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SpaceX Won "rural" FCC Funding in Surprising Places, Like Major Airports
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is "subsidiz[ing] broadband for the rich," according to the title of an analysis last week by Derek Turner, research director at advocacy group Free Press. Turner has a strong track record analyzing FCC broadband data and last year found major errors in Pai's broadband-deployment claims.
[...] SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said Starlink is targeted at rural areas and "will serve the hardest-to-serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble" reaching. While SpaceX did get FCC funding for plenty of rural areas, it also won "the right to serve a large number of very urban areas that the FCC's broken system deemed eligible for awards," Turner wrote. For example, Turner wrote that SpaceX won broadband subsidies in locations at or adjacent to major airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New York City, Seattle, Las Vegas, Newark, Miami, Boston, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood, Detroit, and Philadelphia.
[...] The RDOF[*] and other universal service programs run by the FCC are paid for by Americans through fees imposed on phone bills. According to rules set by the FCC, the entire $9.2 billion must fund deployment only in census blocks where no ISPs report offering service with at least 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds.
But census blocks are small, and blocks that are counted as unserved "may be surrounded on all sides by fiber," Turner told Ars via email. "That's because of an important design flaw in the FCC's mapping system: ISPs are [required] to report the blocks where they currently offer service or could without extraordinary use of resources within a 10-day period. Thus a block can show up as 'unserved' even though it isn't any more expensive than any typical block to serve; it just means an ISP didn't claim the block."
SpaceX "appears to have played by the rules. But the FCC's rules created a broken system," Turner wrote in his post on the Free Press site. "By bidding for subsidies assigned to dense urban areas, Musk's firm and others were able to get potentially hundreds of millions in subsidies meant for people and businesses in rural areas that would never see broadband deployment without the government's help."
RDOF - Rural Digital Opportunity Fund
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Thursday December 17 2020, @03:34AM (14 children)
If they can get it off the ground and serve urban areas, won't rural areas also get covered at the same time? It's not like they have to dig or something.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Thursday December 17 2020, @05:13AM (2 children)
I'm told teh satellites won't be very effective in dense urban areas becaues of too much demand. But is anything stopping Google from isntalling their fibre networks in those newly acquired urban areas?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2020, @01:16PM (1 child)
"anything stopping Google from isntalling their fibre networks in those newly acquired urban areas?"
not profitable because it sucks to live in areas around major airports so people with money don't?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @06:34PM
If I'm reading it right then those areas aren't populated at all because they are too close to the runways. There are laws requiring exclusion zones around airports and some jurisdictions actually follow them. The FCC offering 'rural subsidies' for areas like that is a classic case of graft through regulatory capture, and the only reason this is in the news is because someone who isn't a major telco or cable company got a slice of the pie.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:38AM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday December 17 2020, @02:48PM
AFAIK, this isn't that kind of subsidy. It was designed to help defray the cost of building infrastructure, not provide a direct-to-consumer payment or rebate. The companies in question can spend it on underwater basketweaving as long as they can deliver the services specified under the contract.
(Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Thursday December 17 2020, @10:59AM (7 children)
It's more like satellite TV than a satellite phone - the receiver is about 50 cm across
https://hackaday.com/2020/11/25/literally-tearing-apart-a-spacex-starlink-antenna/ [hackaday.com]
Presumably in order to serve higher bandwidth or multiple simultaneous customers they more/larger dishes and some sort of WLAN. I guess coupled with a installation costs, it ends up costing few $10k for each installation.
FTFS:
> potentially hundreds of millions
Presumably that really means 10s of millions, i.e. few thousand installations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2020, @01:11PM (6 children)
Thanks for the Hackaday link. That is one heck of an antenna! Not only is it phased array for rapid tracking, it also has tilt and pan motor drive. Waaay more sophisticated than a sat TV dish that points at one geosynchronous satellite.
Winter is here in the northern hemisphere, it will be interesting to hear reports about how this works with wind, snow and ice loads. Or, maybe you have to keep it under cover? Will it work in an attic with a couple of layers of shingles on the roof, or will it need a little https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radome [wikipedia.org] ??
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday December 17 2020, @02:24PM (5 children)
It has some self-heating. It's certified to work down to -30°C. That might be a problem for some Canadians.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacexs-starlink-targets-january-for-wider-public-beta-test [pcmag.com]
Supposedly, the dish costs $2,400 to make. So at $500 they are losing a lot on each one. For now at least.
https://archive.is/P54Dd [archive.is]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday December 17 2020, @04:13PM (4 children)
I think the plan is to make it up in volume.
Sell enough of them, the losses get big enough to wrap around into big positive numbers.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Thursday December 17 2020, @05:40PM (2 children)
Joking aside, the obvious business plan involves acquiring the customer with an initial loss. Then charge the customer a monthly fee that is greater than the unit cost to operate the service. The initial loss will turn into a profit in some acceptable time frame. There may even be some sliding loss windows, but the aggregate will be a nice profit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday December 17 2020, @05:48PM (1 child)
I seem to recall cell phones working that way about twenty years ago.
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2020, @06:37PM
Any cellphone contract that includes a 'free' phone works that way, even now.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:07PM
And with Christmas coming up, there's also time to provide improved incentives to buy them [giantitp.com].
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday December 17 2020, @10:03PM
To clear up any confusion:
The satellites are the thingies in the sky overhead.
Not the round dish thing on the ground.
SpaceX Starlink antenna is not a parabolic dish antenna as is used by most satellite ground receivers. (In Starlink case, it is a transceiver.)
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.