The level of ignorance from you musk haters is hilarious. Starlink has done 100xs more for rural areas than the nearly trillion we gave to the telecoms. Yea musk is a dick but you're ignorant as fuck if you think starlink is a scam.

bulkshit

I love it, because he is so full of shit, you get it in bulk.

The grant requires applicants to meet these benchmarks by 2025. Only SpaceX came close to meeting this standard and only SpaceX is being denied the grant for not yet meeting this requirement.

God I hate how our options are between shit and shit like every time. I just want RC cola internet, instead of pepsi and coke, is that too much to ask? I want kirkland signature internet, that's what I want.

Almost no major company can, have you seen how much the US subsidizes oil and gas despite their profits? How much we subsidize food production? Renewable technology such as wind and solar is only becoming so vastly popular because we're heavily subsidizing it finally.

Don't get me wrong fuck Elon musk, but don't kid yourself and pretend like most companies wouldn't fail without subsidies. That includes other internet companies which we subsidize regularly

It's just not a sustainable idea. To expand service, they need to launch even more satellites. Which degrade and fall down after a year. The only reason it could exist thus far is because the US taxpayer paid for it with subsidies like this.

America has problems with getting cable companies to actually lay cable after giving them money to do that, which is a separate thing. But at least if you get cable laid, it is in the ground providing service for hundreds of years instead of 1 year.

In rejecting SpaceX's appeal, yesterday's FCC order said the agency's Wireline Competition Bureau "followed Commission guidance and correctly concluded that Starlink is not reasonably capable of offering the required high-speed, low-latency service throughout the areas where it won auction support."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has acknowledged Starlink's capacity limits several times, saying for example that it will face "a challenge [serving everyone] when we get into the several million user range."

Isn't it Starlink that should fix this?

this applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade

Maybe we should invest in another company that will actually deserve it.

In Iowa, at least, the state had a pre-existing fiber network that got expanded to a shit-ton of rural communities and local (often municipal) ISPs. It's more expensive than what you'd get in the cities, but much better bang for buck than Starlink.

The only people still struggling to get service are those who live way, way outside those communities -- the kind of people for whom "neighbor" means somebody who lives a significant fraction of a mile away. And, outside of comfortably wealthy individuals, those people are a dying breed, at least in Iowa.

If Iowa of all places can pull something like that off, I figure it's not out of reach of any state (or nation, for that matter) whose inhabitants give a nano-fuck about access to technology.

Hi from me, a Starlink customer in rural Australia. It's a premium service but greatly outperforms the alternatives.

However this isn't about your anecdotal experience. This is about what level of service they can guarantee as minimum and overall to meet the conditions of the subsidy.

I would also note this isn't reinstatement matter. FCC refused to give them the subsidy in the first place with this decision. What SpaceX are trying to spin as reneg on previous decision is them making the short list of companies to be considered. Well, getting short listed is not same as being selected fully.

They passed the criterion for the short list check, but the final authorization and selection included more wide and more through checking on the promises of companies to meet criterion and SpaceX failed the more through final round of scrutiny before being awarded the subsidy.

Government having awarded bad money previously isn't fixed by following up bad awards with more bad awards. SpaceX exactly failed since previously money was handed out too losely and FCC has tightened the scrutiny on subsidy awards to not follow up bad money with more bad money.

Nobody is prevented from buying Starlink, this just means Starlink isn't getting subsidized with tax payer money.

The more people that use starlink the slower and less usable it becomes, additionally phony stark can turn it off whenever he sees fit.

Good luck with that

cable companies literally took a billion dollar grant to expand infrastructure and didnt do much of anything. This is literally doing something. F elon but the engineers who worked hard to make this a reality deserve better

Sounds like y'all should start building your own infrastructure as others have done

The real problem there is all of the government handouts that have gone to the other ISPs for the purpose of wiring up everybody... Taking the money and then not delivering. And I know some years ago it was said that Comcast's internet division was running at over 90% profit margin... And like other companies that were regarded highly successful operate around 30% or less.