> FCC smacking us (article is more than a little generous towards us, thank Ajit Pai's reputation I guess) This is the FCC protecting incumbent service provide

> FCC smacking us (article is more than a little generous towards us, thank Ajit Pai's reputation I guess) This is the FCC protecting incumbent service providers on the basis that Starlink isn't already widely deployed. They are not claiming that they have any kind of technical analysis that Starlink will not in fact be low-latency (the threshold is a full 100ms, so not incredibly strict). They are claiming that simply because they do not already offer the service they will get lumped in with the high latency geo-stationary sat link providers; "In the absence of a real world example of a non-geostationary orbit satellite network offering mass market fixed service to residential consumers that is able to meet our 100ms round trip latency requirements, Commission staff could not conclude that such an applicant is reasonably capable of meeting the Commission's low latency requirements, and so we foreclose such applications." Frankly it's very sad, because the $16 billion in rural broadband grants are the perfect application for Starlink. The funds are distributed by "multi-round, descending clock auction where bidders will indicate in each round whether they will bid to provide service to an area at a given performance tier and latency. The auction will end after the aggregate support amount of all bids is less than or equal to the total budget and there is no longer competition for support in any area." [1] I think if Starlink was allowed to bid as both a "low-latency" and "high performance" tiers, then at the pricing level they would likely have come in under, they would have wiped the floor with the competition and won a lion's share of that funding. So the FCC appears to be trying to keep them out of the most lucrative tiers to protect the incumbent approach of extremely expensive rural fiber deployments. IMO a much smarter approach would have been to require some sort of performance bond from every applicant that they will successfully achieve the service levels they are bidding on. It's not like Comcast or Verizon haven't won massive subsidies in the past and then failed to deliver. The approach the FCC is taking (not surprisingly) just limits innovation and wastes taxpayer dollars. Actually in this case the dollars come from customer service fees, but they are effectively taxes. [1] - https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-364457A1.pdf https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-364457A1.pdf