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Communications Government Network The Internet United States Wireless Networking

FCC Funds 25Mbps, Data-Capped Satellite In Rural Areas (arstechnica.com) 53

Posted by BeauHD from the no-fiber-zone dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is giving $87.1 million in rural-broadband funding to satellite operator Viasat to help the company lower prices and raise data caps. The FCC's Connect America Fund generally pays ISPs to expand their networks into rural areas that lack decent home Internet access. Viasat's satellite service already provides coverage of 98 percent of the US population in 50 states, so it doesn't need government funding to expand its network the same way that wireline operators do. But Viasat will use the money to offer Internet service "at lower cost to consumers, while also permitting higher usage allowances, than it typically provides in areas where it is not receiving Connect America Fund support," the FCC said in its announcement yesterday.

Viasat's $87.1 million is to be used over the next 10 years "to offer service to more than 121,700 remote and rural homes and businesses in 17 states." Viasat must provide speeds of at least 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads. While the funding for Viasat could certainly improve access for some people, the project helps illustrate how dire the broadband shortage is in rural parts of many states. Viasat's service is generally a last-ditch option for people in areas where there's no fiber or cable and where DSL isn't good enough to provide a reasonably fast and stable connection. Viasat customers have to pay high prices for slow speeds and onerous data limits. A Viasat spokesperson wouldn't comment on what prices and data caps will be applied to the company's FCC-subsidized plans. Viasat said it will provide the required 25Mbps service "along with an evolving usage allowance, and at FCC-defined prices, to certain areas, where we will be subject to a new range of federal and state regulations."
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FCC Funds 25Mbps, Data-Capped Satellite In Rural Areas More

FCC Funds 25Mbps, Data-Capped Satellite In Rural Areas

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  • ViaSat has got to hurry and get that free FCC money before SpaceX deploys their network across the world and dramatically reduces the cost of sat based internet. Best part is the FCC gave them enough money for 10 YEARS. Really quite unreal.

    • So yet another federal agency is giving yet another SpaceX competitor buckets of cash with no mention of fair bidding or distribution? (Along with all the others building satellite networks right now)

      • Just like Boeing getting $1.9Billion for 8 launches and SpaceX getting $1.2 Billion for 12 launches. Or competitors who don't have a rocket nor have put anything into orbit getting hundreds of millions in free government welfare.

        Gotta love that Corporate welfare.

      • Since the sat is up there and not changing i guess they just shove most the money in their pockets and type a slightly lower price in a billing system?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kriston ( 7886 )

          Satellites are terrifyingly expensive and take an extremely long time to build.

          There are three Viasat-3 class birds being built right now. The first launches in 2020 and the second around 2022. The dates for the third haven't been announced (but it's for Asia-Pacific, not CONUS).

          After a launch it takes several months to place the satellite in its orbital location and even more months to test the service. Usually retail service begins 9-12 months after launch.

          That Viasat-3 bird that launches in 2020 was orde

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Underrated

  • Satellite internet sucks (Score:5, Informative)

    by kerashi ( 917149 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @10:47PM (#59530930)

    As someone who once had internet though Wild Blue, now Viasat, I can say their service is the ultimate in suck. The data caps were heinously low, and the latency made dialup seem like a good deal. I switched the moment 5 megabit DSL (up to 10 now) became available, and never once looked back. 25 down may look good on paper, but the devil's in the data cap. A large Windows update these days could probably knock you out of data for a month.

    • I moved to the house in the boonies, after being lied to by Comcast about cable availability. But that one is on me for trusting Comcast.

      Anyway, during the dark years before DSL was placed I explored alternatives to the dialup connection I had, the only one being Wild Blue. I determined that the data cap was so low that I actually couldn't really download more per month than I already could with dialup, with worse latency and a higher price to boot.

      My next best option if I wanted to spend more was to shotgu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The data cap has probably changed quite a bit since you've used it.

      Viasat Data Allowance [viasat.com]

      And then there's this:
      Viasat Unlimited Data Policy [widencdn.net]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kerashi ( 917149 )

        $150 a month for 12 megabit "unlimited" (really 100GB then they throttle) still isn't that great of a deal. Especially when you consider the excessively high latency. So a very poor deal for what you're getting. Viasat is an ISP of last resort. It'll just make you want internet.

