If you look at the authorized bids[1] versus the defaulted bids[2], you can see only three companies got any money from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund broadband subsidy. The other five companies got nothing, including SpaceX and LTD.
E-Fiber San Juan LLC gets $7.5M to provide broadband services to 1,085 homes in rural Utah. Monster Broadband gets $5.8M for 11,286 homes in Texas and Tennessee. Northern Arapaho Tribal Industries gets $7.8M for 2,408 homes in Wyoming (probably on Indian reservations). So a total of around $21 million will be spent on 15,000ish homes.
The FCC's budget for the RDOF subsidy is around $20 billion for 4 million homes, so 99.99% of the money is still up for grabs, as are 99.96% of the rural households.
To be clear, those links are only for the eleventh batch of "ready to authorize" bids that was released today. Other bids were authorized in different batches, viewable at https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904/releases
I have a feeling that Starlink will end up being an indirect recipient despite the rejection.
Starlink might just end up making deals with the companies that won their bids and sell their services/hardware as rebranded solutions. It's probably cheaper for these companies to do this instead of setting up their own infrastructure.
Of course the real question is probably whether not following through on their obligations and getting fined is less than the amount they were awarded.
Cell towers already provide internet to everyone in downtown SF and have for 20 years. Just because you aren't using your PC with it normally doesn't mean it doesn't count.
Wireless is always cheaper than wired for an equivalent coverage area. It just requires less physical infrastructure. But in almost every other way it has inferior performance.
Agreed, problem is with everything SpaceX hard numbers are hard to come buy. So wireless will be cheaper, if satelites are cheaper than 5g and other groind based solutuons is hard to tell.
Could you explain your reasoning? My understanding is that:
fiber=c
lasers=c
fiber=nonlinear
lasers=linear
So in physics terms, starlink will eventually surpass buried fiber in latency for all situations where fiber routing divergence from linear exceeds the ~1000km orbital round trip.
Now compare the noise level in a buried fiber, versus satellite radio transmission.
We've been getting a thunderstorm every evening here, and my Starlink slows down a lot -- not sure if it's ionization, the water content of clouds, or what, but it's definitely noticeable.
And my previous point-to-point wifi would also essentially stop transferring data when it rained, just in case some Starlink hater thinks it's somehow worse than alternatives.
Technically the speed of light in fiber is 2/3c because fiber has a higher index of refraction. Some HFT funds have actually moved away from fiber in some instances because they can pick up a few microseconds by going through the air instead.
Yes. You will likely see a maximum theoretical speed of about 600mbps (like WiFi). In practice it will be much slower, maybe half. It’s noise shooting through atmosphere, so there will be physical limitations.
Starlink will get slower and slower as they get more subscribers.
This is already happening. In many places it is well below half as fast as before. More, and more powerful, birds will help some, but if they need to loft 4000 a year their unit cost will matter.
I expect they will cap subscriptions offered in some areas, particularly parts of Asia and Africa.
No, it assumes that they will sell as many subscriptions as they can just barely support, because they desperately need the revenue to sustain the business model.
I was excited about Starlink until I learned more about it. Far too many issues. We need wire under ground or 4g. I lived in an area without many services (no cable, water, sewer) and had several satellite services which are more stable than Starlink and still found it inadequate.
What issues? I’ve had less issues than with other wired ISPs and satellite providers, personally. Not to mention any other satellite provider is going to be incredibly latency positive. Starlink has been a godsend. I guess just be careful of andecdata.
True, they aren't upgrading the satellites to the v2 ones that are 10x more powerful in total throughput and number of subscribers. They also aren't launching more satellites (and rockets) every year /s
They have launched exactly zero of those "more powerful" satellites. And they are not launching at near the replacement rate for the final constellation.
It appears you are doubting that they will eventually launch their 2.0 satellites with an order of magnitude more bandwidth. It's not like they haven't delivered in the past...
The constellation is still growing quickly, they just passed 3000 launched Starlink satellites. By the time they go past the 9.000 satellites or so they should have Starship ready and kick their launch volume into overdrive. Have the 30,000 extra satellites (on top of the 12,000 already approved ones) even been approved yet?
> Higher-bandwidth birds just moves the bottleneck.
What does that even mean? There is no reason to believe they can't launch enough powerful satellites to reach faster speeds in those rural areas.
If each new satellite can put down more spot beams, you can cover more cells for longer. With the spectrum they have, they could put 8 beams on a cell with 100% duty cycle, which is probably around 3.2-4Gbps.
They’ve already applied to the FCC for the 2Ghz spectrum. They’re already launching the larger 1.5 satellites that include lasers to limit ground stations. They just had a successful test fire of a starship with the engines mounted this week.
What makes you doubt the company that made reusable rockets that land on boats and reflux 13+ times won’t do this? The ENTIRE industry said it was impossible but it was fully within the realm of physics. They pulled it off because it was possible.
Oh Starlink is still losing massive amounts of money. There’s absolutely no feasible way they’re profitable at this stage.
That said. I’m sure the US Department of Defense will effectively write SpaceX a blank check after seeing how quickly they switched to spread spectrum frequency hopping to prevent Russian jamming of comms in Ukraine.
> They have launched exactly zero of those "more powerful" satellites. And they are not launching at near the replacement rate for the final constellation.
You can't deny that they're going to launch the more powerful satellites while simultaneously relying on those more powerful satellites for your calculations of the size of the final constellation...
They're launching at much faster than the rate needed for replacement for the existing planned constellation for the version 1/1.5 satellites.
Don’t the next gen satellites require the new Starship for deployment, which is still nowhere near ready for launch (they aim for a first test launch by the end of this year, IIRC)?
Nothing about the current situation is permanent. They're launching more and more satellites and it's only in the eastern half of the US that subscriber rates are growing faster than available capacity.
Definitely, and there are several other areas that need to be scaled up as well.
- Completing the gen 1 constellation, as well as getting gen 2 up.
- All of the ground stations
- Meeting the bandwidth requirements
However, there are potentially other ways SpaceX might be able indirectly benefit.
Another idea I've heard floating around is that Starlink can be used to link ground stations together. This might be very important in those especially hard to reach locations where laying fiber or establishing line of sight, etc might be too complicated/difficult/expensive. I've heard that this is not really a viable solution with gen 1s though.
I would imagine a $500 dish, plus installation (which can be done oneself) is much cheaper than digging trenches for fiber or copper lines, or hanging lines on utilities with obnoxious right of ways. For the cost of the dish to be cited as a blocker is mysterious, it's actually cheap compared to the prices quoted to truly rural folks to get fiber pulled to their remote locations.
It's a political move against Elon, just like the previous EV TAX incentive where the strings-attached involved having factories with union labor. Sure $500 is costly, but it's better than nothing.... that's the point.
Yup, this is another idea I've heard floating around. In some situations where fiber backhaul or line-of-sight is not feasible, Starlink could link their ground stations to these hard to service locations extending the reach of existing backhaul.
Then the 4/5G can be set up using a mixture of fiber, line-of-sight or Starlink backhaul, depending on the situation and location.
Of course this is another way that Starlink might be able to win some of these contracts. They could set up (or work with a partner) mini 4/5G networks in these rural areas and also use a mixture of fiber and Starlink backhaul. After all, they still need fiber backhaul for their ground stations anyways.
Starlink customers end up not needing to buy the current, expensive hardware and just use relatively inexpensive 4/5G modems.
I've heard this isn't possible with the gen 1 satellites, so still a theory until the Starship program is off the ground.
I'm not sure how viable that would be, given that two of the reasons given for cutting them out would still stand:
- Not meeting the bandwidth requirements in practice.
- High initial hardware cost.
Starlink effectively being judged not able to meet the program requirements would surely rule them out to be used in connection with RDOF in any capacity?
I don't think this is correct. The FCC announcement notes that $5B of the original RDOF auction has been authorized already. It gave out $23M today in a separate announcement.
It’s weird… at that level of subsidy why can’t StarLink just give away the terminal for subsidized users? That’s over $1k per user, more than enough to pay for the dish.
I believe the issue is that they don’t have the bandwidth, not the dishes. They need more satellites to provide the speeds and amount of service they promised.
Exactly. Look at the starlink coverage map (https://www.starlink.com/map). Nearly the entire east of the US is "waitlist" aka at capacity. This is basically exactly what I predicted would happen - starlink is beyond awesome as a way to get internet but really suffers from lack of capacity "at scale".
Keep in mind too that each year average internet consumption rises so the existing sats can service fewer and fewer users.
I am personally surprised they have reached capacity so quickly - I thought they would have fit more users per sat on by aggressive traffic shaping/data caps.
Starlink will only be a niche service imo, FTTH/cellular will continue to roll out to more and more rural locations. It's a great niche service but the capacity really constrains it.
I also wonder how long SpaceX can afford all these falcon launches for starlink. I think the plan was spaceship would do huge deploys at a way lower cost per sat, which would increase capacity much quicker. But it seems spaceship is understandably delayed?
There's still tons of folks on 56k phoneline modems, <512k ADSL, unreliable&expensive cellular or expensive, slow and high latency VSAT connections in rural areas.
In those places Starlink will dominate.
And the real global growth will start when the satellite-to-satellite links finally allow coverage away from SpaceX's teleports.
So coverage in the middle of the seas and in the middle of Africa or South-America.
Yes but every year that goes by that market shrinks as new fibre gets rolled out and 4G/5G continues to grow in service. I don't know if it really is enough of a market to cover the cost of servicing thousands of small sats long term.
The global angle is interesting; but I don't think Africa will be as simple as people make out - there is a lot of corruption around telco contracts there and they won't just allow SpaceX to turn on all of Africa and bypass it all.
As they mass produce sats at ever increasing rates and at the switch to Starship and increase production rate of their termianls, their price per unit of capacity is gone go down much more. They have 3 vital parts all are dropping in price.
In addition, with laser links and improving routing software they still have a ways to go in optimizing the whole network.
The global shipping, flying and remote industrial use-cases are significant and pay a premium. In addition there are still a huge number of rural people in the world, Africa, Asia, Europe, South America. Then there are all kinds of mobile use-cases as well.
