Viasat Tries To Stop Citizen Effort To Revive FCC Funding for Starlink (pcmag.com) 78
A resident in Virginia has urged the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider canceling $886 million in federal funding for SpaceX's Starlink system. But rival satellite company Viasat has gone out of its way to oppose the citizen-led petition.ÂPCMag: On Jan. 1, the FCC received a petition from the Virginia resident Greg Weisiger asking the commission to reconsider denying the $886 million to SpaceX. "Petitioner is at an absolute loss to understand the Commission's logic with these denials," wrote Weisiger, who lives in Midlothian, Virginia. "It is abundantly clear that Starlink has a robust, reliable, affordable service for rural and insular locations in all states and territories."
The petition arrived a few weeks after the FCC denied SpaceX's appeal to receive $886 million from the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is designed to subsidize 100Mbps to gigabit broadband across the US. SpaceX wanted to use the funds to expand Starlink access in rural areas. But the FCC ruled that "Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support." Weisiger disagrees. In his petition, he writes that the FCC's decision will deprive him of federal support to bring high-speed internet to his home. "Thousands of other Virginia locations were similarly denied support," he added.
The petition arrived a few weeks after the FCC denied SpaceX's appeal to receive $886 million from the commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which is designed to subsidize 100Mbps to gigabit broadband across the US. SpaceX wanted to use the funds to expand Starlink access in rural areas. But the FCC ruled that "Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support." Weisiger disagrees. In his petition, he writes that the FCC's decision will deprive him of federal support to bring high-speed internet to his home. "Thousands of other Virginia locations were similarly denied support," he added.
The FCC is right, but rural residents wont care. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you live in one of these areas, you're so used to not having enough bandwidth and not having any recourse about it that you'd do nearly anything to get more of it, even if you knew it was a bad deal that wouldn't live up to the advertiser's promises. Most these people have exactly one other option: 28.8k speeds on a 56k modem.
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Most of the dial-up options are not really workable now either because the phone lines have degraded to the point of near-uselessness, or the ISPs have just turned off the dial-up gear.
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How many rural areas don't have cell service? How many that do don't have an option that lets you use your phone as a hotspot? (Curious, I really have no idea.)
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Re:The FCC is right, but rural residents wont care (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a result of the failure in the USA to classify internet service as a utility the same as phone service. Sane countries (such as Switzerland and S. Korea) have shown us how to make it work and that it needs to happen.
Basically everyone in the USA gets overcharged for crappy, subpar internet service [communitytechnetwork.org] while republicans scream about how "competition" supposedly makes things the best.
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I agree with this notion. We should have declared internet service as a public utility a long time ago. The problem is, greedy corporations that were already involved in carrying internet service didn't want to be barred from also making money off the content carried, and they had enough money to lobby to halt progress.
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Seriously there could be another country on Earth called the United States of Umerica with exactly the same geography and climate and population and culture and politics with the only difference being they regulate internet as an essential service and benefit greatly from it. And you idiots would still complain that it was an unfair comparison and it
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This is a result of the failure in the USA to classify internet service as a utility the same as phone service. Sane countries (such as Switzerland and S. Korea) have shown us how to make it work and that it needs to happen.
Basically everyone in the USA gets overcharged for crappy, subpar internet service [communitytechnetwork.org] while republicans scream about how "competition" supposedly makes things the best.
The main issue is the infrastructure. In Sweden, at least the "last mile" of fibre is public. This means that ISPs all have access to it - so you can choose between many different providers. This enables free competition, unlike scenarios where you are free to select the one provider who owns the connection.
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Cellular coverage maps have been caught repeatedly being complete lies, and it's been reported here on Slashdot. In general you can't count on it far outside of town.
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This is a comment that was worth checking the Anonymous Coward box?
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Probably fear of retaliation from his cellular carrier.
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There actually seems to be less, or worse, rural data now than there was 5 years ago due to the older equipment (2G, 3G) being turned off in favor of 5G equipment. Chances are that in the western states, if you live on a back gravel road without city services that you're also unlikely to have decent broadband Internet or good cell coverage. That's been my experience in looking at land lately, at least.
