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.
- As if giving it all to Comcast and Spectrum for the 47th time will make things any better? Starlink is actually something accessible for a lot of these people, while legacy ISPs just pocket the money and claim its too hard to serve rural customers.
  
  It's great that there is variety and all but let's not pretend the CEO isn't dangerous, see starling/Ukraine issue and that the company isn't filling the sky with consumer shite designed to be burned up.
  Infrastructure should be publicly owned and strong competitive regulation.
  
  Anything is better than Starlink, Starlink is just extreme useless pollution for something that normal ISPs can achieve.
  The government needs to step in and make internet more of a utility like in like every other successful country.

- It's not a scam. Satellite internet was extremely expensive and slow last time I checked a few years before starlink. Yeah , musk is garbage but starlink is actually helping a lot of people worldwide.
  
  It's probably the most wasteful way of providing internet imaginable since they have to send satellites up by the dozen every year for them to burn in the atmosphere only several years lates. Yeah I don't think it's a good business model at all, especially considering they haven't been able to turn a profit and rely on subsidies.
  
  Oh no! It's expensive! Wait. Isn't he the chairman of a vertically integrated space shuttle and satellite international conglomerate? Why are Americans footing the bill for any of this?
  
  But he can pay for it.
  
  it absolutely is a scam.. you WANT it to not be a scam, but you are incorrect..
- How about that CGI car in orbit in front of a swim screen? There are still a lot of people who haven't figured that one out yet.
  What it accomplished is manifold, but mainly to get investors to pony up, and creditors to extend credit, and the fan boys to fan the flames.
  CC: @misk@sopuli.xyz

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.
- I live two hours from a city, waaaay up in the Alps and I have gigabit fibre for€40 a month lol
  Your infrastructure sucks donkeyballs 😂
  
  two hours is waaaay out there guys!
  My sides are in orbit! Here is a side-by side of the Alps
  
  next to a small section of the American Rockies,
  
  which is still nothing compared to Canada (yes there are people in that big empty area).
  
  No offense, but true European rural doesn't exist.
  
  No where in Europe is "remote."
  Come to the South West US where you can drive 100 miles in any direction and barely see another human.
  
  It's a difference between definitions of "city" and "middle of nowhere" between the US and Europe. The US is a massive place. Part of the reason the US appears to have such a crappy infrastructure is that when, say, mobile carriers want to improve it to upgrade something to 5G, they have to do so for the entire country, with many US states having an area the size of whole European countries. Texas itself is the size of Germany. That is a much bigger undertaking than improving it for a single European country or even a block of countries like western or central Europe. Things are so spread out here that "remote" can mean REALLY remote in some areas. Distances between reasonably sized cities in the US can be much larger than in Europe, and the US has more people in those more rural areas than some think, especially in states in the middle of the country. Local ISPs for internet in those areas can be good depending on the area, but a lot of people in the really rural areas would still be better and more easily served by a service like Starlink.
  
  Sounds wonderful tbh
- Today you learned that the majority of people don't live in the middle of nowhere?
  Of course they don't, by definition, if a bunch of people lived there, it wouldn't be the middle of nowhere.
  
  Lmao you're being a pedantic dick bc you know what they meant.. and I'm cracking up enjoying everything about it
- Yeah, Musk has gone insane, anyone can see that.
  But Musk aside, LEO satellites are still really the only viable and economical solution to the problem of broadband in rural areas, and Starlink seems to work great.
  Also, the objection that resulted in pulling this funding looks pretty bullshit. Several other broadband providers are getting these same funding deals for doing basically nothing.
  
  Musk has gone insane
  No, he hasn't. He's just a bog-standard capitalist doing bog-standard capitalist things.
- My partner’s family lives on a dirt road between a corn field and cow pasture.. a full 1.5 hour drive from the nearest mid-sized city.. they have gigabit fiber..
  Not saying that their situation is currently typical, but id argue it is indeed a sign that good internet is slowly but surely coming available to everyone.
- That doesn't make any sense. Taxpayer money was supposed to fix this over a decade ago.
- Middle of nowhere between fields: I have 5g router and 300+mbps
  
  If you're pulling 5G you're not remote.
  
  Brother, we have wildly different definitions of "nowhere" if you get 5G. When I lived in a rural shithole in the US, I had to drive 100 miles to start picking up 5G signals (though that was just before the pandemic, so maybe 5G coverage has improved greatly in the past 3 years).

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.
- That stock chart is nothing terrible. Sideways on the 6 months and the 5-year is pretty good. I don't think he's suffering.

- Doesn't match my experience. The worst thing about it is ping, but download is mostly always around 100-200.
  
