SpaceX and Viasat Fight Over Whether Starlink Can Meet FCC Speed Obligations (arstechnica.com) 94
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink -- though not the only problem -- is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat, which says Starlink lacks the capacity and speed to meet FCC obligations. In a new FCC filing, SpaceX denounced Viasat's "misguided campaign" against the Starlink funding. "Viasat is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology," SpaceX told the FCC. The new SpaceX filing was submitted on Friday and posted to the FCC's website Monday, as pointed out by Light Reading.
Viasat submitted an analysis (PDF) to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction. Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites." Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing [...].
In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance." SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 (PDF) and December 2021 (PDF). The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review. "Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff -- not competitors -- to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."
Viasat submitted an analysis (PDF) to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction. Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites." Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing [...].
In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance." SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 (PDF) and December 2021 (PDF). The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review. "Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff -- not competitors -- to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."
My company is also objecting, actually (Score:5, Funny)
I work for Tin Can & String Wireless, LLC - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Semaphore Aldis, Inc.
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But negative karma is required for the solution of the imaginary part of the equation?
The FP was funny. So there.
SAT FIGHT! (Score:5, Funny)
Slow speeds (Score:3, Informative)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sta... [pcmag.com]
For rural areas, it's still probably better than DSL, but I have already been involved with a couple of people using it. I'm now regularly having to check the database, because it is "running slow." No it isn't. It's your Starlink.
Also, the satellites are already starting to fall out of orbit:
https://www.space.com/satellit... [space.com]
And Dish and Starlink are still fighting over spectrum:
https://wccftech.com/starlink-... [wccftech.com]
Re: Slow speeds (Score:5, Informative)
The article isn't saying that they're falling out of orbit, it's saying that the launch method they use is susceptible to that kind of event, and specifically cited the 40 that had a failed launch. The solar activity isn't likely to ground the birds that have already reached their intended orbital positions.
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No, working from memory, but I'm pretty sure the article says the orbits are decaying at a much faster rate than anticipated, and this is being caused by solar storms. I agree, that's not "falling", but given the money involved here, satellites going out of commission years ahead of time has to affect the business model.
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How is something in a decaying orbit not falling? (For that matter, how is something in a stable orbit not falling?)
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It's falling with style
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Starlink satellites are low enough that they're always in a decaying orbit. They have to use thrusters to stay up high enough. They will just run out of fuel earlier than expected.
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AFAIK they have enough fuel for 10 years, but they're intended be to replaced every 5-10 years, so it would likely just push them towards the earlier stage of their intended life cycle.
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Starlink satellites have operational orbits of 340 miles (550 km), which is above the most at risk region. However, after launch, Falcon 9 rockets deposit the satellite batches very low, only about 217 miles (350 km) above Earth. SpaceX then raises the satellites' orbits using onboard propulsion units. The company says that approach has advantages, as any satellite that experiences technical problems after launch would quickly fall back to Earth and not turn into pesky space debris. However, the increasing and unpredictable behavior of the sun makes those satellites vulnerable to mishaps.
All spacecraft around the 250-mile altitude are bound to have problems, Stromme said. That includes the International Space Station, which will have to perform more frequent reboost maneuvers to keep afloat, but also the hundreds of cubesats and small satellites that have populated low Earth orbit in the past decade. Those satellites — a product of the new space movement spearheaded by private entrepreneurs pioneering simple, cheap technologies — are particularly vulnerable.
Re: Slow speeds (Score:2)
Re:Slow speeds (Score:5, Insightful)
For rural areas, it's still probably better than DSL
This is the key for the entire issue.
Viasat's complaint is that "Starlink users experienced median download speeds of 90.55Mbps (well under the 100Mbps speeds required under the RDOF framework) and median upload speeds of 9.33Mbps (less than half the 20Mbps speeds required under the RDOF framework)."
What they don't mention is that many of those regions normally struggle to get 5 Mbps on many types of connections. They also don't point out their company's own service is more expensive, $170 / month for slower speeds compared to Starlink's $110 that has a median speed of 90.
Consider how all the other services have big warnings that you may not receive the actual speeds you pay for, that just because the service is rated for 100, 300, or even gigabit speeds isn't a guarantee that will be the actual connection speed. Hitting a median of 90.55Mbps on a 100Mbps rating for $110/month is tolerable, especially when it's about 9x - 18x the speed of the more expensive services.
