7 ms·

FCC has “serious doubts” that SpaceX can deliver latencies under 100ms

59 points by kyle_morris_ 6y ago

tomohawk 6y ago
It would be great if LEO could solve the rural broadband access problem, but why should taxpayer dollars be provided to companies that do not have a proven solution? Time after time various businesses such as Frontier have gamed the system without providing any value.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Seems like easy solution is make it a loan. If they make it work, they can keep the money for free, if not, they pay back with interest.
  - laurowyn 6y ago
    And when they declare bankruptcy because they can't pay back the loan with interest? Payment upon delivery is how most business-to-business purchases work. You agree a cost, deliver the item, then get paid. Being paid before delivery gives no incentive to deliver what was requested.
    - noway421 6y ago
      payment before delivery is ubiquitous in SaaS
- bsder 6y ago
  Or we could, you know, take all that money, dig some trenches, and lay a whole lotta fibre. We can solve rural access. You have a "Rural Fibre Project" like you had the "Rural Electrification Project" and you get on with life. Ajit Pai and the telecoms simply don't want to because the telecoms would vaporize overnight everywhere that suddenly got fibre.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    There are people in rural areas with mile long driveways. Cost-per-mile makes a lot of rural places cost-prohibitive. Not just for fiber; lots of rural areas don’t have sewer or water coverage, either.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Haven't we already paid for the rural broadband access project a bunch of times, both at a state and local level? If starlink does what it's supposed to, it should provide a pretty good experience that works best in rural areas precisely because of the sparseness of users that makes wiring each home expensive. Certainly, giving the money and hoping it works as advertised isn't a good idea --- for all providers. For nationwide providers, these should be allocated whatever way, then the provider should post a bond and get their money and the grant money upon completion. If they don't complete it on time, the grant money and the bond roll down to the projects that were approved but didn't get funded because of the spending cap. Posting a bond for a hyper local provider might be problematic, but hyper local providers probably have a better track record of delivery, so they could have more generous pay as you go grant terms.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
      YES. ATT collected a half-trillion dollars in authorized overcharges to existing landlines, on the promise to build out rural fiber. They did do some build-out. (One such fiber bundle terminates a few yards from my house.) ATT did not promise to light it up, and haven't, in ten years. But they pocketed the money.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  FWIW, SpaceX has proven it can solve problems and make viable, honest business, and Elon's other company, Tesla, is known to repay government loans on time and with interest. So if anyone is to get a taxpayer-funded loan, SpaceX is one of the best bets.
iaw 6y ago
If my math is right geostationary satellites have a round-trip time (just at speed of light in a vacuum) of ~240 mS whie LEO satellites have a round-trip time of ~13 mS. Current observed latency on geostationary satellite uplinks is 550 mS, presuming delays scale linearly with the travel time in vacuum that puts us at ~30 mS round-trip for LEO satellites. Sub-100 mS seems physically possible to me but from an engineering and volume perspective there may be a real challenge. Anyone with more knowledge care to chime in?
- T-A 6y ago
  From the FCC quote in the article: "Propagation delay in a satellite network does not alone account for latency in other parts of the network such as processing, routing, and transporting traffic to its destination." In other words, client and server are not both sitting right under the same satellite. The trip to and from LEO is just part of the full route; you also have server to ground station and (in future) uplink satellite to downlink satellite (AFAIK Starlink currently doesn't do that).
  - messe 6y ago
    Is there any public documentation on how much of the round-trip time the processing and routing takes up? It has had the shit optimized out of it every else, so I can't imagine it would get significantly worse for a satellite, especially one of SpaceX's which attempt to use commodity hardware as much as possible.
    - wtracy 6y ago
      Satellites have to operate in a very different thermal and radiation environment than most networking hardware. Cooling is very difficult when you're surrounded by a vacuum. Also, without the planet acting as a heat sink, the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures is staggering. I don't actually know to what extent radiation hardening is a concern for these satellites. They're well below the Van Allen Belt, so the background radiation is nothing like deep space. Still, it's something you need to consider for systems that are expected to have years of continuous uptime. (The Russians use commodity PC hardware on the ISS for systems not involved in navigation or life support. But that's a situation where there are people around to hit the power button.) Not to mention that replacing hardware is expensive, and repair is basically impossible, so there are incentives to prioritize reliability over performance.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ericson2314 6y ago