Starlink will also be used on things like rockets (like Starship) and all kind of military aircraft as well. Such usecases will also pay a premium.
Then there is global low latency backhaul as well.
I think if you really go threw it there is plenty of markets to service, even if you assume fiber is gone continue to roll out.
The launches were delayed by COVID for supply chain issues, just like the antennas were. One rather surprising issue was that all the high-grade oxygen was being used in hospitals, with none left over for rockets.
> starlink is beyond awesome as a way to get internet but really suffers from lack of capacity "at scale".
Keep
Surely it pays for itself if they can sign up users as fast as they can scale? But if capital is the problem, maybe Starlink should be IPO'd the old fashioned way, to raise capital rather than cash out investors.
To IPO, they would need to release information that might make the whole enterprise seem less tenable. And, if it turns a profit they would be less able to siphon the money off to private projects. (No, not for a Mars colony. There will not be one.)
Mars is wholly unsuitable as a place to colonize, and Starship would anyway be far from adequate to attempt it, by at least two orders of magnitude.
Starship might suffice to maintain a moon base, after the model of McMurdo Station, albeit radically more expensive. But that would be an end in itself, not any sort of staging point. There is noplace to go from there.
O'Neill cans make better sense. After aneutronic p-11B fusion is mastered in some future century, O'Neill cans out in the Kuiper Belt will be a place for humanity to expand. The inner solar system is a dump, Earth excepted.
Exactly, the subsidy is meant as a "no household left behind" type program, so awarded companies need to prove they can cope with the best case scenario of 100% adoption, and StarLink probably wouldn't be able to cope with that many terminals in close proximity (typical rural community is sparsely populated, but not that sparsely).
I would imagine in the future they could narrow the scope of their bid just to really really really remote and unpopulated rural regions, where even a 100% adoption would fit comfortably in a satellite bandwidth, but then I don't know if such a smaller bid would be worth the hassle for them.
Per the article, the problem is that they can't cope with the users they have right now, not some theoretical future user count.
The FCC looked at data from Oopsla, and saw that Starlink is currently averaging 91Mbps Down / 9.5Mbps Up or something like this. Their bid was for 100 Down / 20 Up, so they are some way away from providing the level of service to their current users that they committed for the subsidized users.
But they have ~500k users now, with 20% of satellites deployed, and there are something like 600k subsidized households if I’m reading correctly. I think it’s safe to say that in 2024 they will be able to handle 600k extra users. (If they actually try and don’t oversubscribe!)
The 100/20 was observed early on IIRC so they have demonstrated it’s possible if they don’t oversubscribe. (Which is more than can be said about previous satellite internet services.) But yeah, they certainly aren’t currently in compliance. Given Musk’s general approach to regulatory bodies I can’t blame them for applying skepticism here.
As far as I understand from other comments, they will have the option to re-apply of they achieve these speeds sometime before 2028.
> I think it’s safe to say that in 2024 they will be able to handle 600k extra users. (If they actually try and don’t oversubscribe!)
We'll have to see. It's important to note that so far they've been able to use whatever launch capacity they want to increase the constellation, but by 2024 they will have to start using a good portion of their launch capacity to re-build it, since the satellites launched today will have fallen down by then.
If they manage to launch Starship by then (not sure if that's looking likely or not), maybe they will have extra capacity to be able to both replace satellites and expand the constellation.
Starship will blow the satellite count out of the water. Also, SpaceX gets to load up launches with payload space with more satellites.
What is apparent is that the other upstart satellite flotillas have zero chance of being competitive and getting off the ground, both figuratively and literally.
But at some point there were issues with getting components for the new gen of Dishys, they have less ports and flexibility than mine. Scaling dishys is still an issue along with the satellites, but it's not like growth has stalled.
This decision may minorly slow the growth of starlink, but not by much.
And if SpaceX does get Starship off the ground at anything close to their economic targets, fuggedaboutit.
That’s one objection, but another one in the FTC’s rejection as outlined in the article was the cost of terminal.
My point was “cost of terminal” seems like a weird one to be getting dinged on.
I agree capacity seems like a better thing to be focusing on. This seems like an own-goal from StarLink as they could have kept up their speeds by slowing growth and not enabling roaming. But maybe they are just prioritizing subscriber count over winning subsidy dollars.
"Cory Hauer, LTD Broadband’s CEO, told Fierce it is “extremely disappointed in the FCC staff decision” and is evaluating next steps. He added “I don’t believe the FCC fully appreciated the benefits LTD Broadband would bring to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.”"
Except of course the facts suggest the exact opposite, where the FCC very much appreciated the benefits that you "would" bring, so much so as to select you as one of two potential contract recipients, but has determined that you lied during the bid and in reality can't bring what you claimed you'd be able to bring.
Can someone explain how does Starlink go about using the electromagnetic spectrum efficiently? 4G (and 5G even more so) relies on small cells to spatially partition the spectrum, therefore increasing the maximum bandwidth available in the system. Need to serve more users without compromising per-user throughput? Split the cells.
Now, the cell of a satellite is enormous, and there's no way to reduce the tx power without getting out of range of the surface of the planet altogether. Not to mention that those satellites are pretty damn fast so they stay over any particular user for a very short amount of time.
What am I missing? Or is this supposed to be a low throughput system (when added up over all concurrent users)?
You’re not missing any spectral efficiency trick. Starlink maxes out at one customer per square mile or about one million total customers. It’s for areas beyond cellular coverage.
Cell networks could improve infill coverage consistency with professional installs of roof mounted CPE. That would help people who have a weak signal inside their home but good signal outside.
Starlink is effectively a point to point connection with each satellite. There is no technical reason they can’t have 1 billion customers with a large enough network and the right hardware.
The issue is economic. Target 1 customer per square mile and most of the orbit over land is useful, target 100,000 customers per square mile and most satellites are only beneficial over megacities like NYC.
Due to the short lifespan of individual satellites they can adjust to market forces and new technology fairly rapidly. If for example China lets them in the economics around density change significantly.
Directionality of antennas/electronically steered beams (off axis gain is not zero on the satellite or the terminal) and the relatively large bandwidth involved in these links imposes a limit that you'll hit even with an unlimited number of satellites. Calculating that limit is tricky but I don't think it's practical to cover urban areas for the reasons the parent brings up... cellular networks rely heavily on short effective range; the minimum achievable spot size for LEO satellites is still much larger than a typical urban LTE cell, and the terminal has the same problem of spot size in orbit being quite large.
The spot size is proportional to the phased array antenna size, right? Could SpaceX just keep scaling up their phased array antennas on the satellites as Starship reduces launch cost?
Antenna size is a different one. They're orbiting low enough that atmospheric effects become a real issue. See the deployment in February[1] where they lost ~40 of the 49 satellites in a launch batch, because a Geomagnetic storm increased the atmospheric density at their initial parking orbit, overwhelming the ability for their control system to maintain orbit.
So, yeah, they could then scale up the control system, too - but that makes them even heavier, increases fuel expenditure, reduces lifetime, etc.
The antenna array is parallel to the ground, so scaling it up has a minimal impact on drag.
It increases mass, sure, but an increased mass to drag area ratio is usually considered a good thing (you'll be needing a better rocket to launch it tho).
It's not always perfectly edge on, and it requires a control system to keep it oriented that way.
This is why from the linked article:
> The satellites were then placed in a protective "safe mode" and commanded to fly edge-on "like a sheet of paper" to minimize drag effects as the company worked with the U.S. Space Force and the company LeoLabs to track them with ground-based radar, it added.
The v2 satellites they're testing out to launch on starship are in fact scaled up. The v1.5 they're launching now are larger than the originals which is why they've not launched 60 starlink satellites on a single falcon 9 launch in sometime.
I thought they start at about 250 km after launch and then boost up to around 400 km. They don't have very powerful thrusters or gyros so they couldn't boost faster then they fell out of orbit.
It seems that they are far safer once they have boosted up into operational orbit - that's why only the recently launched Starlinks fell back to earth.
This is the standard way of showing the performance of antennas - it shows the varying amount of power that is sent out from the antenna in different directions. Note that (a) it doesn't roll off immediately outside the target zone (usually the 3dB threshold as shown here) and (b) there is measurable power in completely off-axis directions. In fact the tighter you beam steer, the more lobes you get in weird places.
Both of these mean that you can't just parcel up physical space into perfect beam spots and just keep adding satellites. There are all sorts of things you can do to help as you go up, but it gets harder and harder.
That's true, but assuming maximum possible density both the sender and receiver should be using directional antenna on top of this the closest satellite gets the strongest signal simply due to distance. That distance effect becomes less meaningful as the density increases but stays relevant for practical networks.
Both ends of the starling link are already using directional antennas. The difference in power die to distance is already pretty irrelevant - the satellite is 400km up and we're talking about offsets of 10km on the ground. The 400km part of that is far more dominant making the power difference to the 'next satellite over' be very small.
“Both ends of the starlink are already using directional antennas” Sure, but it’s critical to understand the associated benefits when doing this kind of analysis.
If you’re talking average 10km separation on the ground that would mean stupid high constilation densities. A lower densities it’s more meaningful.
PS: I got to 1 billion customers assuming different hardware and more satellites not just more satellites. The only way 100,000 customers “works” is a none viable and lower bandwidth per customer business model, but the goal was to illustrate a point. Space X is aiming for an economic sweet spot, not the outer edge of what’s technically possible.
I don't follow your economic logic. Are you saying 100,000 customers need 100,000 different satellites which is too many to be used efficiently on the rest of their orbits?
That was in reference to the capacity to handle X customers per square mile not total. If you want to average 100,000 customers per square mile over a wide area you need a fuckton of satellites over that area.
Basically a network that handles 1 customer per square mile might in theory have say 40 million customers worldwide eventually. A network capable of handling 10 people per square mile might cost 10x as much, but only increase that to say 120 million because some areas have less than 10 potential customers per square mile. Increasing that to say 100 or even 100,000 people per square mile would vastly increase the cost, but you hit heavy diminishing returns with a lower percentage of areas reaching those densities and many people with better internet options than starlink or simply can’t afford the service.