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The problem here is that SpaceX's argument is not about not selling broadband to consumers. It's about qualifying for specific government grants, that have specific speed and coverage requirements.
You can fuck consumers over in many countries on this (notably not in mine, we have it written in law that broadband offerings MUST state minimal actual speed that will be provided). But this is not about fucking over a consumer. This is about begging the state to accept that your offering is good enough for their
Re:Slow speeds (Score:5, Insightful)
I got curious and did some looking, and it's not at all clear to me that Starlink isn't meeting the milestones laid out. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong spot, but there's a summary here of what I think the program is: https://www.usac.org/high-cost... [usac.org]
Since they received the award just a couple years ago, it's not clear that any of the full milestones have even arrived yet. But even if they have the RDOF has a lot of discretionary language in it, and a lot of talk of awards being prorated (not canceled) for missed milestones. Which explains the lawsuits, Viasat is taking a program that's highly discretionary and trying to strongarm the FCC via the legal system into awarding as little as possible to their main competitor. Feels pretty desperate to me.
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Viasat should be desperate... Starlink is going to outright kill both Hughesnet and Viasat - probably within the next 5 years. They have no feasible way to compete
They've been garbage tier for years - the provider of last resort... Now people in locations that were only serviced by Viasat and Hughesnet actually can get a solid connection with pretty low latency.
Now - that said... If you have access to a decent wired connection - Starlink is not targeted by you, and you will be disappointed when comparin
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Or get it if you want a dual / redundant link so that if one goes down, you still have a connection to the net.
Especially useful when you know for a fact that they are using a different medium of connection - even more so when it happens that multiple ISPs have fiber in the same conduit at times and all of them can go down at the same time, even if you are trying to have redundant connections.
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That's useful for problems in the last mile, so it's not worthless. But since Starlink brings your traffic down to a ground station near you, it won't help you avoid many if not most area outages at this time. When they get into the next phase and have sat to sat links functioning then it will.
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I think maybe you're over estimating the number of ground stations...
https://starlink.sx/
The orange dots are the downlink locations - they aren't all that many, and satilites can generally see multiple ground stations at once, so can switch if one is having a problem.
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Viasat should be desperate... Starlink is going to outright kill both Hughesnet and Viasat - probably within the next 5 years. They have no feasible way to compete
No, they won't. Sure, StarLInk will absolutely clean their clocks in the consumer broadband space, but that's just a small part of the business model of HughesNet and ViaSat. Their bigger businesses are things that you just don't hear about, where bandwidth doesn't really matter, just having connectivity does. Think credit card clearing, positive train control, inventory management, well monitoring, and so forth. For large scale contracts, the terminals are something like $15/mo, and reliable enough. That i
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Viasat is wasting time saying that it's not possible for Starlink to meet future obligations. They're not even arguing that Starlink isn't meeting milestones now. Just saying that they can predict the future better than Starlink - which carries zero weight at all, or at least it should.
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There are two issues with using this money for Starlink, instead of laying fibre.
1. Some of the areas that need serving are too dense for Starlink. Dozens of houses close together. Starlink needs to keep density down to maintain even the current speeds.
2. 100Mbps is baseline now. It's only going to get less and less adequate as time goes on. Fibre is still ahead of the curve and upgrading it is relatively cheap. Look at the copper lines that deliver phone and DSL service, they have been there for a century.
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4k video on YouTube is 50-60mbps.
20mbps upload is very slow too, not good for remote work. Either of them are easy to saturate and degrade service for everyone else.
Re: Slow speeds (Score:2)
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WTF are you talking about. I'm outside the city and I can get 4Mbps max on DSL.
I've been able to get 10 Mbps from a WISP. DSL is frankly not even adequate by modern standards. Viasat's Exede service provides about 6 Mbps, which is also not adequate — it also comes with around 650-750ms (and sometimes up to 1000ms!) real-world latency IME, which is punishing at best. Try using VoIP over that, holy shit it's terrible.
For only the third time in my life, I have high-quality home internet access, and one of those times it was ISDN — which tells you how long ago it was. In Soda
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Seems that if they have a copper phone line then it at least made sense to run POTS there. The same poles and conduits can be used for fibre.
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then it at least made sense to run POTS there
A lot of that was achieved via New Deal programs almost 100 years ago. The actual companies weren't going to do it themselves... And the way the subsidies are designed today, they use the grant for things it wasn't intended for, and then do a stock buyback with their own funds (because money is fungible...)
