SpaceX gets FCC approval to bid in $16 billion rural-broadband auction
SpaceX is one of the 386 entities that have qualified to bid in a federal auction for rural-broadband funding.
SpaceX has so far overcome the Federal Communications Commission's doubts about whether Starlink, its low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, can provide latency of less than 100ms and thus qualify for the auction's low-latency tier. With the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) set to distribute up to $16 billion to ISPs, the FCC initially placed SpaceX on the "incomplete application" list, which includes ISPs that had not shown they were qualified to bid in their desired performance and latency tiers. The FCC also said that LEO providers "will face a substantial challenge" obtaining approval to bid in the low-latency tier because they must "demonstrat[e] to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold."
[...] SpaceX's Starlink service is in a limited beta and appears to be providing latencies well under the 100ms threshold. SpaceX still isn't guaranteed to get FCC funding. After the auction, winning bidders will have to submit "long-form" applications with more detail on how they will meet deployment requirements in order to get the final approval for funding.
The $16 billion available in the auction will be distributed to ISPs over ten years, paying all winning bidders combined up to $1.6 billion a year to deploy broadband in specified areas. SpaceX satellite service could theoretically be made available anywhere and doesn't require wiring up individual homes, so this funding won't necessarily expand the areas of availability for Starlink. But satellite operators can use FCC funding as subsidies allowing them to charge lower prices in areas that lack modern broadband access.
[...] The $16 billion in funding will be directed to census blocks where no provider reports offering home-Internet speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. The list of approved census blocks contains 5.3 million unserved homes and businesses.
See also: SpaceX, Hughes and Viasat qualify to bid for $20.4 billion in FCC rural broadband subsidies
Previously: Ajit Pai Caves to SpaceX but is Still Skeptical of Musk's Latency Claims
SpaceX Starlink Speeds Revealed as Beta Users Get Downloads of 11 to 60Mbps
SpaceX Seeks FCC Broadband Funds, Must Prove It Can Deliver Sub-100ms Latency
Related Stories
Ajit Pai caves to SpaceX but is still skeptical of Musk’s latency claims:
The Federal Communications Commission has reversed course on whether to let SpaceX and other satellite providers apply for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers. But Chairman Ajit Pai said companies like SpaceX will have to prove they can offer low latencies, as the FCC does not plan to "fund untested technologies."
Pai's original proposal classified SpaceX and all other satellite operators as high-latency providers for purposes of the funding distribution, saying the companies haven't proven they can deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms. Pai's plan to shut satellite companies out of the low-latency category would have put them at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
But SpaceX is launching low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites in altitudes ranging from 540km to 570km, a fraction of the 35,000km used with geostationary satellites, providing much lower latency than traditional satellite service. SpaceX told the FCC that its Starlink service will easily clear the 100ms cutoff, and FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly urged Pai to let LEO companies apply in the low-latency tier.
The FCC voted to approve the updated auction rules yesterday. The final order isn't public yet, but it's clear from statements by Pai and other commissioners that SpaceX and other LEO companies will be allowed to apply in the low-latency tier. The satellite companies won't gain automatic entry into the low-latency tier, but they will be given a chance to prove that they can deliver latencies below 100ms.
[...] SpaceX met with commission staff over the last few days of May, telling them that its broadband system "easily clears the commission's 100ms threshold for low-latency services, even including its 'processing time' during unrealistic worst-case scenarios." We contacted SpaceX today about the low-latency change and will update this story if we get a response.
SpaceX Starlink speeds revealed as beta users get downloads of 11 to 60Mbps:
Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps.
The same tests, conducted over the past two weeks, showed latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms. This isn't a comprehensive study of Starlink speeds and latency, so it's not clear whether this is what Internet users should expect once Starlink satellites are fully deployed and the service reaches commercial availability. We asked SpaceX several questions about the speed-test results yesterday and will update this article if we get answers.
[...] Beta testers must sign non-disclosure agreements, so these speed tests might be one of the only glimpses we get of real-world performance during the trials. SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.
[...] Although the Ookla speed-test latencies for Starlink don't hit Musk's target of below 20ms, they are below the FCC's 100ms threshold. For competitive online gaming, Ookla says players should be in "winning" shape with latency or ping of 59ms or less, and "in the game" with latency or ping of up to 129ms. The 35 best cities in the world for online gaming have ping rates of 8 to 28ms, an Ookla report last year said.
Latency tests are affected by the distance between the user and the server. The Ookla tests revealed on Reddit showed the tests going to servers in Los Angeles and Seattle; SpaceX's beta tests are slated for the northern US and southern Canada, but a Stop the Cap story says that testers so far are in rural areas of Washington state only.
SpaceX seeks FCC broadband funds, must prove it can deliver sub-100ms latency:
SpaceX, Charter, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, Cox, and about 500 other companies are seeking government funding to provide broadband in rural areas. The Federal Communications Commission yesterday released a list of applicants for the first phase of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which is set to pay up to $16 billion to Internet service providers over 10 years.
SpaceX would be the first low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider to get FCC rural-broadband funding. The RDOF and predecessor programs generally fund expansion of wired or terrestrial wireless services by paying ISPs to expand their networks into rural areas where they would not otherwise have built.
