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.
Rurally here, HughesNet has existed for years. I have never used its service, but why would anyone have been compelled to switch to Starlink?
In theory, StarLink would have been faster because they use many low-orbit satellites as opposed to a handful of further-away geostationary satellites like HughesNet. But “faster speeds” isn’t everything and this money is meant to expand actual broadband/optical internet.
Thanks. The speed part does make sense.
If they were able to meet the actual up/down metrics for the subsidy, I don’t see why they shouldn’t get it. But they weren’t able to do that, so they don’t get the subsidy.
Affordability is also a thing
The subsidy had a goal of 2025, they said you won’t make it there in 2022. The money was going to be used to help make it there by 2025.
Hughes net is popular in my area. It has such severe latency it is unusable for gaming, unfortunately.
Wouldn’t the latency be an issue for Starlink as well? At some point, you’re fighting the speed of light.
https://www.gsma.com/get-involved/gsma-membership/gsma_resources/new-speedtest-data-shows-starlink-performance-is-mixed-but-thats-a-good-thing/
I thought I read that the latency increased since it first launched but it seems like they’re doing pretty well.
No, due to the physical location of the sats. A much lower orbit and light delay only adds like 30ms of latency, versus HighesNet with something in the realm of 700ms.
Looks like Hughesnet starts at 15 GB per month and 15Mbs down for $49.99 a month**
That is pretty bad.
It’s better to just use Visible. $25/month for unlimited data.
not everywhere has cell service
Ping/latency…and upload speed.
Traditional satellite internet using geostationary satellites not only have bandwidth limitations but also very high latency. This is simply physics, even at the speed of light, GEO is pretty darn far out. For regular web browsing that’s not an issue, but anything that is latency dependent either starts failing or becomes unbearable.
Latency to GEO is about 500 milliseconds, that’s half a second for a request you send to get up there, then another half second for it to be sent back to ground stations, then normal internet latency, then another second back up and then down to you. So you have normal internet latency, plus 2 seconds, at the best of times. So things like VoIP and gaming often have many more issues, or sometimes may not even be really usable.
The Starlink contstellation being in a Low Earth Orbit means a much lower latency. Real world latency has been around or below 100ms total, similar to LTE latency times. In the real world it is just more like a mobile connection that works even in the middle of nowhere.