  • Even with extra money will service be improved... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @10:51PM (#59530934)

    If you look at current via sat pricing plans [exede.com], you'll find that the 25Mb/s plan is good for streaming "typically 480p" video. Frankly, that really sucks.

    Although it seems like the FCC money could reduce the cost of that service, and maybe other plans - it does not seem like enough to improve the quality of the network as a whole such that you could get improved streaming speeds.

    Even if the price of the 50Mb/s service was reduced, that's just 720p video quality...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just checked streaming a blu-ray copy of Aliens across my network and it peaked at about 40Mbps, with the average being around 30Mbps. Services like Netflix compress heavily, so their 1080p streams are rated around 5Mbps with UHD at 25Mbps.

      • Just checked streaming a blu-ray copy of Aliens across my network and it peaked at about 40Mbps

        Really Mb/s or MB/s?

        Even so, I was wondering the same thing in regards to the speeds needed to support HD. It seems more a case of you get 25Mb/s down, but really the source going up to the satellite system before going back down to you is going to be massively throttled unless you pay them a ton. Unless they could have a Netflix streaming cache for each satellite? That seems like it would be pretty smart to of

        • Yeah, blu-rays are in the 20-40 Mbit/s range and modern streaming services can deliver 1080p well under 10Mbit/s, so I think the 25Mbit/s down on this is good, but the data cap is the bigger concern. If I were living out in the sticks (again) though, I would just use DirecTV (or maybe Dish now that AT&T ruined it). No sense wasting those transponders on on-demand video when it could be used for less-wasteful internet traffic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Even so, I was wondering the same thing in regards to the speeds needed to support HD

          Blu-Ray average 25-40Mbps on average for HD. HD streams from Netflix and the like are around 3-5Mbpx. 4K UHD Blu-Ray is around 125-150Mbps, while 4K UHD Netflix "requires" 25Mbps, but averages in reality around 18Mbps. That seems to be standard across the industry and I'll take Netflix 25Mbps requirement as essential to include buffering speeds and other overheads. But you really need 50Mbps if you actually plan on using th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Take marketing feature comparison charts where they are trying to sell you on the higher tier with a large grain of salt.

      For example, many years ago I recall a blister pack of a 6 foot ethernet catching my eye at an electronics store that was marked up a tad. While most of the cables were cat 5, this one had emphasized that it was a cat5e cable and included a 'helpful' marketing chart. Knowing what cat5e was and for a consumer electronics application there would be no difference for a 6 foot patch cord, I

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kriston ( 7886 )

        The reason we have Cat 5e is because the market was flooded with counterfeit Cat 5 cables shortly after Cat 5 was introduced.

        Today's narrative claims that Cat 5e is virtually the same except for an improvement in crosstalk characteristics. While that may be technically true, the market was flooded with fake Cat 5 cables and the standards bodies had to take steps to restore customer confidence. They took the opportunity to improve crosstalk but that wasn't the real reason Cat 5e was created.

    • you'll find that the 25Mb/s plan is good for streaming "typically 480p" video.

      I didn't read the terms, but it likely means that they throttle video streams to force auto-negotiation at a lower bitrate.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "Frankly, that really sucks."
      Should have just opened the entire USA and parts of the world cared for by the US gov/mil to community broadband.
      Let the city/state/locals/walled community buy some bulk optical/community "wifi" mesh and find an ISP for the end of their own networks..

  • Wasted Money - Viasat Is Clueless (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @10:51PM (#59530938)

    Viasat: Providing 20th century technology to 21st century customers!

    At least that's what should be their model.

    I had to use Viasat, or Viasuck (as it would be more accurately called) for two years. Their level of incompetence is astounding and their prices are outrageous. (That's coming from FiOS to Viasuck.) Their current high level tier is 150GB per month. While they offer "unlimited," basically they don't cap you, but they can slow you down whenever they want to prioritize for others.

