and also it will be able to go around the track for hours and hours whereas the Tesla would overheat and leave you stranded on lap 2.
We are going backwards in the name of politics, that cannot be accepted quitely, it's stupid and un-American. Solely done in the name of politics and Government money extraction.
> > Customers really wanted SpaceX
90% of global population lives in urban areas, that's only going to increase, so that's 90% who will never need SpaceX. You have to go and pick your sample with a searchlight to get the result you want, and even then only about 30% are going to be happy with the service considering that SpaceX is cutting their download speed all the time compared to what they clocked at the time of first installation, that's predatory.
He doesn't, he has publicly said the company didn't lobby for this program. If it exists though would you rather have the most efficient player be award the contract or some legacy telco who lobbied for the largesse and is woefully slow and inefficient?
SpaceX interfered with the conflict by sending equipment and allowing them to be used for the conflict.
You're essentially saying SpaceX should have waited until the DOD contracted for services
There's a guy in the UK who sent his APC to Ukraine. He didn't just have it delivered via a truck. He handed it over to the UK MoD. That's how these things are meant to be done.
No, because most of that fiasco was just garbage journalism. SpaceX has had a publicly stated policy of not allowing use of Starlink in that manner and the US government has not opposed that stance (hell, it's likely because of technology export regulations that the use of Starlink to directly control drones is not allowed).
The initial story claiming shutdowns was actually just about terminals that the UK was paying for being deactivated with full knowledge of Ukraine because there were far more terminals available being directly supported by SpaceX. Ukraine had rotated out the terminals appropriately. The other intermittent outages were just general system instability as many early users around the world also experienced.
The more recent story was retracted because it turned out to be completely false. SpaceX hadn't turned off the cells over Crimea as an act of sabotage, they had always been off (to prevent Russia from using captured terminals) and they had just refused to turn them on hours before a drone attack. IIRC since then the cells have been turned on after having more time to discuss with relevant authorities.
I’ve always found the outrage on HN over this somewhat inconsistent. Lots and lots of people here are critical of the arms industry and were largely supportive of Google employees pressuring the company into dropping US defense contracts, but when it’s Elon who doesn’t want his satellite internet service to be weaponized he’s suddenly the bad guy? Personally I think Elon (and the general HN consensus against the defense industry) is naively pacifistic, but the double standard is noteworthy.
For what it’s worth, SpaceX is also launching a completely separate Starlink constellation, known as Starshield, for the US Space Force. So if the government wants to allow our allies to use a weaponized Starlink, they can share their own.
I'd agree, but on the other hand, it isn't entirely HN users' fault that scummy journalists intentionally misreport and/or don't circulate their corrections as loudly as their initial accusations.
Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine. If anything, they'd be complaining about Google not just paying for it out of pocket, as they did when SpaceX said that providing Starlink for free for an indefinite period of time would be financially unrealistic for them.
My understanding is that Starshield isn't an entirely separate constellation, it's a special mode of existing Starlink for which the DoD controls cell activations, probably has priority usage of some portion of bandwidth, plus custom terminals and the ability to have Starlink satellites with hosted payloads (which, by nature of being Starlink satellites, would be able to take advantage of the rest of the network for their own communications, enabling things like extremely hard to detect point-to-point beamed communications anywhere in the world).
> Plus, I doubt those critical of the arms industry would be complaining about Google offering to take on defense contracts specifically intended to help Ukraine.
The letter from the Google employees about Project Maven began, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”. If that’s what they meant, if those are the principles they were operating from, that would obviously apply even to the war in Ukraine.
Obviously what’s happened is that the war in Ukraine has taken on a particular partisan coding in the broader culture war. I’m not surprised to see the inconsistency here but it is worth calling out.
Only to the extent that it pissed off the democrats, but geofencing the receivers donated to Ukraine is definitely not in the top five reasons for democrats to dislike Musk.
Okay, so I'll ask questions to understand your point :
- is starlink the only company that lost its subsidy?
- do you think starlink goals of serving 650 000 people 100/20 by 2025 are reachable? (it means 23 000 starlink satellites available, so basically 1000 launches with current tech, minus those who already reached space).