How about money back if they don't deliver? Even better would be bounty after delivering the service, but I do see how it's hard to combine that with the (reverse) auction mechanism.
- blackearl 6y ago
  It would be nice if we could get back the hundreds of billions given to telecoms in the 90s so that they could wire the whole US instead
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    Indeed!
cagenut 6y ago
If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for "processing [&] routing" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.
- mhandley 6y ago
  Thanks - those are my videos. If you've got any questions, I'll try and answer them. One key limitation is that they only model the propagation delay, so achieving those latencies also assumes that serialization delays and queuing delays are minimal. Serialization should be pretty negligible, but queuing will greatly depend on the network architecture adopted. There have been a number of ideas developed by the research community over the decades that are hard to apply in the Internet, but which might work well in a private network like Starlink. So I have confidence that it can be done, but I don't know at the moment how SpaceX actually plan to do this part.
  - cagenut 6y ago
    no specific questions but thank you for making the videos, they're so much easier to follow than reading an fcc filing (for me at least). if you setup a patreon, and every time spacex updated a filing you turned around an updated video that week, i'd pitch in. I think you'll find interest in starlink among people with dozens of dollars to spare is pretty high.
mhandley 6y ago
There's no doubt that this sort of technology can in principle deliver sub-100ms latencies. Take a look at my analysis here with inter-satellite links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU And here without ISLs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY Now, these videos assume no queuing delay. It's really hard to guarantee low queuing delay in a traditional IP network, but there's been a lot of research over the years, and we have a range of ideas that can be used to deliver minimal queuing with reasonable utilization. In fact doing this for Starlink is something I'm actively researching at the moment. I'm convinced it can be done, but it won't look like a conventional IP network internally. I don't know what SpaceX will actually do, so if the FCC has doubts, this is perhaps where they are concerned. Other delays might be in the ground segment, but that's more or less the same for SpaceX's terestrial competitors, and the FCC seems to think they can do it.
- portillo 6y ago
  These analyses are quite optimistic as they only consider propagation delay. Moreover, the idea of using user-terminals/gateways as ground-relays to bounce signals up-and-down is quite impractical, since you would be greatly reducing the capacity available to satellites on those "intermediate" satellite.
  - mhandley 6y ago
    Using user terminals was as much of a thought experiment as anything. The graphs in the video show you can do pretty well just using a few well placed groundstations - you can shave another millisecond or three off with higher densities, but it's not a lot. The big advantage of higher densities is really that you can get better spatial reuse - with more possible choices you can use RF uplinks in places where the spectrum would otherwise go unused, whereas you've less freedom to choose if you've fewer groundstations. Having said that, this kind of wide-area low-latency bounced routing is never going to be used for you or me to watch Netflix. It will be reserved for high paying customers who really really care about latency. For you and me, we'll be dumped into the terestrial network at the nearest possible location that isn't already saturated. The second generation of satellites should have optical inter-satellite links, and then you would only use ground relays rarely.
trynumber9 6y ago
Why give money to unproven technology when we know ground networks work and can be low latency? Surely there is a market for Starlink even without government funding. Then after they prove it is reliably low latency they can apply again. This isn't DARPA it's the FCC.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Ground networks work… where someone bothers to deploy one. The problem in rural areas is that no one does.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    And places with no competition. Some times there is a ground network, or at most two (in the US, this tends to be Comcast and AT&T).
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    And most of the undeveloped world.
- seastonATccs 6y ago
  Because in the US broadband ISPs wont wire up rural areas. My local school district has 40% of homes that cable will not wire. 13% of them can not get cell service at home. They have taken so many millions of dollars in state and federal money to provide service, but utterly fail to do so. We had a real good opportunity to build a public ISP to service our school district. A local Indian reservation had built up the expertise as they had accomplished it on their lands and was offering it to us. We partnered with a quasi-public development authority to handle purchasing and installation of equipment. Site surveys. State/Federal licencing. Starting an ISP is hard. The week before we were to start installing equipment on end users homes the cable company, who previously said they no objection to this, dropped a lawsuit. This was after thousands of hours of work and many thousands of dollars spent. We knew we didn't have the money to fight it in courts so we folded. If they had said they would have objected from the start we would not have gone done the path we did. This venture was to provide students internet access for a tiny rural school district. They have YET to increase their footprint in this rural area. So I hope starlink takes every fucking customer they have.
