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SpaceX Won “Rural” FCC Funding in Surprising Places, Like Major Airports

posted by martyb on Thursday December 17 2020, @03:17AM   Printer-friendly

Fnord666 writes:

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

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:38AM (1 child)

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday December 17 2020, @08:38AM (#1088495)
    They will of course serve all areas more or less equally (depending on the orbits coverage might fall off as you near the poles though), but this is a subsidy so I expect the FCC's money is supposed to be passed directly onto the consumer, either by means of paying a reduced rate or getting some other form of rebate. For instance, if Starlink's eventual rate for a given level of service is $50/mo then someone in a subsidised area might only pay $35/mo for the exact same service, or might get their upfront "setup costs" for the supply and install of the receiver waived but still pay the $50/mo service cost.
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday December 17 2020, @02:48PM

    by ElizabethGreene (6748) on Thursday December 17 2020, @02:48PM (#1088547)

    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.