> You’re not missing any spectral efficiency trick. Starlink maxes out at one customer per square mile or about one million total customers. It’s for areas beyond cellular coverage.
You're entirely wrong here. Their customer density is way higher than 1 per square mile... I'm not even sure where you get these ideas.
There are a bunch of estimates out there, but the best guess is that starlink can currently serve around 300 terminals per cell.
Each cell is 146 miles, which is around 2 terminals per square mile.
People may be clustered a bit, giving the illusion of starlink being able to support a higher density than this.
Starlink isn't as scalable as people want to imagine due to the RF bandwidth SpaceX has as well as power requirements. This is part of why SpaceX made such a big deal over the 12GHz band that Dish wants to use.
The next version of satellites may be able to support additional bands which will help, but starlink's still going to be fairly limited in terms of number of people it can support.
There are two directions satellite to ground and ground to satellite, and they operate slightly differently.
From the ground you can think of an array of satellites like a monitor showing a document. As you read every word is being displayed at the same time in the same color, but because the light is coming from different locations you can focus on a little area and ignore the rest of the screen.
A traditional satellite dish uses a similar idea to just look at a single satellite at a time and ignore the rest of the sky, this is why you need to aim them. What starkink does differently is using a phased array to let it change focus without physically moving the dish, which is really really fast and lets them track satellites in LEO.
Just like cellphones it can hand off from satellite to satellite plenty fast to keep up with the speeds involved. As soon as you can handle 1 transistion just repeat the same thing millions of times, computers are great at repetitive tasks.
As to throughput, it’s supposed to be fast enough to watch 4K video which isn’t gigabit speeds but is vastly better than millions of people are stuck with.
None of that makes any difference to the question. Phased array techniques save transmitter power more than bandwidth, because the beams just can't be very narrow with such a small array. It means one satellite gets your signal, not all in sight. Up top, one beam takes in many, many subscribers. Starlink will struggle to maintain more than a few tens of megabits.
Power ends up being bandwidth, but I don’t think you understand why.
A cellphone networks depend on proximity to a cell tower to alow frequencies to be reused across multiple cell towers. On top of this they also use a wide range of techniques to share each individual towers available bandwidth with multiple cell phones. But the most basic trick is signals get weaker with distance.
Starlink also uses distance as a satellite can only see a small fraction of the total number of ground stations. However, weaker from distance is indistinguishable from a weaker signal due to a phased array antenna pointing somewhere else, so they can in effect simulate more cells than they would have from proximity alone. On top of this they can use all the existing cellphone tricks to maximise bandwidth.
PS: Yes Starlink is limited to ~100 megabits per customer, but that’s vastly better than 1.5 Mbps DSL which is what many rural communities are stuck with.
> It means one satellite gets your signal, not all in sight.
So it would seem an easy way to scale out is by adding satellites. I don't think they're anywhere near capacity on that, yet.
Also, each current-gen satellite is 20 Gbps of bandwidth. v2 is claimed to be "almost an order of magnitude more capable than v1.0" in terms of communications bandwidth.
Oh, ok. But 22km is still a lot more than a typical 4G/5G urban cell. It's basically the size of a city. Whereas I can spot multiple stations in my city if I go for a 5-10 minute walk.
Latency is big issue for geostationary satellites - the ones at which you can aim a dish at a fixed point in the sky - which have to be very far away from Earth to be geostationary, 35000 km above surface, unlike Starlink satellites which are just 550km above ground.
Starlink gets 40-150ms, more often erring on the faster side. If they can get their peak load under control, I don't think I'd ever pine for hardwired internet again.
In principle you've got spatial diversity at both ends - on the ground and in space. I don't mean full duplex - I mean that the same area on the ground can in principle be covered by multiple Starlink satellites simultaneously using the same frequencies, so long as the satellites are not close together. The receiving phased array can separate the multiple signals just as it could if you used a steerable parabolic dish, but in software. Of course there may not be enough satellites launched yet to take advantage of this, but eventually there should be.
They're on the same frequency band and traditional satellite dishes can pick up some amount of off-axis interference. Assuming constant power per beam, more beams (Nco) eventually overwhelm traditional receivers.
There's a ton of very clever stuff going on with modern RF modulations. For example, each client terminal will have a unique pseudo-randomization key, and transmissions are modulated by that key. That evenly distributes the transmission across the spectrum. To someone without the key, it appears to be random noise. Multiple transmissions can occur simultaneously on the same spectrum with different keys, without necessarily interfering with each other.
Also, that 22km beam isn't going to be uniform, but rather higher gain at the center, and below some power threshold at the peripheral.
CDMA doesn't increase capacity because the N codes have to each use 1/Nth the rate. It fell out of favor around 15 years ago because it doesn't allow one transmitter to temporarily use the whole channel, which is advantageous for data traffic.
Spread spectrum methods are not magic, they do not manufacture new spectrum. As you get a larger number of simultaneous spread spectrum users the apparent "noise floor" (actually other spread spectrum transmissions) becomes higher and higher until the achievable data rate approaches zero. This isn't to say that the use of spread spectrum methods doesn't have benefits, but it doesn't change the fundamental concepts. Bluetooth, for example, uses FHSS but will still suffer from contention in very noisy environments.
It could also be that there are a series of different communication technologies. By the time we move onto the 3rd, noone is listening for the first. For instance AM radio, FM radio, TV, Spread spectrum analogue, digital, ... hypersuperfastwave ...
Since each tech spreads from the source in a small sphere-shaped shell depending on when that technology was invented, you need a huge co-incidence for someone else's shell to hit you WHEN you are listening for that type of communication.
Phased arrays and beam steering are pretty magical. Both the satellite and the ground station can aim at each other by using hundreds of antennas as a "lens", providing very efficient use of the spectrum. If I had to guess, I would assume that Starlink's beam size is about 10-50 km in radius.
There are limits to this magic. While sparse arrays of antenna can get you very good angular resolution when receiving signals, they're not so magical for transmission; as your array of transmitting antenna gets sparser, the power density of the beam also decreases proportionally. This is why aperture synthesis is great for radio astronomy, but next to worthless for far-field power transmission.
You can spread out a given collection of N antennas as wide as you like to get better angular resolution, but you lose signal strength at the target. Radio astronomers use big antennas and look for a long time. That doesn't work for communication.
You can add more antennas, but those cost money. So, you use as many as you can afford, and space them out according to what you need. A too-broad antenna array on a satellite would have one set of problems, one on the ground others.
Technically, RDOF ISPs have until 2028 to provide the promised service but Starlink's application was denied because their Ookla speed tests are slightly low in 2022. Appearances matter. If they provisioned slightly fewer customers per cell they might have passed.
I've been using Starlink since March 2021 and am very grateful for it. But the US service has gotten a lot worse since they chose to oversell their capacity. I'm glad to see that has consequences.
Also a little sad; I'd hoped that 100/20 RDOF standard would mean Starlink would have someone keeping them honest. They seem to be in a race to the congestion bottom right now.
You should be careful about being too glad. Starlink is a money sink and won't even have positive cash flow for many years.
SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Considering the expenses of Starlink and Starship, both big money sinks, it's entirely possible for Stalink to get scrapped at some point if investment money dries up.
Probably unlikely, since they could stop launching and keep the service running until the sats decay, but still possible.
I don't want Starlink or SpaceX to go broke. One of Musk's great strengths is balancing companies right on the edge of financial catastrophe. Partly with the help of government subsidies. Looks like they screwed this one up.
OTOH $900M is a lot of money to give to a company. And there's no guarantee that if they survive they won't just keep overselling capacity.
Starlink is mostly a bet on Starship. If they can actually get big reductions in cost to LEO, the cost of maintaining a large satellite constellation goes way down —- the capital cost of building each satellite is in the five-figure range, and the really expensive part is launching them. (Which, as you mentioned, they need to keep doing constantly as the older satellites are de-orbited.)
> You should be careful about being too glad. Starlink is a money sink and won't even have positive cash flow for many years.
> SpaceX has used Starlink as a driver for investment rounds and is regularly raising money.
Takes like these make no sense. They assume some kind of lack of intelligence among people at SpaceX. As if they don't know how economics work. Rather than assuming stupidity, maybe you should rethink your premise?
Starlink may just be a run of the mill Musk fraud like FSD - entirely about raising investment or stock values. Yes, they ship something, but they may not ever get to the promised end state.
The math doesn’t work out for starlink and people have noted this for years at this point.
> Starlink may just be a run of the mill Musk fraud like FSD - entirely about raising investment or stock values.
Believing that FSD is a fraud in the first place is where you go wrong here. Frauds generally require something to not work at all or not exist. FSD works and exists, just not on the timelines promised but continued to be refined.
They're already more than half way to a billion a year in revenue from only ~2500 of 12000 satellites so far in orbit. Hopefully this will make its continued support financially plausible.
Promising 20mbps and delivering 9 is not "a bit low". I want starlink to succeed, and I wish they'd gotten the the criteria to get this funding, but let's not be deceptive here.
That’s what Spectrum has done with my cable modem. It used to be 200/20 now it’s advertised as 300 with no upload speed advertised. Ookla tells me it is now 320+/10, but sometimes only 9 up. Uploads are reminiscent of my DSL line 20 years ago.
not that i want to defend the practice, but real-world speeds being a bit less than half the advertised speed is about what i've experience from every ISP i've ever been a customer of.
We have a 1080p TV. We had a connection that was effectively 6mbit dedicated down, and it never pixelated or buffered. Our “75mbit” comcast line regularly dropped to minimum resolution or started buffering. Speedtests said the connection was providing 25-100 mbit down, since ISPs often prioritize households that are currently running speed tests. This was before netflix launched fast.com to defeat such gaming.
For starlink, everything is fine, except that a few times an hour it jumps to the next satellite and the connection drops for about a second.
I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
> For starlink, everything is fine, except that a few times an hour it jumps to the next satellite and the connection drops for about a second.
> I don’t think it resets tcp streams or anything, but it definitely makes Zoom and “live” TV streaming apps cranky.
It hops to next satellite more often than that. The satellites take about 90 minutes to go around the globe.