savrajsingh 6y ago
Why the snarkiness from the FCC? They could have just said, "you can have the funding if you can show low latency, please prove it to us" -- end of story. It sort of reveals that they are already siding with / super-chummy with / in the pocket of the terrestrial ISPs, no?
- grecy 6y ago
  Of course it does. How many billions have the terrestrial ISPs lobbied over the years. They expect results for all that money and they want competitors to be severely discouraged or downright banned.
- m463 6y ago
  It could be that the FCC has seen a lot of presentations on the difficulties in assuring low latency and how it has been tackled. Or the technical people in the FCC understand the technical difficulties and can't let any player make claims without ensuring they back it up. (Or the FCC has a strong well funded relationship with incumbent telecommunications carriers)
jtchang 6y ago
The FCC is fairly conservative on what they believe can be delivered and rightly so. However this is the kind of technology that as taxpayers we should be funding. Things that are right at the envelope of possibility. It's not impossible but highly complex and involves a ton of calculations. Sounds exactly the kind of problem that technology is good at solving.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Given the current management, I wouldn’t discount politicking as motivation (to what end I have no clue).
teleforce 6y ago
Generally there are four types of internet delay namely propagation delay, processing delay, queueing delay and transmission delay. For satellite link, regardless of Geo or Leo the propagation delay will be dominating the equations. I believe Starlink's engineers would have figured all the delay situations to claim less than 100ms latency and hopefully they will publish a credible white paper about it to refute FCC's counter claim. Elon if you're reading this please send email to my username on Gmail for a third party verification of the latency, and of course with a small amount of fee in USD :-)
new_realist 6y ago
I suspect a large portion of this latency will arise from the use of error correcting codes, time division multiplexing, and utilization tricks (i.e. compression) employed on the RF uplink and downlink. And that’s ignoring the queuing delay that anyone who is within three hours/150 miles of a major city will experience. Users from the cities will choke the satellites.
tobmlt 6y ago
It’s amazing to me that we allow a regulatory body the power to decide, before a system is even built, whether it qualifies as a “such-and-such performance” system. Why not just wait and see before potentially excluding LEO providers from certain spectrum auctions? Why? Hmmm... the idea of regulatory capture by incumbents provides one potential answer. Then again what’s the risk? If the new folks meet the bar, you can always change the rules.
- trynumber9 6y ago
  They are rejecting them from the low-latency category, which includes most of the funds, until LEO providers prove they are in fact low latency. If they manage to prove their network's merits then they will be eligible for future auctions. Seems fair to me. > If SpaceX and similar companies are rejected from the low-latency category, they will be at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion—$1.6 billion yearly, over ten years—from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The auction, scheduled to begin on October 29, will give ISPs funding to deploy broadband in census blocks where no provider offers home-Internet speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. >The FCC will prioritize low-latency networks when awarding funding, so SpaceX and other LEO providers could come up short against terrestrial networks. Even DSL providers would have an advantage over LEO networks in funding battles if the satellite companies are placed in the FCC's high-latency category.
Havoc 6y ago
This feels like FCC just making noise to prove that they won't just grant it to SpaceX because they're hot right now
totetsu 6y ago
I'm going to miss looking at the stars and not seeing satellites.
ncmncm 6y ago
There is a subtext here that is not about the facts. Speculating, people influencing the FCC might be trying to reduce the availability of investment capital to SpaceX, and increase it to incumbents. If I were an incumbent, I would be very worried indeed. If I supplied capital to incumbents, I would be demanding a greater risk premium, about now.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I remain sceptical for several reasons: While these are early alpha at best, so is Starlink atm because it currently lacks the sat to sat laser comms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite Furthermore there are [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN and [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber to be taken into account, which all have the potential to change the equations without spamming the skies, or at least less so.