    They're overloaded as it is and can only increase bandwith with more satellites. By the time they get more up, Starlink will leave them crying in the dust and wondering what happened. A year or more ago, when the average monthly bandwidth usage was about 269GB, Viasat was truly puzzled why anyone would think they needed more than 150GB a month.

    I got lucky and found an internet provider that resells data from various cell networks and it's like I have real internet again. I can stream shows that I can watch with my wife on our HDTV and not see such poor resolution that we can barely make it out.

    Viasat needs to be allowed to compete in the open market, where, after Starlink, Project Kuiper, and OneWeb take hold, Viasat will be all Tango Uniform.

    • They're overloaded as it is and can only increase bandwith with more satellites.

      And their next plan is to launch a next-generation global constellation by 2022 with a whopping 3 satellites. The ridiculously small number of satellites is proof that they are just trying to do the bare minimum to rake in subscriber fees and don't care a bit about providing the service being paid for.

      • IIRC, Arthur C. Clarke originally stated that 3 satellites, in geostationary orbit, would be enough to provide 100% coverage (or nearly so) of the world. So I think that's where they got the 3 satellites you're talking about.

        Yeah, you could hit a satellite from just about any spot on the globe. But you're talking some pretty nasty latency. And if you need to communicate with a site on the other side of the planet, you would be going from your ground station to a satellite in geostationary orbit, to ANO

        • 100% coverage is absolutely correct. But the bandwidth is much easier to manage with a larger constellation, nevermind the latency. No matter how many end users, you'll likely only have one ground station per satellite. And even with more than one, you'll be limited with how much equipment you can fit in a single satellite.

  • Their Bronze, Silver and Gold plans are "speeds up to" 12, 25 and 50 Mbps, respectively. However, they then say that the Silver 12 Mbps plan is for "Stream Small Screen quality video typically 360p". Uh, what the heck are they talking about? 12 Mbps is fast enough for 1080p. They are claiming you need the 50 Mbps plan for just 720p. That makes no sense, and what it tells me is that "speeds up to" number is so seldom achieved that you can only actually count on 1 Mbps from the Silver package, which is w

    • "12 Mbps is fast enough for 1080p. They are claiming you need the 50 Mbps plan for just 720p. That makes no sense, and what it tells me is that ..." ... you haven't factored in the latency. Go find a TCP throughput calculator (e.g https://www.switch.ch/network/... [switch.ch] ) , and plug in the values into the bandwidth-delay-product.

      At e..g 300ms with a 64kB window size, 50Mbps becomes 1.75Mbps.

      This is why CDNs changed the internet (and why Youtube built one of the first), especially for people (like me) in countr

      • Go find a TCP throughput calculator

        Which is why streaming should be done on UDP, or fall back on UDP for high latency connections.

        • Go find a TCP throughput calculator

          Which is why streaming should be done on UDP, or fall back on UDP for high latency connections.

          <sarcasm>Yes, because there couldn't possibly be any more important traffic on that link than video streaming ...</sarcasm>

          A better option may be using multiple TCP connections, possibly with better pre-fetching (assuming non-realtime streams), or using bittorrent :-p.

      • This isn't live video - you can pre-buffer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by boskone ( 234014 )

        also, this isn't about making sure you can stream Die Hard for Christmas. This is about making a usable internet to communicate, do commerce and stay connected to the rest of the world under a mandate around citizen enablement.

        If they can't watch Netflix on it, that's fine, but if they can watch a youtube video to learn something, post on Slashdot, read the news and telecommute to work, then it's a success.

    • Easy to explain. The speeds "up to" are for everything but video, which is throttled to its choking point. If they didn't, you'd hit your cap if you stream so much as 4 minutes of video per day.

  • This all sounds so familiar. As if we did this before and it ended disastrously, with said ISP's putting the US in a boondoggle of quasi-monopolies that we're only now pulling out of.