Most of the handovers to next satellite are seamless (maybe 10ms delay in traffic), but especially when they're working on the beta phase software the more routing-oriented parts of the system seem glitchy. Earlier in 2022 I'd lose Internet for a few tens of seconds every now and then -- but that seems to have been a bug in the routing stack that they since fixed.
The ookla results are misleading so they're optics. Starlink speeds are completely non-uniform. Some areas get 300 mbps or even higher. Some are dropping down below 50 mpbs.
They're satellites, they move. You can't "provision" customers like that. You provide a constellation that gives some level of coverage at some level of reliability as a function of latitude, and that's what you get.
Now, OK, maybe that's not going to be acceptable to regulators. And... that's sort of a shame given the fact that satellite services are available literally everywhere. How many people not served by existing rural broadband RDOF recipients would love to have a subsidized Starlink antenna?
I really don't see how this is helping anyone except a handful of cable companies actually doing deployments. The vast bulk of the rural subscriber base that fund is intended to assist aren't going to get anything out of it.
Starlink right now is a bent pipe between the dishy and a ground station. Depending on how many customers they have in a specific ground station's cell, they need different backhaul capacity for that cell.
So, in the case of Starlink, they absolutely CAN provision customers like that, and that's EXACTLY how it works right now - invites happen per "cell," and each "cell" has a capacity quota.
Recently, they've been overprovisioning "cells" for some reason or another, and the service has slowed down, so it objectively didn't meet the thresholds and they'll need to bid again. This also seems reasonable.
I say this all as a happy Starlink customer - negative externalities to space junk and obnoxious fanbase aside, it's way better than my previous fixed point to point WISP experience was, and worlds better than ADSL stretched to the bitter end of distance capability over lines from the 1970s was.
My experience with the Starlink at my brother's house in Maine is that it's "OK" relative to wired broadband. Speeds are reasonable and, while I've had a couple multi-hour outages in the limited time I've spent up there, it's pretty usable. I could work up there if I wanted to.
But there are no good alternatives. ADSL was 1Mbps down with a tailwind and it was the last house on the road that could get it. Cell service is very sketchy, especially if not on Verizon. HughesNet limitations are well-known. So it's pretty much a game-changer in terms of Internet access.
Here in Colorado my service is actually pretty good - I get 20-30mbit during crowded times, and 150-200mbit during off hours. Outages were problematic a few months ago but have improved and now usually coincide only with severe thunderstorms.
Overall, it's a literal order of magnitude better than end-of-line ADSL and roughly a 2x gain over my old WISP (at 2x the cost). For someone who used to have access to a WISP, it's evolutionary. For locations with no previous access at all, it's revolutionary.
On the flip side, the hardware is almost offensively silly and ridiculous (proprietary connectors and cables, router with 0 Ethernet ports but a diagram of Mars instead, etc.). IPv6 support disappeared sometime last year, and everything is behind a CGNAT. And link quality sometimes seems to depend on the dish repositioning algorithm picking the correct inclination, which seems to be a crapshoot depending on when it was last rebooted rather than an ongoing correction process.
I'm pretty sure dishy is way out of spec for poe power use. Using proprietary connectors is probably forgivable with that. Poe+++
I agree not having Ethernet out of the box sucks. I suspect some one chose environmental seals over Ethernet given the water proofing on the cables. Though they seem only half way committed to the path given the warnings and disclaimers about the Wi-Fi access point not being rated for waterproofing.
I had a cable sliced and I put standard rj45 jacks and a coupler in as a repair and it works fine. Pretty sure you could put standard ethernet in there straight to dishy if you really wanted to. At least if you can feed it enough power.
I just cut the Ethernet cable and put RJ45 on it, I wasn't about to drill another hole in the wall of my house to accommodate the connector. It works fine, even though I'm sure it's out of spec.
There's really no good excuse for the router setup - SpaceX could still supply a standalone power injector with Ethernet on one side and the proprietary connector on the other side.
I love how they call out Starlink's $600 equipment cost but completely gloss over many a small-town fiber company that will charge $200 easy for an install (or more), and completely ignores ViaSat's $10/month equipment lease (or $300 prepaid but you don't own it) and Hughes $15/mo lease and $99 setup or $450 upfront payment for their dish.
FCC's app is a white-labeled test on contract from SamKnows. FCC also has contracts with Ookla for use of their data. From the FCC's perspective they seem to just be using data across multiple vendors for more coverage, but Ookla is the biggest player and has a lot more data points on offer than SamKnows.
I never heard of FCC's own speed test app. So I tried to use it.
1. Apparently I have to install an app on my phone. I can't use a web-based tool from my desktop. (I was thinking there must be a version for regular computer users, right?)
2. Thinking I missed something, I searched for "FCC speed test". The results all point back to this app.
3. On a whim, I tried visiting speedtest.fcc.gov. Of course nothing lives there.
Why is FCC bothering with this if they're going to obscure it behind app stores? Seems like a way to only get outlier users.
One issue: I don't know about others, but personally I'm way more likely to check Ookla's Speedtest when the connection is bad, to see whether my connection got an issue. Not when it works as expected.
Because people independently choose to use Ookla, it's very popular. Few people use the FCC's app, which depend on people at the locations using it to provide data.
"After careful legal, technical, and policy review, we are rejecting these applications. Consumers deserve reliable and affordable high-speed broadband,"
So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC! The hypocrisy in this statement is laughable since rural customer's only choice is dial-up, HughesNet(which is worse than Starlink) and mobile hot-spots. I think there is more to this than that statement.
That's exactly what the grants in question are for
And no, there isn't more to it, the only reason we're even here is because they had to play along with Starlink's initial application that had too optimistic numbers because it's not their job to question pie in the sky numbers, but instead, to tentatively approve it until it's proven false.
> So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC!
You don’t want that. They (and others like Verizon) have repeatedly taken government grants to extend their networks into unserved areas (both rural and urban) and then just not done the work. Ars Technica follows this stuff pretty closely and they’ve done some good reporting on it.
AT&T took $500M back when to extend fiber to rural areas, back when that seemed like a lot of money. They ran fiber to 1/10 mi from my house. Then, never lit it, because the grant they took didn't require that. FCC staying on top of telecomm companies' follow-through is a welcome change.
I explain it this way; think of it as a cellular network in the sky, except in a terrestrial cellular network, the cell sites are stationary and connected via fiber and you are moving in your car or walking (or you can). With LEOS, each satellite is like a cell site, like a 5G one with phased array antennas, the satellite is moving and you are stationary and the satellited are connected to each other via free space optics but the backhaul is obviously RF, but the hand offs between satellites is over FSO. In fact, R17 of 3GPP standards now has provisions in it for 5G direct from the LEOS to the user. None deploy yet. but in a couple of years, that could be interesting.
Each satellite paints a spot on the ground using the beamforming capabilities of the phased array antenna. The capacity of that spot is of course limited by Shannon limit, where
C ~ B * S
C = capacity (think Mbps)
B = spectrum (think Mhz)
S = SINR (Singal to noise ratio)
If you have a smaller spot on the ground, then the spectrum is shared amoung fewer users. If you have more powerful transmitters and or better antennas, then your C will be better.
Right now based on the specifications I have seen publicly, Amazon's Kuiper (their LEOS) will have higher capacity than starlink because it will have half the "spot" diameter. That is due to better antennas mostly, more array elements mean narrower beam width.
Yeah, but starlink can just cycle in newer generation satellites with tighter beams as well, could they not? Is there a technical reason I'm not aware of that they can't? Would Dishys even need to be changed?
Kuiper needs Blue Origin to get cost competitive with SpaceX, which doesn't look likely because a) they don't even have commercial operations and b) uhoh, here comes Starship.
Sure SpaceX might launch Kuiper satellites ... at a premium over Starlink.
Yes, but it's tricky and takes time, if you replace on starlink with 30km radius with 4 at 15km. but then kupier could go to 10km while starlink is doing that. Satellite wars!
Kuiper needs to get off the ground, no idea what their timeline is but... yeah.
Hm, they were supposed to launch two satellites in 2021, now that's pushed to Dec 2022. They "announced" 83 launches with way-more-expensive than SpaceX and fictitious New Glenn launches. Blue Origin has been way way way behind its estimates.
... Kuiper has Bezos money behind it, but we'll see. Starlink is already up, and if Starship launches, I doubt anyone but SpaceX can compete.
Elon the prognosticator says 1-12 months for first starship launch. Even if it's two years, Starship likely becomes operational before even a minimal Kuiper flotilla.
But, competition is good, so even if that happens, I hope Bezos keeps the money flowing.
I don't get why they can't bake something into these grants that says if the company fails to deliver on their promises the government can claw back the money. It seems like I've read a lot of stories over the years of telecoms failing to deliver results after being given grants or large tax breaks.
The money (and the areas that were bid on) go back in the pot for Phase II of RDOF. Starlink can bid on that if they demonstrate adequate performance by then.
Edit: Actually it looks like it goes back into the Universal Service Fund (which is where RDOF got it's money), and may be used for RDOF or other USF funded programs.
This is completely wrong though, I've seen 220 down/40 up out of it. They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test. But that can be relatively easily remedied by reducing subscriber growth vs new satellite launches. And literally just today we saw another significant step towards Starship launching with the first static fire of Raptor 2 on a full Super Heavy booster. That'll bring far more launches of the much more powerful Starlink v2.0 satellites. It's brand new cutting edge technology bringing service right now to people abandoned to dialup or ludicrously expensive lines or HEO sat for decades. It's already been a life changer.
Their plans for further scaling are solid and in progress. The tech is obviously and objectively capable. The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though, but even so this is a really disappointing decision.
I agree with all of the aspirational statements you have made here, but I still think this was the right choice. A threshold was set. The threshold was not met. Sounds like they can reapply, and if they provide the necessary service level at that time, then they can get the $.
I would agree if the same standard was being applied to the existing telecoms. But it isn't.
In the last several decades, telecoms have routinely been paid billions for projects that didn't produce, and then won money in the next round as well. Indeed the fight isn't usually about whether to continue this, but who should win this round (established telecoms, municipal broadband, etc).