59 points by kyle_morris_ 6y ago

It would be great if LEO could solve the rural broadband access problem, but why should taxpayer dollars be provided to companies that do not have a proven solution? Time after time various businesses such as Frontier have gamed the system without providing any value.

bawolff 6y ago
Seems like easy solution is make it a loan. If they make it work, they can keep the money for free, if not, they pay back with interest.
- laurowyn 6y ago
  And when they declare bankruptcy because they can't pay back the loan with interest? Payment upon delivery is how most business-to-business purchases work. You agree a cost, deliver the item, then get paid. Being paid before delivery gives no incentive to deliver what was requested.
  - noway421 6y ago
    payment before delivery is ubiquitous in SaaS
bsder 6y ago
Or we could, you know, take all that money, dig some trenches, and lay a whole lotta fibre. We can solve rural access. You have a "Rural Fibre Project" like you had the "Rural Electrification Project" and you get on with life. Ajit Pai and the telecoms simply don't want to because the telecoms would vaporize overnight everywhere that suddenly got fibre.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  There are people in rural areas with mile long driveways. Cost-per-mile makes a lot of rural places cost-prohibitive. Not just for fiber; lots of rural areas don’t have sewer or water coverage, either.
- toast0 6y ago
  Haven't we already paid for the rural broadband access project a bunch of times, both at a state and local level? If starlink does what it's supposed to, it should provide a pretty good experience that works best in rural areas precisely because of the sparseness of users that makes wiring each home expensive. Certainly, giving the money and hoping it works as advertised isn't a good idea --- for all providers. For nationwide providers, these should be allocated whatever way, then the provider should post a bond and get their money and the grant money upon completion. If they don't complete it on time, the grant money and the bond roll down to the projects that were approved but didn't get funded because of the spending cap. Posting a bond for a hyper local provider might be problematic, but hyper local providers probably have a better track record of delivery, so they could have more generous pay as you go grant terms.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    YES. ATT collected a half-trillion dollars in authorized overcharges to existing landlines, on the promise to build out rural fiber. They did do some build-out. (One such fiber bundle terminates a few yards from my house.) ATT did not promise to light it up, and haven't, in ten years. But they pocketed the money.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
FWIW, SpaceX has proven it can solve problems and make viable, honest business, and Elon's other company, Tesla, is known to repay government loans on time and with interest. So if anyone is to get a taxpayer-funded loan, SpaceX is one of the best bets.

iaw 6y ago

If my math is right geostationary satellites have a round-trip time (just at speed of light in a vacuum) of ~240 mS whie LEO satellites have a round-trip time of ~13 mS. Current observed latency on geostationary satellite uplinks is 550 mS, presuming delays scale linearly with the travel time in vacuum that puts us at ~30 mS round-trip for LEO satellites. Sub-100 mS seems physically possible to me but from an engineering and volume perspective there may be a real challenge. Anyone with more knowledge care to chime in?

T-A 6y ago
From the FCC quote in the article: "Propagation delay in a satellite network does not alone account for latency in other parts of the network such as processing, routing, and transporting traffic to its destination." In other words, client and server are not both sitting right under the same satellite. The trip to and from LEO is just part of the full route; you also have server to ground station and (in future) uplink satellite to downlink satellite (AFAIK Starlink currently doesn't do that).
- messe 6y ago
  Is there any public documentation on how much of the round-trip time the processing and routing takes up? It has had the shit optimized out of it every else, so I can't imagine it would get significantly worse for a satellite, especially one of SpaceX's which attempt to use commodity hardware as much as possible.
  - wtracy 6y ago
    Satellites have to operate in a very different thermal and radiation environment than most networking hardware. Cooling is very difficult when you're surrounded by a vacuum. Also, without the planet acting as a heat sink, the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures is staggering. I don't actually know to what extent radiation hardening is a concern for these satellites. They're well below the Van Allen Belt, so the background radiation is nothing like deep space. Still, it's something you need to consider for systems that are expected to have years of continuous uptime. (The Russians use commodity PC hardware on the ISS for systems not involved in navigation or life support. But that's a situation where there are people around to hit the power button.) Not to mention that replacing hardware is expensive, and repair is basically impossible, so there are incentives to prioritize reliability over performance.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Ericson2314 6y ago