As a satellite provider, SpaceX won't need to install wires or wireless towers in any particular area. But traditional satellite providers have obtained FCC funding before despite already offering service throughout the United States. For example, the FCC's Connect America Fund last year awarded $87.1 million to satellite operator Viasat on condition that it provide service in specific parts of 17 states at lower prices and with higher data caps "than it typically provides in areas where it is not receiving Connect America Fund support."
SpaceX could follow a similar model, seeking FCC funding to offer lower-priced broadband in census blocks that lack service, meeting the FCC's speed standard of 25Mbps downloads and 3Mbps uploads. We asked SpaceX about its plans for the FCC funding today and will update this article if we get a response. SpaceX Starlink prices have not been revealed yet, so we don't know what Starlink will cost either at full price or if subsidized by FCC funding.
[...] Like other Universal Service programs run by the FCC, the RDOF is paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @10:18PM (1 child)
So that would be the form the FCC hasn't done due diligence on in the past two decades yes?
Can I submit one? I can build out a million homes in twenty minutes for a ten million dollars, so long as nobody checks to see if I actually did it.
(Hey it works for the carriers)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @11:16PM
This is the FCC controlled by the bought and paid for Trump appointee Ajit Pai. You can be reasonably certain that whomever wins these grants Ajit's palms (and/or those higher up in the Republican crime syndicate) will be greased.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 15 2020, @11:34PM (11 children)
Moar bandwidth for city punks working from home in rural towns.
Flyover country, hear the message: Musk will gentrify you, 10 years tops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 15 2020, @11:53PM
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/31/6-us-cities-and-states-that-will-pay-you-to-move-there.html [cnbc.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @12:19AM (9 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @12:38AM (8 children)
Plenty of city punks too [pewsocialtrends.org]. They'll start with buying in the existing villages, before sprawling new suburb-style around.
A whole generation of millennials no longer constrained to living with their parents, with children to be raised in the progressive culture.
Pink and green hair dyes and "authentically ripped jeans" will make a killing for a bit, until they get adjusted to the idea those things don't really matter for their social justice causes. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @01:22AM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @01:35AM (6 children)
At your peril. Not that you can do anything to avoid it, but it will come less surprising.
More boring than living with your parents during a lockdown? They are already bore-hardened; the twitch.tv is choke full of them.
Although, I reckon the first invasion wave will be made of hackernews dwellers. Well-paid by the flyover country standards, with enough mental mobility and courage to give it a try; the first ones to post on hackernews "I got here and it's nice enough and cheap and my lagtime is about 150ms" will crack the dam and cause the first rush of the flood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @02:27AM (5 children)
Well, yes. Their defenses are pretty impregnable.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @02:38AM (4 children)
Oh, don't delude yourself. Note that "mental mobility" doesn't mean "mentally sane" or rational.
Your only chance to delay them is to make soy/almond milk unavailable and keep the road full of potholes, so they can't get it via Amazon Prime. Won't last long, Bezos will invent something to download the stuff from the cloud via a drone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @03:10AM (3 children)
Well, let's consider the SN real world example. We have several people who already dwell in flyover territory. Runaway is mocked for living in Arkansas. No one will acknowledge The Mighty Buzzard's mighty fishing boat. My views on economics are claimed to be tainted merely by living in Yellowstone. There is this massive mental block.
The only documented time someone moved in to flyover was Azuma Hasuki who immediately fled to Erie, New York upon learning the dark truth of flyover. There is no "my latency is only 150 ms".
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @04:15AM (2 children)
Context [xkcd.com], khallow. Let me remind it to you:
The bandwidth that Musk's satellite constellation will bring, if the other ISP-es don't want a slice too.
With or without money from FFC, Starlink is going to happen - because they can do it and their satellites go around the world so their customers aren't limited to the US market.
---
The trickle that will bring the dam down has started [phys.org]. No, seriously, get recommendations too [forbes.com].
Here's the search term you can use to keep an eye for this start: zoom towns [google.com]
You can get hackernews reaction [ycombinator.com] - mainly reserved, but there are posts like
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @02:18PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 16 2020, @10:04PM
Or they'll remain city punks and burn your employer's business down. Because, like Runaway likes to think, once a leftie, always a brown shirt. (large grin)
No, listen, I agree that they will change (and 'rural punks' may be a good term to designate them), but they will change the space they are living too. They may become rural, but they'll still remain punks. For example, at least the conservative base organized around religious values is doomed to extinction: those punks will prefer to play "Doom eternal" [youtube.com] than to go to church.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Revek on Thursday October 15 2020, @11:39PM (3 children)
The last time they promised to help rural areas they gave the money to large companies by preventing the small companies from qualifying. They took the money and didn't build one additional mile of infrastructure. AT&T though gave record bonuses and laid off thousands of workers.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:45AM
And, unsurprisingly, nobody went to jail for this.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 16 2020, @01:05AM (1 child)
Yup, was just going to point this out: No point in worrying, really, about who is getting this contract, because the odds that it will be fulfilled is approximately zero.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday October 16 2020, @04:13AM
Sorry if I sound like a Musk fanboy, but at least if SpaceX gets a contract, all evidence shows that they would actually fulfill it and build something that works, which is a lot more than I can say for the telco/cableco incumbents. Elon may be many things, but someone who takes taxpayer money and gets nothing done is not one of them, at least so far. If his competition is shitty companies like CenturyLink and Comcast, I feel compelled to root for him. (He also doesn't seem to be one to push out poorly-engineered pieces of shit like the Boeing 737MAX, another favorite Congressional company.)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by shortscreen on Friday October 16 2020, @12:14AM (9 children)
Is it really cheaper to launch satellites all over the place than to run a cable/fiber? I have to wonder how rural areas ever got electricity or POTS if it's supposedly this difficult to get broadband.
