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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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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
(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.
The thing about landline phones is that they never get lost. No air tag necessary.
(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.