It was a surprise when Starlink won in the first place. But it is no surprise that it is being held to a higher standard than, say, Charter.
What do you mean by "applied to the existing telecoms"? For this RDOF subsidy, no major telecoms have been given any money.
It's totally fair to criticize subsidies that have been historically given major telecom companies when they failed to deliver (and they have). But, I don't think it's fair to say "historically the US government has given subsidies to telecoms that have failed to deliver, so you should keep doing that".
There have been a series of "give broadband to rural areas" bills starting with the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Generally great sums of money are given, and generally only limited customers get broadband. And then a few years later there is a new bill with similar results.
Given this history, I am inclined to believe that actually not giving money to Starlink for a fairly small performance miss is motivated by something other than just applying the rules.
If in a few years it is clear that policies have changed, and telecoms no longer get the gravy train either, then I'll change my opinion. Ending this corruption would be a welcome change.
Perhaps the reason Starlink is being held to this scrutiny is because of those previous attempts being failures and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The solution to “the old people weren’t being vetted enough” is not “the new players should also not be vetted enough.”
Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms and cable for ages for absolute nada [EDIT, 1]. The clients I put in Starlink for last year had a 10 meg connection for which they were charged hundreds of dollars per month and were fortunate since a mile away it was 56k modem of HughesNet or nothing. It's really good tech. I've been hearing promises and aspirations about fiber for like 17 fucking years. I can completely believe that in designing and putting into being a brand new network like that SpaceX has misjudged cell density vs satellite density and capabilities in areas and let the average speeds fall. But given what they're doing and the (non)alternatives I'd be a lot happier if there was some leeway to bring that back up and see how v2 comes out. Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon is precisely the sort of thing government should do after all their failures up until now. And there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program. And Starlink aren't assholes like the incumbent players either. No datacaps, zero billing crap with surprise charges or fees, no port blocking, no bullshit in general. Of course more speed would be better, but that should be worth something too vs theoretically faster connections that then punish or restrict.
Bottom line: I don't think these $886 million now going elsewhere are going to benefit even a single person up here near the Canadian border in the next few years. Fiber is still not going to appear here. The border is over 3000 miles long. In contrast Starlink can do something now (if you look at the Starlink map [0], there are very few filled cells in northern New England or northern Midwest/Pacific West up near Canada), and has the real promise of doing better. Now that will be harder, and I do not believe anything better is going to come of it for any of us in that time frame. If fiber comes in 2028 wonderful, Starlink could be cancelled then. That's a long time though to still be on 56k/HEOsat.
To sibling comments talking crap like "do you work for SpaceX" if you wish to volunteer and come up to lay fiber for us right fucking now by all means.
1: I'm editing in response to tyrfing below because I suspect I'll hit the HN reply speed cap sometime shortly. This got tons of coverage in the 00s in particular but has fallen away over time as these things tend to. I had a bunch bookmarked at one point from old /. stories and the like and actual paper books but all the sites now seem to be dead. Here's a more recent one though that seems to cover the gist and could be a place to start for more: "The Book Of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
> Government has given hundreds of billions in broadband funding to the giant telecoms
Can you share a source for this? I'm very curious to see the breakdown of funding sources.
> there are others less well off within a hundred miles who were hoping to get Starlink if the monthly cost could be brought down by this program
Why would the company receiving free money make it cheaper, are there price caps that SpaceX wouldn't meet? You've clearly laid out that they have no competition.
> Funding very promising technology that is aggressively trying to ramp hard and has a clear 1-3 year horizon
They had 1.5 years. "1-3 year horizon" is thus clearly misleading, since halfway through that timeframe they are unable to meet requirements.
Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much.
The network is improving, the tech is capable, but the real life performance is not up to snuff. Starlink, much like any company Musk seems to get himself involved with, is promising more than it can deliver, and that hurts when it comes to subsidies. They can have their billions when their network does what it promised to do.
Compared to 1.5/0.5 DSL its great, it's getting 60/11 about 40mi away from SpaceX (Starlink) HQ. But compared to municipal bidirectional gigabit fiber it's...not as great.
Heres ping info from starlink:
--- google.com ping statistics ---
38 packets transmitted, 38 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 26.879/45.073/95.627/11.582 ms
Is anyone else delivering anything even close? Aiming 10-100x better than competitors and missing by a small percentage is considered failure apparently.
Hughesnet was one of the best options prior to Starlink.
>Sounds great. However, I've seen ↓31/↑4 and ↓20/↑10 out of it. Anecdata doesn't prove much.
Anecdotes cannot prove population statistics, you need an unbiased random sample for that. But anecdotes absolute can prove limits though. Remember, this is what I was responding to, emphasis added:
>Starlink isn't CAPABLE of meeting its performance commitments
That's what I took issue with and think is important. Starlink is absolutely capable of those speeds; I've seen them. So the problem isn't the technology, the problem is balancing serving the most people (which is a public good too) with maintaining enough performance on average for each one, all while scaling and evolving the technology fast. I'm assuming SpaceX could have submitted private data showing the public results by ookla were off in some way that would have been sufficient and that the FCC didn't ignore that out of lobbying/politics, so I'm taking it as a given that they did fall behind there. But it's not like Starlink is "done", they're continuing to increase sat numbers, build more ground stations, they're prepping to bring online intersat optical links and have no given a firm date for that (it's required for their marine service to get away from coastal waters), they've got much better sats and a solid process on the rocket to launch them. If we didn't need someone to take on some more risk and help accelerate things, this entire program would be meaningless and there would be no need for government in this space at all! I guess it feels like they're being punished for trying to move faster when that's exactly what lots of Americans need. We needed something better then the crap we've had 10 years ago let alone now.
Of course, this may be 100% the correct legal decision depending on the exact language, administration and so on of the program. I could easily see the FCC not doing well on that but that doesn't mean they aren't required to stick to it by law. But that's not what I see most people criticizing it on, they're talking technical and societal angles instead. And on those grounds, I can be disappointed if the program didn't have some leeway. "Needs to be ready by 2028" isn't good enough!
When someone uses the word "performance commitments," they usually are referring to SLAs like: "performance for 99% of subscribers 99% of the time."
Starlink is probably below three nines of reliability on even having a connection, and may only be at one to two nines or so on the speed demands. Many people on Starlink get bursts of decent speed and also stretches where the network operates at a crawl.
Thus, they can offer you good speed and still be incapable of meeting performance commitments.
no, it's not. it's not capable of meeting those speeds with the number of users they need to be profitable. if what you say is true they simply could have grown the network slower and kept the speeds higher. but they can't, because they need the money, and they need it fast. they're ramping as fast as they can and have decided to provide poor service to many users during peak hour (just like other satellite ISPs do that HN seems to think starlink is immune to).
> They've apparently been trying to stay right around their commitment level while building out as quickly as possible, and let it slip a bit under on a third party speed test.
They've actually been below their commitment for all of 2021 and 2022 so far: they started 2021Q1 with a 16.29 average and 2022Q1 had dropped to 9.33 average. That's a pretty worrying trend and I don't think its the FCC's job to evaluate literal rocket science to decide whether or not they believe SpaceX will meet their obligations.
SpaceX chose what speeds to pitch in their bid, how many satellites and ground stations to deploy, and how many customers to let onto their network. While I agree that Starlink has a bright future I can't help but see this as SpaceX clutching defeat from the jaws of victory.
We've been far too lenient with ISPs in the past with broadband funding, and this is what keeping them to their word looks like.
> The lobbying against it has been intense for completely befuddling reasons though
Citation needed. I don’t see why anyone would lobby against starlink or LTD here. Neither won. They money from the fund is not distributed. They can reapply.
What the hell are you talking about? If there is lobbying, it’s certainly not against Starlink or LTD getting the funds as subsidiaries. The goals were set, starlink didn’t meet them, they don’t get subsidized. Simple as that.
I'm not sure we can really say if their tech is "obviously and objectively capable" at scale. We don't really know enough about the PHY layer modulation or even the mac layer modulation they're using. My guess has always been that they use some flavor of OFDM, but this is a detail thats unrevealed currently. These are incredibly important details for the oversubscription calculus in the access network itself.
RDOF aims to hold providers to a much higher standard for rural broadband, and part of that commitment is whether you can deliver speeds across the whole network at scale, not just relying on theoretical top line speeds. The evidence so far per Ookla demonstrates they don't meet muster currently, and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted, it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.
The cells are 22km and the traffic path strictly client<->satellite<->ground station at the moment. There isn't really any reasonable scaling concern until you start talking about serving densely populated areas but that's not Starlink's market nor what the RDOF targets/measures anyways and the inability to service a user in a city as well as a rural user shouldn't be reasoning to not provide funding to service those rural users.
That said I don't have a problem with the funding being held until the conditions are demonstrably met instead of as funding to meet them. The latter has failed too many times with providers just pocketing money to then stop executing once they have it.
Well we have to square what you're positing with the evidence right now that in the aggregate as their network size increases, the speeds are getting substantially worse over time on average. Lots of explanations for that, but its still the current outcome.
And there are definitely reasonable scaling concerns here. They're using a finite set of frequencies and the laws of physics still apply. Any concurrent transmissions are going to be impacted by both their phy layer modulation strategy, in addition to the mac layer. But we know so little about those layers currently that its hard to comment without being entirely speculative.
The evidence right now is as their network size increases, expands to lower latitudes, covers more than non-rural users, and allows mobile use the download speed increases and the upload speed decreases. "I haven't been given the details of their MAC and PHY" isn't reasoning to jump to conclusions about their MAC and PHY architecture being problematic for the rural use case here because of that.
Yes they must obey the laws of physics but this isn't a WISP, concurrent transmissions can't just stomp on each other and find out fast enough to hide it they've had to be broken out per client in the cell from day one. Other than mentioning the MAC layer exists is there a particular concern you have about it scaling? The satellites only have 2 paths to forward things and only a small patch of cells to do it for. Scaling has been brought by putting up orders of magnitude more satellites to provide coverage at more than the dense northern coverage from the orbits, it has not been by putting a ton more clients through the satellites themselves.
