Elon Musk's SpaceX on Tuesday ramped up a battle over broadband regulations with Dish Network and an affiliate of billionaire Michael Dell, calling for the FCC to address lingering disputes over broadband use that could interfere with its Starlink satellite internet network.
[...] In January 2021, the Federal Communications Commission issued a notice asking for comment on how to best use the 12-gigahertz band. Dish and RS Access, funded by Dell's investment firm, published studies arguing that ground-based 5G networks could share the frequency with low Earth orbit satellite networks, such as Starlink or OneWeb.
SpaceX filed its analysis of the Dish and RS Access studies on Tuesday, claiming it needed to correct what it called "some of the most egregious assumptions" in the reports, arguing Starlink users would see interference to the point of causing service outages for customers "74% of the time."
Musk's company called on the FCC "to investigate whether DISH and RS Access filed intentionally misleading reports," noting that the studies did not match findings from Dish two years earlier that called sharing usage "not viable."
[...] SpaceX isn't alone in opposing a potential expansion of 12-gigahertz use. Telecom companies, such as AT&T, tech giants Google and Microsoft, as well as satellite network operators such as Intelsat, OneWeb and SES, all filed comments with the federal agency opposing the change.
Senior SpaceX representatives told CNBC the company hopes its analysis will persuade the FCC to see that a decision in favor of Dish and RS Access poses what amounts to an existential threat to the company's Starlink network.
"Leaving the proceeding open any longer simply cannot be justified for policy or technical reasons. Over the six years the Commission has let this proceeding fester, satellite operators have been forced to spend countless hours of engineering time responding to frivolous arguments by DISH and RS Access," SpaceX senior director of satellite policy David Goldman wrote in a letter to the FCC on Tuesday.
See Also: https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/spacex-asserts-5g-would-blow-out-satellite-users-12-ghz-band
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:03AM (3 children)
What do you mean by she's not almighty and miraculous and the sometimes a governing body is necessary?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:38AM (2 children)
One free market solution assigns control of a frequency band to whatever entity pioneers its use. If another entity can make better use of that band, it can buy rights from the pioneer.. Highest bidder wins, and the entity capable of bidding highest should be the one capable of putting the bandwidth to economic best use. No need to petition and bribe government officials, a process which leads to the entity willing to spend the most money on corrupt practices winning.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:54AM
I see. So the free market fairy favors the pioneers rent-seekers and all the other non-pioneers better pay for it.
And they never fight over commons - because there are no commons, first come, first to take ownership. Even more, by God, they are so gentile they never fight over ownership full-stop.
Such are the wonders of the free market fairy - they lived happy ever after. Because they are the very prototype of the New Libertarian Man [wikipedia.org].
Amiright?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @09:45AM
So a governing body gets to decide who is “first” and enforce imaginary property, except might makes right and the rich can steal from the poor. Or do you mean an auction system, like they literally have right now, except with some non-governmental governing body. And I’m sure they will be beyond bribery, unlike the government, somehow.
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:18AM (2 children)
It starts here:
https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2022-June/219789.html [nanog.org]
Basically (AFAICT) its low power 12GHz from LEO vs High power 12GHz from a local cell tower. Guess who wins?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @02:05AM (1 child)
Whoever detonates an A-bomb first?
(Score: 2) by crm114 on Saturday June 25 2022, @02:33AM
Yeah...
World is insane at this point. Would be ironic if the LEO satellites with self-guidance survive the human race.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by krishnoid on Saturday June 25 2022, @03:16AM (5 children)
I've wondered for a while if the whole desktop stack could be designed around expectation of intermittent connectivity -- you click a link, it automatically displays a cached page (if available) and queues it to download an updated version later. Video would be downloaded in pieces so you might be able to watch it in a couple days, but you'd definitely have to wait. Email would stay much the same, downloads would all be queued, etc. Google docs already offers a working offline mode with sync-upon-connect, and other collaborative tools would have to add/improve their sync mechanisms as well.
The UI would just have to do a little more work to reroute the user to previously completed requests, and around things requiring on-demand connectivity, but you could still get things done, just asynchronously and out-of-order [wikipedia.org]. From a workflow perspective, if reliable connectivity could gracefully degrade into the intermittent connectivity case, people might not be put out that much when their network connection drops.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:33AM (2 children)
How does the stack know which links I'm going to click on? Most of my internet is aggregate sites like this one, Fark, and Google News. Are you suggesting my laptop routinely download and store these sites + any new links they contain?
Why shouldn't we judge a book by it's cover? It's got the author, title, and a summary of what the book's about.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:38AM (1 child)
If something's not cached locally or on a municipal caching server or whatever, you get a 404-like page saying "come back later", it stores the URL for downloading in the background when (possibly a daily window of) connectivity becomes available, and (optionally) have it route you to something you wanted to look at earlier which has since loaded. It could provide a delayed option for rural/remote/undeveloped/uninhabited areas, with poor, slow, or intermittent connectivity on the time scale of hours or even days.
Such sites wouldn't be available right when you ask for them, but might be *an* option for extreme situations that could scale with faster connectivity that would let you request many links on say a front page, then read them later as they become available. Storage and CPU is inexpensive nowadays, and while connectivity is cheap, sometimes you simply have to travel "into town" from some remote locations to get it for a while.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday June 25 2022, @06:43AM
Sorry, I'm referring to a browser feature and/or local caching proxy server on the laptop to provide this kind of service. It would require some modifications designed to expect that web page requests could be queued (more like email) and retrieved possibly days later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:28AM
Any change you live in a podunk village in bihar, inida? No offense, despite the poverty, I very much enjoyed visiting patna. Just curious because of your post.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday June 25 2022, @01:44PM
You could request and receive data by email; SMTP works quite fine with intermittent internet. You have to have a local SMTP server running on your computer, of course, but that's how email was originally meant to be used anyway.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @03:58PM (1 child)
dish gets 0-6 ghz
starlink gets 6-12 ghz
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @04:54PM
Muck Fusk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:01PM
Sure would be a shame if the sat cluster that you paid the US for spectrum started to have problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25 2022, @05:32PM
The 12 GHz band is shared between multiple satellite providers with both FCC and international rules to prevent interference. Dish's scheme would break all of them and is blatantly illegal. But that isn't new. Dish is facing billions in fines for frequency squatting and this is an attempt to get out of that while screwing over the competition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @02:22AM (1 child)
Dish certainly has a track record that says that this converision would be a gift.
X is already secondary on this freq, so any guarantee would be a gift.
Is it technically sensible to:
Give Dish rights in highly populated areas where they might actually do something.
Give X rights in the elsewhere, where their ability to economically serve in random places shines.
That won't serve roamers moving between both places, but it might actually make good use of a public resource?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 27 2022, @01:38AM
It isn't just Starlink that will be affected and it won't just affect highly populated areas. This will jam any 12GHz satellite that has line-of-sight to any of Dish's proposed cell towers, which means the blackout zone will be much larger than Dish's coverage area. Starlink could well lose half of their customers because of it. Both OneWeb and Kuiper are in the 12GHz band as well and their satellites are higher so they will be hurt even worse. That's why what Dish is proposing is illegal and the FCC should have thrown it out already.