Starlink loses out on $886 million in rural broadband subsidies

Because as we know, the only way for companies owned by the richest person on Earth to do business is if they get hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money first.

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TIL: The majority of Lemmys have never lived an hour from the nearest population center, down a dirt road, on a few hundred acres of wilderness. I fucking HATE musk and I still have an RV kit in my basement so when I'm traveling around hours from anywhere, Starlink works perfectly.

Guys, please be nice to Elon. He's having a bad day, his attempted cover story to boost TSLA isn't working, and he's coming down.

Its simple like many Musk projects he over promises and under delivers.

Starlink performance is slow and unreliable. Sometimes you get 100 Mbps and sometimes you get < 1 Mbps with the average being around 25. So it cant even really be considered broadband.

trying to get another one of his boondoggles financed by Congress i see.. nothing but charlatan under those robes..

musk is one of the richest man alive, why does he need subsidies to do his job??

Aside from the bit of personal enjoyment I get from seeing Elon take an L… Starlink only meets the classification as “broadband internet” in optimal conditions. The average experience just plain doesn’t qualify and it is openly acknowledged that performance will get worse with more traffic. It may be better than nothing for some, but it is clearly not sustainable. The money would be better spent running lines because at least that would be consistent and long lasting even if it is more expensive.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”

That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal.

SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.

“This applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade.” FCC commissioner Brendan Carr dissented, writing that “the FCC did not require — and has never required — any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”

But his funding plan was slashed by the time it became law, with the final version offering no money for locally-run internet service.

Christopher Cardaci, head of legal at SpaceX, writes in a letter to the FCC that “Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

The original article contains 296 words, the summary contains 235 words. Saved 21%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Quite excited to see what some competition will do in this space (no pun intended) with Amazon's upcoming deployment.

For an operating company that's the kiss of death. I predict Starlink will be bought by the US government and there won't be a hell of a lot of profit.