Is RF and framing something Starlink has had to design for? Absolutely, they do after all need these things. That doesn't mean it makes sense to jump to it as the source of any perceived issues, particularly on the basis it's something unknown.
That information is out there but it's scattered and hard to find. The real bottleneck right now seems to be that the number of beams per satellite is higher than the number of cells per satellite.
I haven't seen anything official nor convincing about the aspects I commented on.
I've seen the write up on the individual who was able to spin up an SDR to receive beacons from their satellites, but that doesn't really tell you anything about how the signal is modulated.
>it makes sense for the FCC to play it safe here on behalf of the consumer.
Maybe it "makes sense" to those who aren't actually one of those consumers. But if "playing it safe" means "you get to stay on 56k/4-1-ADSL/viasat/hughes for another 5 years and maybe you get fiber then or maybe another administration comes along and crushes this whole thing who knows! <3" then no that's not great right? The more positive angle is that this doesn't actually slow SpaceX down at all, they aren't a public company so this doesn't mean their stock plunges immediately and shareholders demand a course change or anything like that, they're obviously committed to improvements and obviously have a fair amount of private capital to tap. So it won't necessarily slow them down much if any, at least hopefully. But it does mean all the growing capacity and improvements will go exclusively to the better off who can afford the $110/mo privately in the immediate future and that's too bad. It's more too bad as well because even with someday tens of thousands of Starlink v2.0 and intersat optical mesh and greatly increased cell density, there will still be tight density limits relatively speaking. So less well off people may find themselves effectively shut out of Starlink due to having to have waited until others move/pass away/get fiber. It might not amount to much but I'd really like to see my tax dollars helping to get them something asap on a more even ground I guess.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong though and for everyone to get fiber instead!
>and since the tech is so new and (mostly) unvetted
Shouldn't government should have more, not less, appetite for risk of this nature? If it's risk free, the market would already be doing it. Particularly after decades of throwing billions down the crapper for "safe" and "proven" tech by "reliable, established" companies which then used it to do mergers or stock buybacks or lobbying against municipal broadband and getting laws against it enacted in much of the country and perhaps a few token deployments.
I completely understand and applaud the pendulum swinging back against the decades of established monopolies trying to water down definitions of "broadband" to meaningless so they could market and suck subsidies with no capex required. But all pendulums can swing back too far in the opposite direction too, and now that rapid deployment transitional tech is possible (Starlink and WISPs) it'd be nice to see timelines factored in as well. There is value to society in someone getting 50-150 via Starlink or fixed wireless until 2028 even if fiber then makes it in and obsoletes it. And there's parts of the US I doubt see it even then honestly.
Also to your sibling:
>They're using a finite set of frequencies and the laws of physics still apply
This is nice of you to write but would you care to crunch us the numbers on Shannon limit for the Ku-, Ka-, and E- bands (ignoring V-band since nothing for that exists for Starlink yet)? Do you actually have reason to think they're maxing out potential bandwidth right now in 12-18 GHz or 26.5-40 GHz right now vs that being a tech limitation that will be improved with better phased arrays and bigger sats like v2.0? Because it's kind of a significant amount of spectrum.
I very much agree with the thematic sentiment you shared that leaving certain rural folks in the dust because they can't hit an arbitrary 100mbps down (but maybe could get 20mbps instead) is a flaw in this whole program. But note that other more capable providers can bid on those census blocks now that Starlink is in default.
> Do you actually have reason to think they're maxing out potential bandwidth right now in 12-18 GHz or 26.5-40 GHz right now vs that being a tech limitation that will be improved with better phased arrays and bigger sats like v2.0?
I do think its a tech limitation, yes. The capacity limitations in many new RF solutions are unrelated to the theoretical max of any of those bands (re: Shannon limit). As to whether the that can be improved, that depends on where the bottle necks are. I brought up the mac layer note for that reason, I don't know that they're enveloping ethernet frames over that link, but if they are - what is the strategy there? TDMA? CDMA? There's just not a ton of public information out there to make a deductively valid argument that the FCC should expect it to improve.
(EDIT: Realized that I didn't convey my point well. It is a tech limitation imposed by the physical limitations of the medium itself. No matter how much spectrum you have, you still need a modulation scheme to allow for multiplexing over that spectrum. There are limitations there where the implementation details really do matter.)
I am hearing that lots of people are now getting under 50/15 out of it, and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband. Those people may be in regions that are oversubscribed, but that is also partly a problem related to the price being too low. Of course, if they raise the price, then it might not be considered cheap enough for these subsidies either.
I’ve had it in central Ohio since February 2021. I would say i average ~120M down, ~20M up. There’ve been a few outages, but I’ve never seen a prolonged period of less than 80M down.
The fastest thing I can get otherwise is a 10M down, 768K up DSL link. I had been working remote on that since 2008.
> nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down. That is not really broadband
AFAIK the minimum speed for "broadband" is 25 down.
I am a highly online person living in a large city with many choices of ISP at many different speeds, and I still only have a 110mbps connection. It seems strange to me to suggest that speed is universally inadequate, though I can understand why large households may need higher bandwidth.
>>and nobody I know with starlink has gotten better than 100 down
I have starlink and mostly see between 150-300 down and uploads in the 8-15MB range, all for $99/month - verizon was charging me $156/month for 3MB down and 0.768MBP up.
Nice to meet you - now you know at least one person 'with starlink has gotten better than 100 down'
I mostly know people with it in the SF bay area, which is reportedly very oversubscribed. Unfortunately, that may be the experience everyone gets once the network saturates at this price point.
Of course that's really broadband and it's fine for what most households use the Internet for. Maybe once you get into multiple 4K streams you start to run into limits. But once you get past some fairly modest point, it doesn't change the Internet experience for most people.
If they failed their qualifying metrics and did win the subsidies anyway, wouldn’t mirror universe hedora be here complaining about that double standard?
To me at least, this seems less obviously suspect than that would have.
Of course they do. I’m just wondering when the last two decades of RBOF funding (which had no apparent effect) is going to be returned to the federal government.
It's not just "a bit under". I regularly dip down to 10Mbps download in evenings; last night I couldn't even watch a single TV show reliably.
This collection of speed test data shows the US average has been 66/9 for the last month. At 50ms they're also nowhere near their latency requirement. https://starlinktrack.com/speedtests/region/us
I've done speed tests on 4 separate dishes within a 25mi radius of my house, and I consistently got around 90 down/10 up. The fastest test to date I've seen in my area is ~130 down / 60 up.
Earlier this year I was pulling 250/40 in Utah. Now during the day I hover around 120/15, with speeds back in the 200’s late at night. Of course YMMV, but it’s more than sufficient for my needs of remote work with several zoom calls per day, as well as streaming 4K content. It is a drag for things like large Steam downloads but I honestly can’t complain.
I don't believe they had performance commitments yet. What this is saying is they don't meet the performance criteria now and they don't think they will meet it by 2028 because performance is decreasing with more subscribers. I think the FCC is wrong on this one. I would take the long bet that Starlink will average above 100/20 by 2028.
Agreed. We aren't even on next gen satellites (far larger) or laser communication yet. Those should significantly improve speed, bandwidth, and reliability.
They only need to point the lasers at the next bird ahead and behind, and each packet just goes down if it can, or forward or backward according to which is closer to a downlink, unless it is for a special customer.
The main use for the lasers will be to offer super-low inter- and transcontinental latency to hedge funds paying thousands of times as much as a normal subscriber. They won't do anybody else but marine customers much good.
Also, this is a weird program for Starlink. Why not just subsidize the terminal cost and monthly plan to any low income area without access to fast wired internet? When fast wired internet makes it to that area stop offering the subsidy. Starlink is unique that removing the subsidy doesn't leave stranded capital assets. Then the FCC could award all the blocks to fiber providers but if they don't make it for another decade or so, the people will at least have decent internet in the meantime.
The FCC used aggregate performance across the network, which arguably isn't accurate at depicting the performance in the most remote cells. Starlink is unusual here in the degree to which their service performs better in more remote areas; for most providers, it's the reverse. So they may well be meeting their performance commitments in the most remote areas, but severe congestion in areas that have other service options is hurting their averages.
I'm not sure what the right call is here. It's very difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison between vastly different technologies; this isn't Starlink exclusive, but will probably apply to the other LEO constellations whenever they come online in strength.
100Mb is higher performance than most people need. That's five 4K video streams. While it's nice to push the definition of broadband forward from ISDN speeds, it should realistically consider the bandwidth a household can consume and that people choosing to live in a rural environment don't need to have the best possible service.
The problem is in the real world, you can't perfectly optimize prioritization. In theory, you can run 5 4k streams on 100Mb. However, in practice, real time data can get messed up.
Before switching to 1Gbps fiber, I had 100Mbps and I frequently noticed that Zoom would lag when 2 people were streaming at the same time. There were enough situations where 3 clients simultaneously needed more data that introduced latency.
That's poor management by your network hardware. (could be your modem, router, ISP, etc) I ran two zoom meetings on my 1.5MBit DSL connection before I got Starlink and it worked fine. Or I could run Netflix and a Zoom meeting. Never did try to push it much past that. But on 100mbps, there's something else wrong there that you can only get one more connection than my shitty DSL line lol.
The bidding process had ISPs to declare what speeds they could deliver down to a minimum of 25/3 Mbps. SpaceX didn't need to bid at such a high performance tier if they didn't want to.
I agree that is overkill today, but if we are spending a bunch of money building out new infrastructure it makes sense to future proof it. The ISPs have ten years to complete their rollout, and I'd like to see it provide adequate service for at least a decade after that. Will 100Mb be overkill 20 years from now? Think about trying to use the internet of today on connection speeds that were common 20 years ago.
I'm a technologist in the media sector, I worked for a big ISP in one of the innovation teams and we were struggling to think of future applications that would actually occupy 1Gbps for consumers.
You might say "low compression, high quality video", true, uncompressed 1080p50 can be 3Gbps, but there's no consumer device available or planned that can handle raw video delivered in this way. You can easily compress HD video to 45Mbps and it's indistinguishable from the source to the average consumer. 4K at 150Mbps is easily done and again, most TVs and STBs cannot handle that kind of input. You'd literally need new silicon to be designed for most consumer devices to be able to do this and no one is starting that process.