Re:The FCC is right, but rural residents wont care (Score:4, Informative)
I have supported a good number of employees over the years living or traveling in remote areas of all types. I have done enough of this that I have experience with pretty much every access technology there is: Dialup, frame relay, ISDN, SONET, ethernet, DOCSIS, every flavor of DSL including specialty long reach stuff and dry loop DSL. Cell networks everything from WAP to UWB; satellite ive done evertyhing from 2400bps Iridium, BGAN, Hughes, Viasat, Starlink.
Starlink and cell networks are the same thing from a network access and architecture perspective. They have the same issues and technical concerns around scaling wireless capacity. If cell networks qualify, Starlink qualifies, QED.
From my experience I can say that none of the technologies have ever been able to adequately solve the problem of affordable rural broadband. But I can say that of all of these, Starlink is the only one that has ever successfully supported a remote employee to everyone's satisfaction at work. The FCC is certainly right to be skeptical of Starlink's ability to scale, but I agree that I'm at an absolute loss to understand the justification for the double standard. If you put all the providers and technologies through the same thought experiment, not only should none of them ever get any money, the entire concept of subsidizing rural broadband won't ever work.
Either the FCC should cut Starlink back in or they should eliminate the program entirely. I could advocate equally for both approaches and quite honestly after having watched so many false starts in this space over the last 30 years, I personally favor giving the whole fucking thing the axe.
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Starlink and cell networks are the same thing from a network access and architecture perspective. They have the same issues and technical concerns around scaling wireless capacity. If cell networks qualify, Starlink qualifies, QED.
Not necessarily. Cellular problems are often a back-haul issue and that is something Starlink does much better at. The flip side, is that I would not want to use a Starlink in even a moderately dense area.
I've said this elsewhere (Score:3, Interesting)
No amount of tech can fix that. If you're gonna let businesses get away with not providing the service you paid them for, and you're going to do it for years and years and years, then nothing will work. And if Star Link is working for your coworker that's more likely to be a fluke and/or happy accident than an
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.. if you can't see why the approach taken with building out the national park system wouldn't work for building a stable rural broadband system, or at least how vastly different those two things are, you really shouldn't be a part of this conversation.
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They might have cell service, but it is often a weak signal that is then sent by microwave from tower to tower and those links often don't have enough bandwidth for anything useful.
I have some friends who lived on a property that was only 10 mins from the nearest town of 83 000 people and the reception was so bad there that they had to go by satellite dish which had latency so bad that they could not video conference. They signed on as soon as there was a Starlink beta program in their area and I heard
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Nationally? I don't know. I do know that where I live (Michigan's Upper Peninsula) the cellular coverage is very spotty. I actually have good service because there's a Verizon tower in line of sight of my house. Lots of areas up here have no cellular coverage or barely usable coverage. 5G simply doesn't exist. Verizon doesn't offer a residential internet plan here, but you can get one on their network via a reseller.
There's no cable TV. Phone service is copper pair, you might be able to squeeze a DSL co
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How many rural areas don't have cell service? How many that do don't have an option that lets you use your phone as a hotspot? (Curious, I really have no idea.)
It's surprisingly common. I live in a college town of 80k (Columbia, MO) and have friends less than 5 miles from town that have no cell data or high speed internet at their house. I have family members in various parts of the state where their only internet is hughesnet which is horribly slow and restricted or now starlink.
They might have cell service but even then the cell service might not have high speed data. I wouldn't be surprised if over 50% of the area of the midwest doesn't have access to high s
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A quick google indicates that roughly half the area of the US doesn't even have access (as of 2017).
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/microsoft-outlines-plan-help-bring-broadband-internet-2m-rural-americans-within-5-years/
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Cell service is pretty dependent on LoS to the tower. Trees/mountains do a number on it. Even with a rooftop mounted antenna + repeater, our cell service is kind of spotty. Their hotspot/tethering options are also pretty pricy and capped on monthly bandwidth.
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We drove down the Pacific Coast from Washington to northern California last summer. One would think that with this intensely techie population that coverage would be great, but no. Lots of dead zones, and lots of areas where signal is barely enough to make a voice call much less support data.
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You don't necessarily need to even be in a "rural" area.
I live 10 minutes away from a downtown urban center, but I'm in some hills so I basically have no cell service in my house. And I only have one wired ISP choice, Comcast, who just QUADRUPLED my bill and won't do shit about it, because they know they don't have to do shit.