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At this point the telecomms companies are so bad that the government should just nationalize the infrastructure and install fibre. Treat it like roads.
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At this point the telecomms companies are so bad that the government should just nationalize the infrastructure and install fibre. Treat it like roads.
I'm not sure treating it like transportation infrastructure would actually help anything. As it is we have ever more freeway lanes but precious little more rail being installed, because of lobbying. There's no reason why the same thing wouldn't happen to the internet. And really that's what is happening — it would take a lot less resources and/or we would get far better results by providing internet via fiber on the poles (or in conduits) we have already than to do it by launching satellites. Fiber is
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Plus American government is even less competent than Britain's
I dunno about that... I think you could make a pretty strong argument either way, these days.
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Hmm, that's a fair point. I was going to say that the only really big negative change we've had is the Catholic Court, but I was blocking out Citizens United.
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100Mbps is baseline now. It's only going to get less and less adequate as time goes on.
100mb is enough to stream high-quality video to several devices simultaneously and gigabytes in minutes. The demand beyond 100mb is more luxury than necessity.
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What they don't mention is that many of those regions normally struggle to get 5 Mbps on many types of connections.
That's actually quite irrelevant. If you don't get a passing grade don't expect a ribbon as an award. Starlink is absolutely better than anything most of these places have, but they shouldn't qualify for funding if they don't meet the black and white requirements as written, or at least put the legal effort into finding some decent loopholes.
Ultimately what *we* think of Starlink and its benefits are irrelevant. I don't know what the law requires, but if Starlink doesn't qualify then they don't qualify, med
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SpaceX chose to sign up for these standards (as a condition of getting federal grants), so I would say it is fair to judge them against these standards.
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From TFS:
SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less.
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It would be, if that's what was being done. It's not. Starlink is the only (AFAIK) satellite system competing for subsidies against multiple landline providers [rdof.com]. Viasat isn't even in the game, they just want to hold back a competitor who is eating their lunch.
Not sure where the 100 Mbps comes from. Last I knew, the FCC minimum was 25/3 Mbps broadband [fcc.gov], although there are other tiers going up to 1 G
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They are bidding in the 'Above Baseline' tier, which is 100/20. https://www.fcc.gov/auction/90... [fcc.gov]
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an applicant that bids in the Above Baseline tier must commit to offering broadband at speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps with a monthly usage allowance of at least 2 terabytes. Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Order at 17-18, para. 31.
Viasat is the only geostationary satellite provider that reports offering downstream speeds of 100 Mbps in FCC Form 477 data (as of December 31, 2018) to consumers in certain areas, and it reports associated upload speeds of only 4 Mbps. FCC Form 477 data as of Dec.
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Isn't it being a bit disingenuous to hold SpaceX to standards that aren't being applied to other companies?
No, my complaint is quite logical. If there are other companies also failing to meet the mark list them and I will hold them to the same standards. I have given no passes to any company. They meet the requirements or they should GTFO, and I don't care if they are run by do-no-wrong God-king Musk, or an evil hell child spawn of Rupert Murdoch and Mitch McConnell. There are rules, and if anyone doesn't meet them to the letter then they should drown in their own tears as they are sent home.
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If you can't push yourself up, push others down. ... disgusting.
^^^ The fact that this is a viable business model in the US is
Starlink (unless it's canceled for some reason) will kill off viasat and viasat knows that. They're just trying to preserve their business model as long as they can by denying starlink money that would aid growth. Reminds me of the music industry in the days of napster and MP3s.
If/when SpaceX gets starship flying (and thus can launch starlink 2.0 sats) it's game-over for viasat.
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The fact that this is a viable business model in the US is ... disgusting.
What is disgusting is that we've been paying the ILECs to build out fiber networks for thirty years which have gone undelivered. Your objection to not paying SpaceX even though they haven't provided what was agreed is support for more of this.
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If you can't push yourself up, push others down. ... disgusting.
^^^ The fact that this is a viable business model in the US is
Welcome to reality. It's a viable business model everywhere. Pretending the US is unique in this regard is foolish. It's not even capitalism's fault, this same thing is possible under basically any economic system worth of being referred to as one. Any time 1) resources are limited, 2) some have more than others, and 3) having more makes one more powerful, there is motivation to maintain a gap by means both fair and foul.