There is an argument that low packet latency is important, but in reality more than 95% of people access their broadband over WiFi which negates most packet timing arguments.
There's arguments about VR, but all evidence is that VR is still not getting market traction, despite what Meta wants.
Sure, I can't predict 20 years from now, but there's nothing on the horizon (for consumers) that will stretch the current ultra-fast broadband for the average consumer. Power users are an exception and should not be the basis of business decisions unless they are paying the premium. We're fortunate that gigabit exists because of the competitive nature of the environment, it's not really about meeting consumer needs.
Pessimistically, if the next 20 years are anything like the last 20, I would expect most bandwidth growth to come from sloppy development and advertising, plus increased multi-device use, such that even if no single use needs that bandwidth lots of smaller amounts will add up quickly. Several hundred MB to load a normal webpage, before it starts streaming 5Mbps video ad, dozens of IoT devices phoning home orders of magnitude more often than the need to, on top of desired use of 50Mbps 4K TV streaming, and multiple 5Mbps TikTok/YouTube-like streams could easily make 100Mbps seem slow.
Costs 5x more to deliver, few people would be able to consume it and 95% of consumers wouldn't notice the difference. You might be in the 5%, but most people you know aren't, or at least don't care enough.
Multiple studies by companies whose business it is to care, have shown that consumer engagement in viewing caps out at 1080p60+HDR, beyond that most people don't care. Sure, marketing creates hype and demand around bigger numbers, but when people are actually watching, they don't actually get more involved in the content above 1080p+HDR.
Starlink's constellation isn't even half completed yet. It's likely that Starlink will get faster when they have more satellites. Why are they judging results on incomplete data? The other guys get until 2028 to finish their build-out -- why doesn't Starlink?
That's a completely different round. There will be different rules, and different competitors. They have to recompete.
Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.
That's like telling the winner of a sports tournament that sorry, the prize you were promised is gone. But we might have another tournament next year, so that's OK.
Starlink is going to sue over this, and they'll win. By 2028 Starlink expects to have two orders of magnitude more capacity than they do now. 15x as many satellites, with an order of magnitude more capacity per satellite.
> Starlink is going to sue over this, and they'll win. By 2028 Starlink expects to have two orders of magnitude more capacity than they do now. 15x as many satellites, with an order of magnitude more capacity per satellite
and an order of magnitude (or more) more subscribers. they're likely going to fall far short on the launch cadence (as they have) and subscriber demand isn't going away.
> Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.
This program started under the previous administration. Overall these subsidies have been around forever and will likely continue. Here’s a negative take on the status quo that runs through the history up to this program:
Personally I think this falls into the category of “if it’s worth doing it’s worth doing poorly.” I actually think that having 100/20 as a benchmark is good and that Starlink will get there. Is it close enough to be an improvement over Hughsnet and 56k modems? Yes. Even at 20 up, 10 down it’s more usable.
Anything Elon Musk touches invites controversy these days so boring policy issues like this get a new life of their own.
>Next year it's likely the Senate will have changed hands, so the likelihood of the program still existing is low.
Why do you think this? The FCC was handing out tons of cash to rural ISPs under Trump & a Republican congress. Improving rural internet is popular and well supported among the republicans since lots of rural areas are pretty red.
ahaha you are funny... every single NA ISP does this... gov funds their built out of network and they get it for free then over subscribe the crap out of it..
plus Musk is against subsidies and government intervention
This would be acceptable if the members of the FCC weren't being compelled to take action that would be favorable to Comcast and Verizon. I do not accept that they acted in good faith. Hasn't anyone noticed that the net neutrality actions initiated by the FCC under the Trump administration haven't changed?
Technically, RDOF ISPs have until 2028 to provide the promised service but Starlink's application was denied because their Ookla speed tests are slightly low in 2022. Appearances matter. If they provisioned slightly fewer customers per cell they might have passed.
Stupid question. In Europe or the US, we wired the whole country all the way to the most remote house to connect them to the electricity grid. Then again to connect them to the telephone. What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber?
I can't speak much to European history, but near-universal electrical and telephone service in the United States is the result of a very substantial regulatory and subsidy effort from the 1920s-1970s. Some of this was achieved through regulation (e.g. AT&T's requirement to provide telephone service in all markets that met certain triggers regardless of profitability, which resulted in AT&T charging higher prices elsewhere as a form of subsidy) and through direct legislative facilitation and subsidies (e.g. the Rural Electrification Act and resulting Administration, which offered extremely advantageous loans to rural electric and telephone co-ops).
These programs still exist to some degree in the form of the Universal Service Fund (USF) and Universal Service Fund Administrator Co (USAC), and the chunk of money here (called RDOF) is actually a specially earmarked portion of the USF. That said, USF's impact on improving broadband across the country has been somewhat limited because USF's focus tends to be on areas and individuals with no service (e.g. due to rural locations or poverty), rather than improving competitiveness of service in markets that have it. For example, the "Free Cellphone" popup booths you see in poorer areas of the US are an implementation of USF programs to provide subsidized connectivity to low-income individuals, as are the $10/mo ISP plans available to low-income households.
This set of priorities is in no small part because, as you can imagine, the incumbent ISPs lobby against USAC actions that would subject them to more competition. But it also comes out of the history of the concept of "Universal Service" which was born in an era when regulated monopolies were the norm for public utilities, and so inter-provider competition was simply not something being discussed. At that point in history, areas with inter-provider competition were generally viewed as bad for the consumer because in areas with competing telcos (for example Los Angeles in the 1910s with LA Telephone and LA Home Telephone) you could only call people that used the same telephone company as you... requiring businesses to have two phones and list two phone numbers. The present world of multiple competing but interconnected providers wasn't really something that was contemplated when most of the regulatory system was built, and post-1982 (AT&T divestiture) the regulatory system has never really caught up... which we can fairly confidently blame heavily on extensive lobbying by both divested AT&T companies (USWest, AT&T, etc) and their competitors that forced the '82 monopoly busting (Sprint/MCI, GTE/Verizon, etc).
> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber?
Unregulated monopolies.
Infrastructure that runs to your doorstep is a natural monopoly. All of them -- roads, water, electricity, sewer -- are either municipally owned or else regulated to prevent vertical expansion. Except non-voice telecom.
I forget the name of the phenomenon, and my search-fu is failing me, BUT - there is something like the "first mover disadvantage" or "innovator's curse" when it comes to infrastructure and technology.
Compare somewhere like Romania with the US. Sure, the size of the country matters, but they started their modern network buildouts WAYYYY after the US. They US was heavily invested in copper and coax. Romania was able to leapfrog our legacy technology and move straight to fiber + neighborhood based local ISP's. While both technologies performed similarly very early on, the ceiling of performance and lifetime of the line is far higher for fiber than copper or coax (barring physically destructive actions like an errant shovel.
So, in effect, they started with something can be upgraded continuously to this day. We started with something whose performance ceiling was much lower, and whose effective lifespan was over 10 years ago or more in many cases. So now that old stuff has to be maintained while doing the capex heavy infrastructure work all over again to get the new stuff in there. Meanwhile, we're still paying them every month and their shareholders are collecting their dividends, so why would they want anything to change? It's not like they're going be able to charge some insane premium for their new faster fiber lines over their old and slow coax and copper.
Norway here. Most suburbs had fiber installed around 2010. Cities were a bit slower due to the complexity and cost of running it underground. It's expensive and inconvenient to dig up city streets. But I think most city buildings have fiber installed these days. Rural parts of the country mostly relies on 4G/5G these days as the old cobber network is being phased out.
Even our cabins have fiber installed these days ...
We have learned from experience that when you put a new set of wires on, a non-trivial risk exists that existing wires get damaged. And then people blame the owner of the other wires for their problems.
This happens enough by accident that cases of intent are hard to prove, but nobody doubts that it happens with intent as well.
The result as we've had more and more wires up is more and more regulatory costs around putting up wires.
The simple answer to this is to make point-to-point dark fiber a regulated monopoly, just like electricity.
It's illegal for me to start my own electric distribution company within the footprint of my power company. It's also illegal for them to deny me service, or to expand vertically into anything other than electrical local distribution.
It would be so easy to do the same thing for dark fiber. Hold an auction, whoever wins gets to buy all the dark fiber that crosses property lines within the territory. In exchange, they have to divest ownership of any business that isn't dark fiber, and must lease point-to-point wavelengths on a fixed and published price schedule to any willing buyer.
The electrical companies would be happy to do this. Mine already does, but only for certain areas where they had to run their own fiber anyways (basically along the major highways). They would be happy to expand to every doorstep if they were guaranteed a regulated monopoly just like they have for electrical lines. That would be a big enough market to allow their fiber department to split off from the electrical utility and become a standalone dark fiber utility. They don't want to be an ISP (they had the chance to become one and turned it down). They're just really good at hanging ADSS on poles and want to do a lot of that.
The US is very big and has very sparsely populated areas, to the point where it would take some time to recoup the cost of the fiber and labor to run it at market rates. Without subsidy, the large telecom companies would rather just not allocate capital to it and issue a stock dividend or something.
Most people no longer live in rural areas, and therefore there isn't as much of a driving force to subsidize people living there. And the people who do live there predominately support politicians (in the US especially) who oppose the regulations and subsidies required to do so.
> What has changed that makes it so difficult with fiber?
Nothing. Utilities just got lazy. If an address has ever had working landline telephone service or grid electrical service, then there's no good reason they don't also have gigabit fiber service.
Telephone and electric lines are above ground in most of US. I assume adding one more overhead line is easy but just make it more ugly and prone to outage due to storms or bad weather.
Been using T-mobile ISP, I have some complaints but overall, it does the job. I feel like some money should be put into 5G towers instead. Country wide 5G access + countrywide broadband. Overall a net win IMO.
They are not receiving money in 2022 because they are not meeting their commitments in 2022. They are still free to re-apply, and if they start meeting the level of service they bid for by 2028, they will get the money.