However, I do have a clear view of the sky.
Fuck Comcast.
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seattle i take it? =/
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Close. Portland.
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(Hence why I say you're probably only going to get 28.8k speeds even if you're using a 56k modem.)
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Oh, where I grew up, the lines were at 24.0 kbps 15 years ago. They've gotten worse since then.
Re: The FCC is right, but rural residents wont car (Score:2)
Er ... (Score:2)
TFS is about the petition, not Viasat's attempt to stop the FCC from considering it. WTF ... ?
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Heretic!
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In response to my observation:
TFS is about the petition, not Viasat's attempt to stop the FCC from considering it. WTF ... ?
EvilSS explained:
You actually have to RTFA I'm afraid.
Yeah. I actually did that before I posted my complaint. As you know, TFS is, like, 3/5 of the PC Magazine article - and all the stuff about Viasat trying to persuade the FCC to deny the private individual's petition is in the part msmash left out.
Not that there's a lot of detail in TFA itself, but still ...
Musk has the money (Score:1)
He doesn't need any socialist money from the government. He can sell off some (approxmiately 4.24 million shares) of his Tesla stock to get the money.
Let us know when he's done leeching off the taxpayers.
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100% this. Musk needs to stop being an apartheidist neonazi welfare queen.
What does Musk have to do with an apartheid? Why do you think he is a neonazi? Do you think any business apply for governmental programs that offer subsidies is a welfare queen?
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Do you think any business apply for governmental programs that offer subsidies is a welfare queen?
Yes.
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The right answer is to remove the subsidies altogether. But thats not what we do. We fuck around too much, and play politics. This affects real people. ViaSat has been in business for decades and their service is shit. High latency, low bandwidth. SpaceX's Starlink is much better (ask a rural user). If the FCC was concerned about scale, they should have pu
It kind of does (Score:1)
OP's post was purposefully facetious but As a taxpayer I don't want more money going his way. What the OP said could have been said more tactfully, but Musk has restored the accounts of openly racist people
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Reading your posts almost always carries the risk of developing an aneurysm.
>He literally interfered in the Ukraine war on Russia's behalf, siding with a dictator over a democracy (and sorry, I'm not buying his reasons).
that's not what happened at all you hare brained progressive twat.
He gave the ukies access to starlink for CIVILIAN purposes, they tried using them for MILITARY purposes.
Using starlink for war opens up a can of worms and entanglements that would potentially impact the entire network, even
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Have you read his twitter feed? It's... Disturbing.
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Have you read his twitter feed? It's... Disturbing.
Sure, but there is no reasonable definition of nazi that would allow anyone to claim he is on based on his social media posts. That is, just like with accusations of racism, when leftists use nazi what they really mean "things we don't agree with".
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His posts seem to fit the bill. White supremacy, support of ideas that marginalize other races, blaming various problems on non-whites and their supposed low IQs etc.
Obviously now very few people would be willing to be openly Nazis, but his views align with that ideology and if this was the 1930s I think we can safely say whose side he would be on.
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His posts seem to fit the bill.
Pick any one of Musk Tweets and explain to me how it makes him a nazi.
White supremacy, support of ideas that marginalize other races, blaming various problems on non-whites and their supposed low IQs etc.
While a lot of Musk's tweets are cringe and/or trolls, they are not anywhere near to the level you want to attribute him. That is, you have to be not only applying the worst possible interpretation, you also have to stretch definitions into meaningless absurd. The fact that all of this is frequently done to smear political opponents does not mean that it is intellectually honest thing to do.
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you are talking to a troll, just ignore him.
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Re:Musk has the money (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about Musk's personal wealth but Starlink as a business applying for government subsidies offered to many of its direct competitors.
Musk likes to claim he did everything on his own, that he had no help. He's even said the government shouldn't be in the business of subsidizing private industry. Problem is, every single one of his companies [businessinsider.com] has received government subsidies totaling over $5 billion.
If he's so hepped up on the government not providing subsidies, why is he whining he's not getting the $866 million subsidy? Why doesn't he use his own money? He has plenty. He could show everyone how he can do things on his own. Show everyone he's not the hypocrite everyone knows him to be.
