The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday reaffirmed its 2022 decision to deny SpaceX satellite internet unit Starlink $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies.
The FCC said the decision impacting Elon Musk’s space company was based on Starlink’s failure to meet basic program requirements and that Starlink could not demonstrate it could deliver promised service after SpaceX had challeged the 2022 decision.
That is true for absolutely every connection type. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and for any sort of wireless system it is going to be limited by physics in a way wired connections are not.
Your home Wi-Fi connection does the same thing if you have a bunch of devices doing things at the same time. There’s a reason MIMO is becoming a necessity even on home Wi-Fi networks, the average home now has a ton of devices when you start adding things like home assistants, smart devices, phones, tablets, doorbells, etc. onto that network. On a larger scale, the mobile networks have congestion issues all the time as well.
Fiber will never be coming to the rural areas where satellite is really the only option now. The return on investment simply doesn’t exist. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy, and the number of customers is simply too low. Unless the government subsidizes it, it will never be installed. And even then, the providers will still not install it and lobby to remove the deployment requirements after they have been paid to do it. They have already done that multiple times since the 1990s, and we’re still being charged for these via surcharges on our monthly bills for things they never did.
Only if capitalists sell bandwidth they don’t have. If I have a 10gbps uplink. And I split the cost and bandwidth equally with 9 other people. Everyone is guaranteed 1gbps at all times. If I brought an 11th person in on the deal. No matter what. No one would be able to get more than 900 megabit per second under maximum load despite the promised 1 gigabit. That’s just capitalist theft.
No. That’s not theft, that’s called selling a specific service amount for a set price. Unused bandwidth is wasted bandwidth. A provider wants the service usage to be near 100% all the time for that return on investment. Oversubscribing is definitely a thing, and every provider does it to some extent, because most people are not on at the same time using full bandwidth. What matters is if they’re maintaining and upgrading infrastructure to keep the service provided within the range they guarantee.
No provider is going to charge a couple hundred dollars a month for you to have your own satellite to yourself, but they can balance the number of subscribers and usage patterns to keep performance in the advertised range. It just depends how well they are able to do that. Starlink is not a fully deployed service, less than half of the currently planned 12,000 satellite constellation is up so far. And they’re already looking at expansion up to 42,000 satellites. Every new launch means more coverage, better stability and more available bandwidth. Some areas have more capacity and coverage than others simply because there are still gaps in the unfinished constellation. This isn’t a GEO satellite service where your satellite is sitting up above at the same constant point with a set capability and supported number of subscribers, where upgrades require replacing the satellite. Starlink can upgrade services by adding satellites to the existing service.
It’s a practice called over selling and no, it is absolutely theft. If it wasn’t theft we would allow it in other areas. Why can’t your electric company do the same to you ? The wires can carry a specific amount of current at any one time. Why aren’t they charging you for that total capacity whether or not you’ll ever use it? The pipes to your house can carry a specific volume of water per hour. Why don’t they charge you even if it doesn’t? Why is it that if you sell 16 oz jars of peanut butter that customers find only actually have about 4 oz on average? You end up in court. But when you sell people, bandwidth etc. That you don’t have. It’s just called good business. Basically why, if this isn’t theft, is it only allowed in the telecommunications industry? And only in consumer telecommunications. Business service is guaranteed bandwidth that they pay for.
It is quite literally theft/ a scam. Just like them selling connections with no cap on total data transfer. That they then proceeded to heavily throttle the moment you went over a few gigabytes. Quickly doing away with it the moment the government started taking a look into their dishonest practices. It’s only “allowed” currently, because not enough consumers are informed enough to really object. ISPs seriously make used car salesmen look almost decent.
I don’t know of a single provider in my area that advertises a range, they advertise a single number.
Maybe if we required them to advertise a range that might be better? 900mbs-1gbps with aim for over half time+ at 1gbps