- do you think the US is so corrupt, public servants implement that kind of stuff without any leak? I remember when plans to remove net neutrality were in construction circa 2018, those were 'leaked' and fsf, Mozilla, and big tech had enough time to lobby against the new plans before it was even out.
I understand that the agencies directors are under the power of the current administration, but I doubt 100% of people working at the FCC are the same (it's irrealist).
Could you quote the part you're referring to? I searched for "censor" in the document, and it doesn't come up. Then I read through the document, and I don't see anything trying to explain possible reasons.
There seems to be no connection between "the feds punishing Musk for not participating in their well documented censorship operations" and this document.
Sorry, linked to the wrong one. This is the one[1] (and twitter thread[2]) that calls that out more specifically. And the one I linked first starts by saying it agrees completely with Carr's dissent.
Thank you for providing the correct link. I just read through it, and I guess you could stretch the first paragraph very, very far to make it compatible with "the feds punishing Musk for not participating in their well documented censorship operations", but unless Mr. Carr has brought something like this up more explicitly, it seems like you're trying to read something into it that he didn't write. There are many ways to interpret his initial paragraph without asserting some "well documented censorship operations" (which I do not believe exist).
Why do you think it needs to be stretched very, very far? I don't think it needs to be stretched at all. The first sentence is literally:
> Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him.
The Biden admin (and by extension the FCC) is "the feds", and "voicing views without a filter" is a paraphrasing of "refusing to censor", and the Biden admin wanting to censor things from social media is, in fact, well-documented[1].
> Why do you think it needs to be stretched very, very far? I don't think it needs to be stretched at all.
The initial sentence "the feds punishing Musk for not participating in their well documented censorship operations" states that Musk isn't participating in censoring other people. The sentence you quoted states that Musk "voices his own political and ideological views without a filter", which doesn't have anything to do with Musk censoring other people.
While both talk about censorship, one talks about "the feds censoring people", and the other talks about "Musk censoring himself". These are completely different things.
It does not state that. Censoring yourself does count as censoring, and is therefore included in the concept of "censoring operations". You're putting words in the commissioner's mouth when you tack "people" on to it.
That being said, Musk is also refusing to censor other people on Twitter, so your point is moot regardless.
If I try to follow your understanding, it would mean that "the feds punishing Musk for not participating in their well documented censorship operations" is about Musk openly sharing his views, not about censoring other people on Twitter. Can you share the documentation about censorship operations targeting Elon Musk?
I cannot. At this point, you are clearly not approaching this discussion in good faith or you struggle with basic reading comprehension. Either way I am unable to help you further.
It's good for you to provide the link. The problem is that people will follow the link and read it.
It says, paraphrasing, "The commission's reasoning is attractive, but doesn't hold water. Why are we requiring Space X to meet its 2025 deadline three years earlier. The arguments are thin, and I'm appalled by the situation."
Nowhere does the opinion mention, allude to, imply, or call out whatever you think it does.
Yep, as other comments have pointed out, I accidentally linked the wrong one (105A3 instead of 105A2). This one starts with "I wholeheartedly agree with the entirety of Commissioner Carr’s dissent". Carr's dissent goes into more detail that he thinks this is the Biden administration going after Musk for not playing ball.
I don't know much about commissioner Carr other than that he was appointed by Trump, so perhaps it is unsurprising he would disagree. I don't know enough about the facts underlying the competing narratives to say confidently whether or not there is foul play here, and suspect it will ultimately be for a court to decide.
Also, one of the other commissioners that form the majority opinion/decision (Geoffrey Starks) was also appointed by Trump, so I don't think that's a very valid point to make here.
My eyes nearly roll out of my head every time I see someone complain about this. People act like astronomy is ruined forever, it's not. You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them. They're not even a problem for large portions of the night and sky at all because there's very little light for them to reflect. There are a lot of benefits to having a constellation like this, and the tech that's being developed to support it will advance astronomy.
Is it perfect? No.
Is musk being an asshole about it? Probably, haven't checked.