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Re: Slow speeds (Score:4, Interesting)
What are the details of the 100/20 requirement? Are median data rates what matter, or mean? Or the design capability? That Ookla report shows that actually in much of Europe (and other countries) Starlink is surpassing the 100/20 mark. So I'm not understanding the Viasat argument that this is a fundamental problem with Starlink. Clearly they're technically capable of surpassing 100/20.
Viasat has so blatantly tried to stifle competition that I don't trust any of their "analyses". They have an inferior product, and know that they'll be overrun soon.
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Pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain.
He'll be dead soon anyway
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Viasat has so blatantly tried to stifle competition that I don't trust any of their "analyses". They have an inferior product, and know that they'll be overrun soon.
Actually completely irrelevant. It really doesn't matter who accuses whom. The accusation that they don't qualify for an American subsidy stands and it's up to Starlink to show that they do qualify. In some cases the failing companies those best placed to hold their replacements to account. Let's not ad hominem this and focus on what is Starlink actually delivering in the USA and does it qualify. Nothing more, nothing less.
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To be clear I absolutely want to make sure Starlink lives up to it's stated promise according to the subsidy. If they don't hit their goals, they shouldn't get the money (or at least not all of it).
Eventually Viasat is just trolling, doing anything to slow down Starlink, as they've done before. So it does matter to me who is making the accusation because they have a history of throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. Viasat will spin the numbers as most in their favor (or out of Starlink's favor
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I'm in a rural area, density 31/sq.mi. (12/km2).
* Viasat $70/mo lowest tier (40GB traffic then some degradation). Same old sat pricing model rural people are familiar with: 2 year commitment, service call to install equipment, $75+. Monthly discount for low income ($30), tribal lands ($75), paid for BY THE FCC. Story time, a lightning strike on one of these rigs, HughesNet, burned through its modem, and later fried my laptop because I thought ethernet was more secure than WiFi for a job I was doing. The rur
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Actually I'm not sure if the $50 fiber is subsidized by the REA or FCC or another agency.
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And phone not necessarily cellular in E. Kentucky.
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Pay the man, Silent Bob... (Score:2)
I'm an actual Starlink user at my farm. It's head-and-shoulders better than any competing service.
I previously has used a cellular uplink... and even with a yagi mounted 30' up on a mast, I barely had 1-2Mb/s of bandwidth. It was truly miserable.
Starlink is a game-changer... give 'em the freakin' money. They've done something truly miraculous for rural internet users, who had previously only terrible/expensive options. As a taxpayer, I'm actually glad to see the money I contribute going to something use
pchar (Score:2)
Bandwidth, and identification of where the bottlenecks are, has been possible for some time.
We can therefore establish precisely what the problem is and where it is.
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From your own 2nd link about starlink sats falling out of orbit :
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Starlink satellites have operational orbits of 340 miles (550 km), which is above the most at risk region. However, after launch, Falcon 9 rockets deposit the satellite batches very low, only about 217 miles (350 km) above Earth. SpaceX then raises the satellites' orbits using onboard propulsion units.
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So it seems they are at risk only for a short while after initial launch, and once they reach operational orbits, they are relatively safe.
So
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Anecdotal, but my personal experience is that they are consistently exceeding the requirements.
SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less.
The only issue I have experienced is that it is prone to interference from flocks of birds passing overhead. I am in the flight path of the local airport, and do not have any issues from planes. Weather has not caused any issues either. But every morning and evening, the shore bird flocks pass overhead and cause a series of brief but noticeable disruptions.
I'm not convinced Starlink is going to compete with cab
A little bit of math (Score:4, Interesting)
A little bit of math and geometry can show that Viasat has little chance of being usable by other than a tiny percentage of the customer base that StarLink will be able to handle at the same speeds. For an analogy think back on land mobile radio. Think back on mountain top (or tall towers or tall buildings) mounted radio repeaters. They serviced relatively few customers per frequency over a relatively large geographical range. When that system saturated several solutions mitigated it slightly. Then some Motorola engineers in Illinois developed cellular services. They reduced the antenna height so it was usable over a much smaller area and caused interference over a correspondingly smaller area. They were able to reuse the same frequency multiple times. The more lower cell towers you place in an area the larger the number of simultaneous connections you can handle. Starlink is to Viasat as cellular phones are to mountain top repeaters.
Spot beam antennas will allow reuse of frequencies in smaller regions. But, Starlink will always be able to reduce the area down farther than Viasat. That's just geometry - geometry used in 5th gen cell service.