This comment isn't adding anything to the discussion. SpaceX has stated they meet a certain standard of service. They have not according to speed test results. They were never going to be able to meet it given the amount of customers they intend to have, but the original rdof was won entirely due to promises and not having data. Now that they have data, it's clear that what everyone already knew happened -- they cannot provide the service they advertise and be profitable.
I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money but then the federal government makes up the difference for what would normally be expensive utilities.
Then those same people crap on those who live in cities.
Right? There was an article here earlier about running fiber in rural Michigan. Kudos to the dude doing it and I agree that internet access is important. But 30k per house seems like a very wonky investment. At 100$ a month that would be 25 years to pay back, which could be feasible depending on what we are doing for internet in 25 years. Still seems ridiculous. If you wanted to pay 30k per household to build super fast internet for everyone in Seattle or Austin, people would laugh you out of the room.
I don't get it. Why is fiber to the home so expensive? I think in principle, it makes sense for us to pay for rural broadband the same way we paid for rural electricity. The problem is some companies took the money but didn't deliver the results, no?
> In 1936, the REA was made permanent through the Rural Electrification Act. It was granted an initial budget of $50 million for the first two years, then $40 million a year for the following decade ($550 million in 1936 is approximately $10.3 billion today). Jul 12, 2021
I can't imagine how our government can justify subsidizing anything other than fiber to the home in the current year. As far as I know, there is very little ongoing maintenance cost and glass fiber is much cheaper than copper, no? Coax people are saying they can get symmetric gigabit up and down with docsis but I will believe it when I see it (low latency symmetric gigabit up and down, no data caps, reasonable pricing). Until then, we shouldn't give them any money.
Any kind of utility is expensive; fiber is no worse than electricity, water, or gas. The difference is that all those utilities were installed before we shot ourselves in the foot with 10,000 pages of regulations written by incumbent monopoly lobbyists.
I guess it costs more than you think to hire someone to dig a hole, put something in it, and then cover it back up again.
I paid a guy almost $2000 to fix a few feet of sewer line in my front yard. Very little work to do once the old line was dug up, the main costs were in pulling various permits, renting the equipment, hiring crew, etc. Now multiply that by a few miles and $30k starts to look like a bargain.
If the main costs were permits, equipment rentals and crew, then your math is way off. By definition, those are mostly fixed costs so the first foot is phenomenally expensive. A crew can easily dig 1/2-1 mile per day, so maybe 4 days instead of the one to dig a few feet. If 1/2 the cost was equipment and crew and the other half permits, that puts us at a $5k total.
It’s all about where you pass the cables. If you need to dig up the street then 30k is not a lot of money to do the installation. If you can install the cables on already existing poles, then that reduces the cost a lot.
It’s also cheaper to do a group of homes then it is to do 1 as the cost of bringing the workers, the machinery and the permits is spread across all clients. That’s why we hear a lot of cases where someone has a fiber cable passing close by but the cable company did not see enough profit to finish the last mile (or they asked at the time of building and not enough homes signed up at the time).
What’s the increase in property value by now appealing to tech/knowledge workers? Would you personally move to a place that only offered shitty DSL?
I almost pulled the trigger on a $30k quote from Centurylink to run fiber to my home but they proved incapable of backhauling anywhere near what i was looking for. I didn’t give a shit about its amortized cost.
This might be an odd notion considering the average HN commenter but hear me out. It's _just_ possible the guy running that ISP isn't doing it to grow into a VC-backed unicorn with an exit strategy of getting scooped up by a FAANG in 5 years.
He doesn't want to _lose_ money on it, but he's an engineer and has evaluated the risks and costs and found them acceptable. He's doing it because because the incumbent ISP won't, because it's a challenge, and because he wants to to serve his community. Or so I've been able to gather.
I can't speak for the guy running this network so I don't know if he has investors or creditors or what, but I live in the same area as he does and can say that if you have a high-paying tech job well into the six figures and live in a LCOL area like this (AND don't blow it all on hedonic purchases like luxury pickups), it's not hard to amass a surprising surplus of cash in a surprisingly short amount of time.
Some people can't afford to live in cities...and their life is better in rural areas. Some people prefer to own rather than rent, even if it's a 100K house on a small plot passed down generations. You're essentially saying poor people don't deserve internet access. It's hilarious to me that people with your position proclaim to be progressive (not saying you are,) when there is an explicit hatred of the poor when you start talking to them. I imagine -that- is why people in rural areas feel a disconnect with people in cities.
People have lived in rural areas for cheaper than in cities for far far longer than government subsidies have existed. It sure just sounds like a very classist take that people that don't live in cities don't deserve what people in cities do. Which is sort of ironic because I see people with tons of money stepping over homeless in wealthy cities all the time. I don't think there are massive homeless problems in US cities because of a redneck getting a 4G tower installed 15 miles from his property.
I have had the opportunity of growing up in a poorer rural area, and have lived in a major city. I find this mindset pretty grotesque and extremely polarizing, to the degree that it actually undercuts public policy.
Except utilities and roads aren't socialism; and maybe treating these people as (essentially) garbage that doesn't deserve these things because they complain about government is actually a very polarizing thing that pushes them farther away...
You eat food right? It doesn't grow in the supermarket? Maybe you take vacations outside of the city and you expect the people who provide the services you use there to have a life and access to the internet.
At one time people placed great value in universal access. That's how we ended up with a constitutionally mandated postal system and nearly universal electric and phone service. The people behind these efforts knew full well there was a cost imbalance, but they placed greater value on the ubiquity of important services, thinking this would yield a better nation.
Now we have people like you, hating on anyone that doesn't want or can't afford to live as you think they should.
The rest of this post will probably be very confusing.
I understand the sentiment. However, real life is more complex than that. For example, this article in particular is talking about an area around Ann Arbor. I have a friend who lives in this area (in a rural house). He's a tech worker. His neighbor is a tech worker. His brother around the corner used to be a tech worker. I've been to the gun range near his house several times, and each time it is populated by a diverse (age, race, sex) group of people.
On the flip side, there are folks (without children) at the local school board meeting trying to have certain books removed. A council in the area recently got into trouble for misallocating covid funds as personal bonuses.
It's a constant battle, but painting everyone in a rural area with the same brush is a mistake.
"I love how people want to live in rural areas to save money"
They aren't saving money, though. Everything gets weird if you live in a rural area - or heck, a small town. Sometimes housing is cheaper, sure, and then you realize that while you don't have a water bill, you do now have to get your septic system pumped regularly, keep bottled water around because your well pump doesn't work when there is a power outage, and you have to drive everywhere. I imagine that Amazon has made it slightly cheaper because you can drive less. If you don't want to drive, good luck: You can't take your bike on the fastest route and the country roads are poorly maintained.
And I'm really happy the government makes up for the utilities. You might live in the country, but if you don't have electricity and internet service, your time is going to be more isolated and miserable. Folks living in the countryside shouldn't have to be without because of crushing costs, especially when we consider that a portion these folks are producing food for the rest of us.
You can't get that from voting patterns: Resistance to government spending and handouts depend on where you are putting the money.
I haven't actually met a farmer that is opposed to farm subsidies, for example.
And I think there is a hint of ignorance when it does benefit them: The local ISP finally giving a rural location higher-speed internet probably did so because they received government money or have brushed up against government regulations that require them to upgrade in the countryside as well as urban areas - yet the government spending goes unnoticed.
I'll add that the US is a 2 party system in practice, so the reasons for voting conservative vary greatly and you can't really take voting a certain way as "against handouts" when it is easily other issues that prompts the vote.
A federal fund to agglomerate dispersed people into small villages where the utilities can be provided at a reasonable price is a better use of tax funds than massive subsidies for existing settlement patterns. We already had another article on here today about how the feds are throwing ~$10k per household at some Michigan ISP to hook up people who live miles from anywhere.
I don't have to name specific people to make a general critical statement about a situation. However, if you'd like me to be more specific and not be sarcastic- I find right wing Republicans who decry government handouts and whatever they believe "socialism" is because some receive farm subsidies and others have utilities subsidized through rural improvement programs by the government. For those that aren't political but live in rural areas, please remove them from my list.
If you want to reply that city people also take advantage of government programs remember they aren't going around angry all the time about government spending and welfare. It's the hypocrisy that brings out my sarcastic side.
where do you live that rural costs less? electricity costs way more then in a city, heating if you get gas line way more if not you pay a lot for heating oil, i have to pay like 200$ for electricity even if i didn't use a watt...
You can't post this kind of dross here, regardless of which politics you prefer.
Since you've been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly in other places as well, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm a starlink user, I'm a bit peeved that the costs haven't come down and other annoyances, but...
This is a travesty of policy. The US has so many rural underserved areas and Starlink is instant cable-internet anywhere you go with a good view of the sky. Telecoms have been pocketing these rural development dollars brazenly and screwing over taxpayers and thumbing their noses at the FCC with their lobbying power.
Starlink comes along with a usable service ... anyway, it's sad. Some Trump telecom insider (Ajit Pai) has a more balanced view than the Biden administration.
This is bad policy.
Starlink won't need it though. They have a billion or more potential worldwide customers.
> I'm a bit peeved that the costs haven't come down
I’ve never had a broadband bill go down. Not sure what you were expecting from a brand new company, but I’ve had the same service for 4+ years at the same cost from one provider, and 2.5 yrs from another. That’s the way they roll…
Phone company finally pulled fiber here where we used to only have cable. Now getting faster service for half the cost compared to Spectrum. So it does happen. Maybe they'll raise the price once they've gotten everyone to switch...
E-Fiber San Juan LLC gets $7.5M to provide broadband services to 1,085 homes in rural Utah. Monster Broadband gets $5.8M for 11,286 homes in Texas and Tennessee. Northern Arapaho Tribal Industries gets $7.8M for 2,408 homes in Wyoming (probably on Indian reservations). So a total of around $21 million will be spent on 15,000ish homes.
The FCC's budget for the RDOF subsidy is around $20 billion for 4 million homes, so 99.99% of the money is still up for grabs, as are 99.96% of the rural households.
1. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-848A2.pdf
2. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DA-22-848A3.pdf