Are the people complaining about it mostly NIMBYs who care largely because Musk has a (deserved) bad rap? Yes, absolutely.
This is a very marginal issue, folks need to calm down.
> This is a very marginal issue, folks need to calm down.
Is it? Why do we need to visually see, basically permanently, a ring or string of lights in the sky, unwittingly, just because of some billionaire?
> You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them.
That doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter if you know where they're at if they're in your way. Telescope time is extremely precious and expensive. Not to mention, these megaconstellations have basically permanently increased the background noise in various spectrums. Not all astronomy uses the visual spectrum.
> They're not even a problem for large portions of the night and sky at all because there's very little light for them to reflect.
That's not true. You can see them with your own eyes.
Your eyes can roll all they want. It doesn't make the problem go away.
If it’s cheap and easy to fill the night sky with satellites, the obvious implication is that it will also be cheap and easy to do astronomy from space, and your “extremely precious and expensive” telescope time could be on a satellite outside the atmosphere in the first place. This is an entirely transitory issue and instead of trying to deprive people of internet access, astronomers should be working together on launching their own satellite megaconstellation.
The complexity of Webb is almost entirely a consequence of the limitations of its launch platform. You have absolutely no conception of what a post-Starship world is going to look like.
Optical band interferometry is gonna happen eventually, perhaps directly as a result to advances in optical interlinking being pursued by starlink right now.
> Is it? Why do we need to visually see, basically permanently, a ring or string of lights in the sky, unwittingly, just because of some billionaire?
There are upsides also.
> You can predict where the satellites are going to be and avoid them.
You could for example not collect from the relevant photosites during transit, we're not using photographic plates anymore. This is not some sort of insurmountable problem, I'm not claiming it's not a problem, but it is not an astronomy ruining problem.
As an indirect result of starlink we have also vastly decreased the cost to put an telescope in space.
> That's not true. You can see them with your own eyes.
You absolutely can't see them in the earth's umbra, they're only 500km high, the umbra represents a significant portion of the sky.
> You absolutely can't see them in the earth's penumbra
I have seen them with my own eyes and they've been filmed. It's just not correct. It's particularly visible when the sun is hitting them. You can find several photos and videos of them from the ground.
Paragraphs 30 and 31 seem pretty dispositive to me. Starlink has not yet been able to reach the required speeds, its speeds have gotten worse over the past years, and it can point to no concrete evidence to suggest that Starlink's aspirational plans to suddenly and dramatically change that trend over the next several months are in fact realistic. Not that the report points this out, but Musk's companies do have a long history of touting unrealistic milestones and a very short history of actually reaching any such milestone on time.
I don't know if it is part of the official report or not, but I'd bet that Starlink cutting off service in Ukraine to prevent them from launching an attack on Russian vessels in Crimea definitely played a part in this decision.
Starlink only cut off service in the occupied parts of Ukraine because you don't want Russia using Starlink there. The Ukrainian forces say Starlink has and is continuing to help them.
> Starlink in use on ‘all front lines,’ Ukraine spy chief says
> “They have proven themselves on the front lines. You can say what you want about whether [Starlink systems] are good or bad, but facts are facts. Absolutely all front lines are using them,” Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Main Ukrainian Intelligence Directorate, said Saturday, according to Interfax Ukraine.
It's so obvious that this is in retaliation for Elon's stance on free speech. The people behind this are frauds and weak.
When China takes over and sends all the current elite to the electric chair, the people ofnl the west will be chanting Xi Jinping's praises. That's what you get for weakness and moral deprivation.
>RDOF rules set speeds of 25/3 Mbps as the minimum allowed for broadband service delivered by winners. However, participants were permitted to bid at four different performance tiers: 25/3 Mbps, 50/5 Mbps, 100/20 Mbps and 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. When the auction closed, the FCC noted 99.7% of locations were bid at 100/20 or higher, with 85% bid at the gigabit tier. That means Starlink will need to provide speeds of at least 100/20 in order to meet its obligations.
1. https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/what-do-starlinks-la...
2. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-105A1.pdf