So is it your position that government should not subsidize rural internet at all, or are you just opposed to Starlink getting it for purely politically-ideological reasons?
He shouldn't receive the money because he's a hypocrite (as just stated). He's saying no one should get a subsidy, that subsidies should be removed from the government's budget, yet repeatedly comes hat in hand begging for handouts. He's no different than Bill Ackman who called for someone to resign because of plaigarism, who publicly harangued the person, then whined when his own wife was shown to have plaigarised as well. Suddenly it's a hit job on his wife, that calling her out was unfair and has called her emotional harm. This is the same guy who likes to talk about capitalism and getting rid of government regulations, but will beg the government to do something (i.e. cough up taxpayer money) to protect himself [marketwatch.com].
“We need to stop this now. We are beyond the point where the private sector can solve the problem and are in the hands of our government and regulators. Tick-tock.”
And yes, I will bring up this quote until the end of time to call out Ackman's hypocrisy just like I'll use the above article about Musk's hyposcrisy. If Musk is ideologically opposed to subsidies, stop asking for them. Walk the walk, not just talk the talk.
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Musk didn't ask for the subsidies. It was offered by the government. Yes, Musk/Tesla/SpaceX took them, just as their competitors did/would have. To not take advantage of the subsidies would have been bad business.
The solution here is to stop the government subsidies altogether. Then the best service(s,) if any, will survive and win the market.
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He's even said the government shouldn't be in the business of subsidizing private industry. Problem is, every single one of his companies [businessinsider.com] has received government subsidies totaling over $5 billion.
If he's so hepped up on the government not providing subsidies, why is he whining he's not getting the $866 million subsidy? Why doesn't he use his own money?
That is unreasonable. I don't think people should eat meat, but in a world where people eat meat, I will do so also. I don't think people should play communication/emotional games when dating, but in a world where that is endemic, I will do so also. I don't think certain government handouts are well implemented (they should not exist in their current form), but I will not say no. Why do you think Elon should be the only one to be so principled that he stands against the world, accepting an uneven playing fi
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Musk likes to claim he did everything on his own, that he had no help.
[citation needed]
If he's so hepped up on the government not providing subsidies, why is he whining he's not getting the $866 million subsidy?
That is not the contradiction you seem to think. You may be in favor in changing the rules and simultaneously not disadvantaging yourself under existing rules with respect to your competitors which are bound by the same rules.
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“I don’t believe in welfare,” Pillen said at a previous news conference about his decision to reject government money to feed needy children.
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen is one of about 200 farmer-owners of a Fremont, Neb., pork processing plant given a $25 million federal grant.
Sixteen businesses associated with gubernatorial candidate Republican Jim Pillen received about $7.8
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Doesn't matter if you complain where he gets his money from. Once it's his money, it's his money. If you don't want to support him to do anything, that's fine, he doesn't have to expand services in that area unless he thinks it's profitable.
He doesn't have to give up his money to give people service just because they want it. If you want to be critical of him for what he makes from Tesla, be critical of all the activists screaming and demanding we go electric. They created an incentive to provide it, so he
Tipping point (Score:5, Informative)
I think part of the resistance we're seeing with this denial is due to the challenge that Starlink presents to what I call the State-Internet complex: the myriad of shitty, often fly by night ISPs which keep getting resold at a loss, and then miraculously get more state funding, for rural broadband.
Companies like Comcast, TW, Altice and Cox play this game, too, of course: they get a lot of federal funding for installing and running "high speed" plant in rural or otherwise unprofitable locations. The quality of the services are often "not great" - certainly not what anyone who's used to in an urban city would find acceptable, with latencies typically north of 80-120ms and congestion based issues. From what I've seen, it's not uncommon for the "high speed" services (I'm looking at you, CenturyLink DSL) of being barely ISDN speed at times, with high jitter and latency at all times: just barely suitable for someone trying to work form home, and not suitable for streaming media.
These companies rely on the federal funding for rural broadband and have for 30 years at this point. The reason why the funding is available is because, they claim, there is no viable alternative. Starlink's prominence and capability destroy that narrative.