Personally some arithmetic suggests neither is going to be very useful as subscriber bases increase. But, Viasat is doomed first. Then Starlink will reach subscriber saturation. (And so will such potential gems as T-Mobile's and Verizon's cell sites sharing with their ISP sites.) Off hand I do not expect the FCC politicians to have the expertise to get this right. But, time will tell.
{^_^}
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As others have noted, this is about grants and requirements.
As for your claim, ns-2 or ns-3 should let you test out what will handle what.
Either the claim is true (Score:3)
Or the claim is false. This is something that can be determined as a matter of fact and is not open to proof by assertion by either side.
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Or the claim is false. This is something that can be determined as a matter of fact and is not open to proof by assertion by either side.
Not necessarily. There is a lot of cherry-picking involved in the data. Some data sets show one result, others show other results.
For example: normal users are more likely to run a speed test when they notice a problem than when thing are operating as expected. This biases the data from Ookla that was in the cited report.
Starlink may have a better dataset... but they are inherently biased. We expect them to tell us they are all good.
Without widespread, active monitoring by unrelated 3rd parties we just
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For example: normal users are more likely to run a speed test when they notice a problem than when thing are operating as expected.
Two things: a) unless there's a time relevant clause to meet the requirements, a problem speed is still a problem speed. Judging on theoretical maxes is something stupid governments did in the early 2000s and sensible nations gave up on.
b) Speedtests may be run during a problem, but the overwhelmingly show results at full speed as there are a myraid of problems completely unrelated to the primary link that make websites appear slow.
I run it quite frequently, as you said, every time I see a problem. At no po
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This is one reason I prefer pchar to using a standard speed test site. It's effectively a traceroute that also reports effective bandwidth and packet loss for each hop. I can then pchar to wherever I'm trying to connect to and get a full diagnostic of the entire path.
Word of caution - pchar/pathchar is a deprecated approach to network monitoring, and the owner never did include a small patch I provided for Linux (it just renamed a couple of the fields from BSDisms, it's really not that hard to do). As such,
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What's a "forex"?
That's what they call foreskins after they cut them off, and before they are made into a wallet.
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What's a "forex"? Can I get them as NFTs? I have a huge pile of money that I just don't know what to do with. I need to invest wisely. Can you help me?
You too? A relative I didn't even know I had left me 10.000.000USD $ and once I pay the taxes and bank fees I'll need to invest that. Please let me know what you learn! /s
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Viasat. Welcome your new neighbors (Score:2)
Meh spaceballs, waited for civilization to come to them.
It’s here now.
There are no heroes in this story (Score:2)
I've used Viasat (Exede) and it's shit in many ways, especially (and unavoidably) latency, but the people pointing that out are missing the point. Viasat isn't claiming that Starlink isn't better. They're claiming that Starlink isn't meeting its obligations to the government, and therefore is enjoying an unfair advantage over corporations which are. Tha
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therefore is enjoying an unfair advantage over corporations which are
And which companies are those? Certainly not any of the ones that service my area... IMO - Starlink is the best bet for the areas not getting the service that's been repeatedly promised and not delivered by the terrestrial networks. It consistently delivers over 5x what I used to be able to get (rural DSL) and there's been zero effort to extend anything better to my area.
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I agree that promises to customers should be kept, but promises from corporations to governments are literally promises to every single person in the country and thus even more relevant because literally every person in the country has standing. Starlink should have paid more, or gotten less, and the debt is owed to every single one of us.
I mean, you know, if it's true. Maybe it's all bullshit. I certainly don't know, but that's the argument.
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therefore is enjoying an unfair advantage over corporations which are
And which companies are those? Certainly not any of the ones that service my area... IMO - Starlink is the best bet for the areas not getting the service that's been repeatedly promised and not delivered by the terrestrial networks. It consistently delivers over 5x what I used to be able to get (rural DSL) and there's been zero effort to extend anything better to my area.
What state are you in? Here in PA, even tiny villages like 500 people are getting service now. Might want to talk to your guvmint, because here the towers and delivery are going up like fast growing trees, and 5G deployment is happening - and 5G can be used as home network delivery.
Oh, just wait (Score:1)
It's fascinating - in Pennsylvania for instance, there are a lot of areas that are basically wilderness. 0 population per square mile. But in a fair number of even these places, there is cellular coverage.
And as the cellular system expands, even tiny villages are now getting service. And as 5G rolls ou