How about money back if they don't deliver? Even better would be bounty after delivering the service, but I do see how it's hard to combine that with the (reverse) auction mechanism.

blackearl 6y ago
It would be nice if we could get back the hundreds of billions given to telecoms in the 90s so that they could wire the whole US instead
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  Indeed!

cagenut 6y ago

If you want a really great visualization and latency estimates for starlink check out the models and videos this guy came up with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY The comment from the FCC about it not accounting for "processing [&] routing" is kindof nonsense on its face, those are not novel problems they're already done by ever other router and switch, including several other satellite networks.

mhandley 6y ago
Thanks - those are my videos. If you've got any questions, I'll try and answer them. One key limitation is that they only model the propagation delay, so achieving those latencies also assumes that serialization delays and queuing delays are minimal. Serialization should be pretty negligible, but queuing will greatly depend on the network architecture adopted. There have been a number of ideas developed by the research community over the decades that are hard to apply in the Internet, but which might work well in a private network like Starlink. So I have confidence that it can be done, but I don't know at the moment how SpaceX actually plan to do this part.
- cagenut 6y ago
  no specific questions but thank you for making the videos, they're so much easier to follow than reading an fcc filing (for me at least). if you setup a patreon, and every time spacex updated a filing you turned around an updated video that week, i'd pitch in. I think you'll find interest in starlink among people with dozens of dollars to spare is pretty high.

mhandley 6y ago

There's no doubt that this sort of technology can in principle deliver sub-100ms latencies. Take a look at my analysis here with inter-satellite links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIUdMiColU And here without ISLs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m05abdGSOxY Now, these videos assume no queuing delay. It's really hard to guarantee low queuing delay in a traditional IP network, but there's been a lot of research over the years, and we have a range of ideas that can be used to deliver minimal queuing with reasonable utilization. In fact doing this for Starlink is something I'm actively researching at the moment. I'm convinced it can be done, but it won't look like a conventional IP network internally. I don't know what SpaceX will actually do, so if the FCC has doubts, this is perhaps where they are concerned. Other delays might be in the ground segment, but that's more or less the same for SpaceX's terestrial competitors, and the FCC seems to think they can do it.

portillo 6y ago
These analyses are quite optimistic as they only consider propagation delay. Moreover, the idea of using user-terminals/gateways as ground-relays to bounce signals up-and-down is quite impractical, since you would be greatly reducing the capacity available to satellites on those "intermediate" satellite.
- mhandley 6y ago
  Using user terminals was as much of a thought experiment as anything. The graphs in the video show you can do pretty well just using a few well placed groundstations - you can shave another millisecond or three off with higher densities, but it's not a lot. The big advantage of higher densities is really that you can get better spatial reuse - with more possible choices you can use RF uplinks in places where the spectrum would otherwise go unused, whereas you've less freedom to choose if you've fewer groundstations. Having said that, this kind of wide-area low-latency bounced routing is never going to be used for you or me to watch Netflix. It will be reserved for high paying customers who really really care about latency. For you and me, we'll be dumped into the terestrial network at the nearest possible location that isn't already saturated. The second generation of satellites should have optical inter-satellite links, and then you would only use ground relays rarely.

trynumber9 6y ago

Why give money to unproven technology when we know ground networks work and can be low latency? Surely there is a market for Starlink even without government funding. Then after they prove it is reliably low latency they can apply again. This isn't DARPA it's the FCC.

ceejayoz 6y ago
Ground networks work… where someone bothers to deploy one. The problem in rural areas is that no one does.
- outworlder 6y ago
  And places with no competition. Some times there is a ground network, or at most two (in the US, this tends to be Comcast and AT&T).
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  And most of the undeveloped world.
seastonATccs 6y ago
Because in the US broadband ISPs wont wire up rural areas. My local school district has 40% of homes that cable will not wire. 13% of them can not get cell service at home. They have taken so many millions of dollars in state and federal money to provide service, but utterly fail to do so. We had a real good opportunity to build a public ISP to service our school district. A local Indian reservation had built up the expertise as they had accomplished it on their lands and was offering it to us. We partnered with a quasi-public development authority to handle purchasing and installation of equipment. Site surveys. State/Federal licencing. Starting an ISP is hard. The week before we were to start installing equipment on end users homes the cable company, who previously said they no objection to this, dropped a lawsuit. This was after thousands of hours of work and many thousands of dollars spent. We knew we didn't have the money to fight it in courts so we folded. If they had said they would have objected from the start we would not have gone done the path we did. This venture was to provide students internet access for a tiny rural school district. They have YET to increase their footprint in this rural area. So I hope starlink takes every fucking customer they have.