I live in a state that was a relatively early test-bed for the 'rural broadband' initiatives. We had 100Mbit (synchronous) cable by 1998 for something like $60/month - in an era when a leased T1 was still thousands. The quality of the service I get on this ISP is no better now, and in some ways worse, than it was in the early 2000s: the latency hasn't improved, reliability is worse, and throughput is higher. Browsing -feels- slow, often, with latencies north of 100ms from here to... anywhere. And there are no other terrestrial ISP options, as they all piggyback on the same carrier networks run by the state-funded ISP, with no incentive to improve the infrastructure.
I now "dual home" my internet, and have had starlink for the past 2 years. It's worth every penny for the peace of mind (since I wfh) of redundancy, but it's finally getting to the point where I can "daily drive" Starlink over the local cable ISP: my latencies are now consistently ~half the lowest latencies I've been able to get from my terrestrial ISP for a while, and browsing feels fast (again).
That's why the FCC is not playing with Starlink. There's a lot of money in these terrestrial ISPs which serve the majority of the US population.
We're still much better off with wired lines (Score:2)
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I take it you've got very little familiarity with how wired lines work.
Right now, we're typically stuck to 2 options: DSL, or cable. Sometimes - about half the time, per capita - that means it's fiber to the house. But we're talking about the half of the other houses which don't have that access. The average price for that is about 50-80k per mile with the per-house cost in the $1500-2000 range. A lot of that is subsidized with tax month. However... that's not the total cost, and that's for urban developmen
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Starlink speeds are just not good enough for a first world country that wants to be a tech powerhouse.
Of course, the US has a massive problem with people being stuck with 90s era speeds and ridiculous data caps.
So the question is: is Starlink worth investing in because the situation is so dire, even though it will not deliver the performance that people increasingly need, or should the money go to services that can deliver it but which have historically failed to deliver?
Sounds like a choice between a turd
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Well summarized.
That the federal government seems to have almost-formally adopted a "we hate Elon" stance gives these sort of sinecure-protecting efforts even more cover with tacit approval from above.
I've had starlink and viasat (Score:2)
Starlink is much faster and has much lower latency, but it's much less reliable. I got dropouts all the time. Viasat, while slow and high latency, was rock solid. If I had to have only one, I'd take viasat. As it is, I dumped both and took a terrestrial wireless solution. It's actually slower than starlink, but it's pretty solid and has great latency.
Re:I've had starlink and viasat (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience was the complete and total opposite.
We live in rural Lane county OR, and at the onset of the covid hysteria the wife and I started working from home, and needed a "real ISP" (we'd been using a crappy cell phone tethering => router setup) -- so we got viasat.
600ms ping (best case scenario), 100GB monthly cap, $165 a month, and during peak hours the network was dogshit slow, a 56k modem would have been preferable. And, it was actually down quite a bit, that might be due to LoS issues with trees on our property (the sat was pretty low in the sky)
But once we got starlink it was much, much more responsive(30ms ping), no cap, and pretty decent speeds all things considered (topping out at ~50MB/s). Oh, and it was cheaper to boot. When people online talk about starlink's reliability I have to wonder if there is some obstruction that they missed, or if it's really bad luck? In the 18 months we used it, we had exactly no issues with network reliability. none, zero, zilch.
We were able to (somehow) get 1GB synchronous fiber despite being 15 odd miles from town, which is a bit surprising, but not complaining in the least.
Viasat simply cannot compete on a technical level and is trying to use regulatory capture to knee-cap a competitor.
Midlothian, VA is just outside Richmond, VA (Score:2)
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He doesn't really have anything to complain about [imgur.com]
one person (Score:2)
Ok so according to this /. article, one person in Virginia doesn't like an 800 million dollar government contract.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. Because that's worth nothing.
Rural residents won't see the benifits (Score:2)
Not a rural argument (Score:2)
The cost to Starlink to sell and link up a dish in Washington DC and in a small rural community 70 miles outside of DC is precisely the same. Anything within their coverage area is equally covered whether it's rural or not. I have starlink and installed 60 units in a remote reservation in New Mexico, very easy and it's a great solution but they don't need federal funding for rural installations because rural installations don't represent a financial burden. This is not a cost offset for Starlink, it's
sucking on the government teat (Score:2)
Companies which need government support are called charities.
Corporations sucking on the government teat.