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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: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday December 17 2020, @04:25AM (2 children)
I am not an expert, but my intuitive understanding is that fixed line infrastructure makes progressively less and less financial sense as population density decreases. I don't see how it can scale to compete against wireless (terrestrial or space based) infrastructure for rural connections. As IOT moves into rural applications fixed line services are going to be in a constant game of catch-up I don't think they can win.
Clarification: They can't win it technically or with infrastructure. Telecom has a long history of killing competition through legislative capture or subsidy programs. It's entirely possible they'll (ab)use that trick again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2020, @06:43AM (1 child)
This is exactly correct. Wired connections, especially fiber, are far cheaper to install and maintain in dense urban environments than in rural areas and have the added benefit of not needing line-of-sight. Terrestrial wireless has both a minimum population to pay for a tower and a maximum receiver count per tower, as well as a distance cost for how far the tower is from a connection point. LEO satellites effectively eliminate the distance cost and the minimum customer base is effectively worldwide.
What I see happening is this:
Urban sticks with fiber and gets the highest bandwidth per $.
Rural areas switch to satellite, and deep rural finally gets service.
Suburban areas are a fight between fiber and satellite depending on how abusive their terrestrial providers are. Expect laws passed banning satellite links just like there are laws banning wireless in many suburban areas. Also expect much flaunting of such laws.
Terrestrial wireless dies out due to loss of market share.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday December 17 2020, @03:29PM
The last line of your post is incorrect, because most of the populace lived in fairly dense areas. So does most of the wealthy populace. It's just more convenient. The really ultra rich can live isolated, and for them it has advantages, but most of them don't choose to do so.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.