savrajsingh 6y ago

Why the snarkiness from the FCC? They could have just said, "you can have the funding if you can show low latency, please prove it to us" -- end of story. It sort of reveals that they are already siding with / super-chummy with / in the pocket of the terrestrial ISPs, no?

grecy 6y ago
Of course it does. How many billions have the terrestrial ISPs lobbied over the years. They expect results for all that money and they want competitors to be severely discouraged or downright banned.
m463 6y ago
It could be that the FCC has seen a lot of presentations on the difficulties in assuring low latency and how it has been tackled. Or the technical people in the FCC understand the technical difficulties and can't let any player make claims without ensuring they back it up. (Or the FCC has a strong well funded relationship with incumbent telecommunications carriers)

jtchang 6y ago

The FCC is fairly conservative on what they believe can be delivered and rightly so. However this is the kind of technology that as taxpayers we should be funding. Things that are right at the envelope of possibility. It's not impossible but highly complex and involves a ton of calculations. Sounds exactly the kind of problem that technology is good at solving.

monadic2 6y ago
Given the current management, I wouldn’t discount politicking as motivation (to what end I have no clue).

teleforce 6y ago

Generally there are four types of internet delay namely propagation delay, processing delay, queueing delay and transmission delay. For satellite link, regardless of Geo or Leo the propagation delay will be dominating the equations. I believe Starlink's engineers would have figured all the delay situations to claim less than 100ms latency and hopefully they will publish a credible white paper about it to refute FCC's counter claim. Elon if you're reading this please send email to my username on Gmail for a third party verification of the latency, and of course with a small amount of fee in USD :-)

new_realist 6y ago

I suspect a large portion of this latency will arise from the use of error correcting codes, time division multiplexing, and utilization tricks (i.e. compression) employed on the RF uplink and downlink. And that’s ignoring the queuing delay that anyone who is within three hours/150 miles of a major city will experience. Users from the cities will choke the satellites.

tobmlt 6y ago

It’s amazing to me that we allow a regulatory body the power to decide, before a system is even built, whether it qualifies as a “such-and-such performance” system. Why not just wait and see before potentially excluding LEO providers from certain spectrum auctions? Why? Hmmm... the idea of regulatory capture by incumbents provides one potential answer. Then again what’s the risk? If the new folks meet the bar, you can always change the rules.

trynumber9 6y ago
They are rejecting them from the low-latency category, which includes most of the funds, until LEO providers prove they are in fact low latency. If they manage to prove their network's merits then they will be eligible for future auctions. Seems fair to me. > If SpaceX and similar companies are rejected from the low-latency category, they will be at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion—$1.6 billion yearly, over ten years—from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The auction, scheduled to begin on October 29, will give ISPs funding to deploy broadband in census blocks where no provider offers home-Internet speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. >The FCC will prioritize low-latency networks when awarding funding, so SpaceX and other LEO providers could come up short against terrestrial networks. Even DSL providers would have an advantage over LEO networks in funding battles if the satellite companies are placed in the FCC's high-latency category.

Havoc 6y ago

This feels like FCC just making noise to prove that they won't just grant it to SpaceX because they're hot right now

totetsu 6y ago

I'm going to miss looking at the stars and not seeing satellites.

ncmncm 6y ago

There is a subtext here that is not about the facts. Speculating, people influencing the FCC might be trying to reduce the availability of investment capital to SpaceX, and increase it to incumbents. If I were an incumbent, I would be very worried indeed. If I supplied capital to incumbents, I would be demanding a greater risk premium, about now.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

I remain sceptical for several reasons: While these are early alpha at best, so is Starlink atm because it currently lacks the sat to sat laser comms. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_satellite Furthermore there are [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZBLAN and [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber to be taken into account, which all have the potential to change the equations without spamming the skies, or at least less so.