  Yeah, I've always seen at least 20 down, never as low as 1 Mbps the grandparent comment claimed. I usually see roughly 100 Mbps down, though.
  That's based on using it in a few different places in our RV over the summer, some with obstructions from trees in some spots. Regardless of the actual speed, my wife and I were both able to telework and hold conference calls simultaneously without an issue - and my wife would use video (I kept it off, but she used it).
- Really? Shit. I was planning to move to starlink but let me do some research.
  
  I had Starlink too and it was definitely unreliable. It's also absolutely atrocious in any kind of weather like heavy rain or snow.
  It's better than nothing for sure, but definitely look into it more, especially if you'll be relying on it for work.
- My parents have starlink and I'm really impressed with it. It's very reliable
- I was shocked when he got a gov't contract after he admitted to all that fuckery in Ukraine. Wtf is happening in gov't???
- i imagine that's a product of the technology and not so much the company. the problems with satellite internet are just physics. it's probably stupid to go with something like this in an area that has fiber available.
- My parents had it. Average was about 40mbps over a 60gb download, minimums were in the low 20s, and it topped out at around 80-100mbps. A fuck of a lot better than 10mbps down 750kbps up, their only other option. I hate Elon as much as the next guy, but starlink is awesome.

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??
- clearly you’re not rich. the rich stay rich by spendng other people’s money.
  
  this guy knows material dialectics
- This isn't really a great argument. Subsidies are there to promote the things we want to come to fruition. Want your people to have solar? Subsidies for putting one on your roof. You want more electric cars on the road even though more expensive? Subsidies.
  You want a billionaire to help a new technology reach people he wouldn't bother with? Subsidies.
  
  So we do that by giving them even more fucking money, instead of taking it away when they do a shitty thing, like ruin our atmosphere with fossil fuels.
- musk is one of the richest man alive, why does he need subsidies to do his job??
  Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor. Next question ...

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.
- Yeah it's totally ruined. I can't even see the sky anymore at night.
  
  That's significantly less of a concern than assisting in elevating a few billion people out of poverty
- I imagine Amazon will be the one taking your tax dollars to do business. They famously have no money and need American tax dollars generated by working class labor in order to survive.

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.
- Unlikely that it'll be purchased by DoD, but death's kiss was given when Elon held satellite internet access of the Ukrainian Armed Forces hostage while they were engaged in a hot war and being supported by DoD. That's not how the Defense Industry operates. If you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.
  I can pretty much guarantee you that the Pentagon immediately started a lot of conversations with established contractors about rapidly expediting their own LEO constellations, and promising help on the regulatory side.
  It may not have been immediately apparent, but it was there. It honestly wouldn't have mattered as much for the business, except for the fact that SpaceX is entirely dependent upon government contracts, and the military is a huge part of that.
  
  He didn't hold it hostage.
  He didn't turn it off, it was never on. He didn't intervene in an attack, he just did nothing.
  It's even questionable if he can legally allow Ukraine to drop one on a boat and use it as a weapon, and it was against the terms of use.
  The DoD failed to sign an agreement with SpaceX which left them in that awkward position. The DoD has now done so and it's a non issue now. The DoD is the one allowing all these combat uses now as it should have been from day 1
- When Musk cut off Ukraine, the Pentagon informed him that they were immediately purchasing a minor controlling stake in the, currently, private company. Service to Ukraine was restored the next day.
  That's how "capitalism" works apparently.
  I also assume that's why NVidia did it's sudden about face and fell right in line when the generals threatened to own them the next day.
  It's all just rich people getting reminded they're only rich, or alive, because the government allows them to be.
  
  I'm honestly at a loss with trying to discern whether you just honestly don't understand the situation and how corporations/defense contractors and government work, if you're unwittingly repeating a source of intentional disinformation, or if you're actually maliciously trying to pump some counterfactual narrative.
  I think it's a mixture of the first two, which is unfortunate because the word count that is required to correct all of that bad information is a lot more then I'm willing to type out on my phone screen.
  So, I'll just point out you can either own a controlling interest, or a minor stake, but the two are mutually exclusive, and at no point was either on the table for purchase from the Pentagon.
  
  Jesus, the absolute state of misinformation in your post...
  
  I don't know that Iridium is still working. I think it's been decommissioned. But, the US military has been looking for its replacement for years. Now, they could launch their own, or buy a network. Musk not getting RUS funds and losing a thousand satellites from orbit a year makes Starlink a prime candidate.
  
  They didn't cut off Internet to Ukraine. They had to stop the military from using it in an offensive way, which is ITAR, it wasn't even musk who pulled the plug, it was a bunch of lawyers that had to make that call.