According to this page about the Rural Electrification Act, Congress issued $410 million in loans to non-profit cooperatives and within two years 1.5 million farms had electricity. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/rural-electrification-administration/ [eh.net]
This page says 80% of farms by 1950 (whereas in 1936 it was only 10%) https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/05/20/celebrating-80th-anniversary-rural-electrification-administration [usda.gov]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Friday October 16 2020, @12:32AM (4 children)
Let's just say the broadband subsidy game has been played before, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
SpaceX has probably spent somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion on Starlink launches and is about ready to start offering service. That cost will go up by the time the full constellation goes up, but not so much if they can switch to using Starship. Hopefully that can happen by late 2021.
Starlink is also capable of reaching multiple countries with the same "build-out", and can be used by RVs, boats, planes, military vehicles/planes, etc.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @01:01AM (3 children)
"Starlink is also capable of reaching multiple countries"
and is much easier to snoop than having to tap physical cables
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday October 16 2020, @01:15AM (1 child)
Try encryption.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday October 16 2020, @02:35AM
And backdoors.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @02:48AM
Because? Cables tend to be pretty centralized systems too and tapping physical cables just isn't that hard for anyone who could similarly tap satellite systems.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday October 16 2020, @04:19AM (2 children)
Is it really cheaper to launch satellites all over the place than to run a cable/fiber? I have to wonder how rural areas ever got electricity or POTS if it's supposedly this difficult to get broadband.
According to this page about the Rural Electrification Act, Congress issued $410 million in loans to non-profit cooperatives and within two years 1.5 million farms had electricity. ... This page says 80% of farms by 1950 (whereas in 1936 it was only 10%)
It's very simple actually: look at those years. The REA was back in the 1930s-40s, not the 2000s-2020s. Things were very different in America back then: stuff was actually built, and quickly. Look at the Empire State Building: it was over 100 floors tall, and they completed 1 floor *per day*, in the 1930s. Good luck getting a building like that constructed in America today at that pace. Or look at subway lines in NYC: they built a bunch of them in the first half of the 20th century (some even in the late 1800s). But they haven't built any new ones in *decades* now; they're completely incapable of building any new subway lines despite much greater demand now.
Infrastructure in this country is decaying and crumbling because we as a country simply can't get anything done any more.
Check out the high-speed rail in California: they spent $1 Billion (!) on it, and didn't build anything at all! Where'd the money go? It wasn't to any kind of construction.
If you want to see any kind of infrastructure projects getting built, you have to get outside the USA to see it, because we just don't build anything anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @06:16PM
According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], 1 story per day was the goal but they only actually achieved 4½ stories per week. Still impressive and was apparently a record pace at the time.
However you also have to consider when comparing to modern projects that many workers were killed during construction, and as a society we tend to frown upon that sort of thing these days.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @06:47PM
Well that's doesn't seem too surprising. A mere billion dollars does not sound like enough to build anything of the sort? Can you even build a regular rail line in the US for that price?
Even comparing to historical high speed rail projects this seems exceedingly low. For example, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen had a construction budget of ¥300 billion in 1958 (a quick search for historical exchange rates, seems worth about USD 6 billion today). It apparently went way over budget (I could not find a final cost figure in a quick search), and I suspect the cost of living in Japan was massively lower in 1958 than it is in California today...
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Friday October 16 2020, @03:02PM
Wrong question to ask. The Left question would be:
If you subsidized rural broadband, and paid two companies money to provide it. One company took the money and did nothing for rural people. SpaceX took the money after partially building and demonstrating a working solution. Which company actually improved the lives of rural people?
Does it matter if land based cables / fiber are cheaper, if nobody will build it?
The question is similar to comparing SpaceX success with "old space" companies that have "experience" at much higher prices, but can't seem to deliver what is being paid for. Help, we need cost plus!
I won't bring up Tesla vs legacy ICE car companies that merely tiptoe into the market and get their toes moist, but have no serious plans to build scalable EVs that would destroy their existing market, production, factories, worker skills. Very much like horse and buggy vs automobile. So if there were incentives to build zero emission vehicles, would it really matter, or does it matter which companies will actually build it?
Then there are the merits of Beta vs VHS we could discuss.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:43PM
In addition to Mr. Musk has to prove he can do it with a viable technology,
How about have you applied for these funds before and how did it work out?
We paid to make Rural America fiber rich, but maybe got 5G instead.