    • This is clearly a preemptive strike on Starlink. Starlink is going to make Exede (viasat) look like last month's dog shit. I guess someone at the FuCC is angry at Elon, or has been instructed to behave as such. As has been pointed out by others in this thread, the level of "service" from Exede is fucking atrocious. It's trivial to hit their caps and they throttle streaming video hard enough that many services choke constantly. VOIP is goddamned terrible. Ping times often approach a full second. Viasat is ba

  • Broadband for everyone! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by clovis ( 4684 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2019 @11:19PM (#59530972)

    I'm guessing that this is so the FCC can lie to a willing Congress and claim that all the USA has affordable broadband.
    Thus Comcast/Xfinity or whoever should off the hook for rural broadband and also be allowed to do whatever they feel like doing like bribing states to disallow local ISPs.

    • I'm guessing that this is so the FCC can lie to a willing Congress and claim that all the USA has affordable broadband. Thus Comcast/Xfinity or whoever should off the hook for rural broadband and also be allowed to do whatever they feel like doing like bribing states to disallow local ISPs.

      This is a farce. The people in the US administration who oppose big government, favor the free market, claim to be the winners of the great American meritocracy, who follow an philosophy of rational individualism, who hate subsidies because they are 'socialist' are subsidizing internet access. If they had the courage of their convictions they'd leave all of this to be solved by the infallible, invisible hand of the free market.

      • The people in the US administration who oppose big government, favor the free market, claim to be the winners of the great American meritocracy, who follow an philosophy of rational individualism, who hate subsidies because they are 'socialist' are subsidizing internet access. If they had the courage of their convictions they'd leave all of this to be solved by the infallible, invisible hand of the free market.

        The Powers That Be want socialism for themselves, laissez-faire capitalism for everyone else.

      • It's cute that you have bothered to learn the talking points of the Glad Wrap party. Someone can now refute them with the talking points of the Saran Wrap party. In the meantime, their thugs will continue to wrap your face in their product and sell your corpse to the powdered-protein manufacturers.
  • When you have a half second light speed delay, it's not broadband, no matter how fast you upload or download. Latency is a big deal. Conference calls, VPN connections, hell even chat apps are nearly useless. The star link crap sounds good, because it's closer contact, but I seriously doubt they've worked out the bugs. And knowing Musk, they probably don't care about this, but it's going to litter the shit out of the sky.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Strider- ( 39683 )

      You get used to it. I operate the network to a remote site, and we’re on a private satellite link for our main link. We run our PBX over it (via VOIP), and most of our users have access to it. You just get really good at typing, and it’s actually not much worse on the phone than your typical cell call. The thing you learn pretty quickly is that you don’t stop talking until you’re done talking, and if yous top talking, you just wait for the other person to start.

      We have viasat as our

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      Exactly.. all the bandwidth advertised with a 750 ms rtt and demonstrable lost packets. But Joe Sixpack wouldn't understand.

    • There was a time when I was using WildBlue for my connectivity. It was ... shall we say ... underwhelming.

      Ping times, back then, were about 1,800 msec. As in 1.8 seconds. The bandwidth was decent. But bandwidth is only part of the equation.

      If you were doing SSH, RDP or VNC into a remote system ... oh, that was painful. Click on something. One-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two, there it goes. Hit a key. One-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two, there it is.

      I subsequently discovered that

  • Satellite TV In Rural Areas. Nexflix and others (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday December 18, 2019 @01:08AM (#59531094)

    Satellite TV In Rural Areas. Nexflix and others can team up with dish / directv to offer push DVR of there shows as well.

  • Translates to having a Ferrari and 2 gallons of gas.

  • I was there a couple of years ago... if you drove 30 seconds away from the 'town' (main street is maybe 1/4 mile long) you have NO cell service and there are NO wired telephone services outside town either. Any internet you get is a miracle. It was amazing how 'third world' the internet service is in the heartland of the USA.

    We are talking a two hour drive from Dallas and there is virtually NO internet service. Not even dialup!

  • Last time I checked, I FUND the FCC. SO title should read "US citizens fund rural satellite access."
  • AI applications in agriculture https://opengeekslab.com/blog/... [opengeekslab.com] have long remained in the background. But agriculture is one of the oldest and most important niches for business in the world. Banal, but people will always want to eat delicious. Artificial intelligence in agriculture provides new opportunities to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, as well as to provide new services and products to the market.

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