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Comment by ccorda | Hacker News Reader

This was a reverse auction, where the goal was to minimze cost to government to get high speed internet in rural areas.

Starlink bid in the Above Baseline tier, meaning ≥ 100/20 Mbps (with data cap of ≥ 2 TB).

According to the FCC [1], 99.7% of locations are at that tier or higher, and 85%+ in the highest Gigabit (1000/500) tier.

So it looks like the auction funded gigabit where there was a provider bidding at that tier, and the rest went heavily to SpaceX.

One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen, or if Starlink will pick off legacy business so quickly (full launch nationwide next year) such that rural providers aren't able to take the subsidies and actually implement the new offerings.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/matthewberryfcc/status/1335978529...

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>One question I have is whether these gigabit deployments actually happen,

No.

Every time the US gives money to telecoms to roll out fiber, the telecoms play a shell game and disappear the money or use it to fight against municipalities that try to build their own infrastructure.

https://nationaleconomicseditorial.com/2017/11/27/americans-...

Thank you for that link. I remember the disappearance of the Project Pronto money in the 90s, and it's bothered me ever since. It's nice to know I didn't dream the whole thing.

Verizon signed a contract with NYC in 2008 to pull fiber to New Yorkers by 2014 and I still can't get fiber here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At this point I've really given up hope that I'll ever get fiber into the home on a reasonable time scale.

In such a litigious society it's amazing Verizon can't be held to account for this, and at the very least be forced to pay back the money.

It isn't though.

Money = power. The US is a barely veiled oligarchy.

As long as you have enough money to pay off politicians to make it completely ok, you can do whatever you like. After you pocket a bunch of money or whatever other shenigans you want, you dump a percentage of the money into the politcian's re-election campaign.

You don't even have to get politicians to make it legal, you could do other things like getting friendly with judges and passing them thinly veiled bribes as 'gifts'.

Most nerd-types I talk to are in complete denial about this. Almost every US federal judge is the spouse of a corporate lobbyist or political apparatchik. They even get caught sometimes having their spouses taking money from parties to the cases they are hearing but nothing ever happens to them.

In TX, a number of the rural telco providers already have really good service in the towns they cover. Presumably at least partially due to previous handouts of the universal service fund being used for broadband. So I assume the higher tier rollouts are in similar situations.

For example there is a rural co-op that covers a number of the towns just west of where I live. The towns actually have better service than I do (cheaper, and faster) because the entire town is a mile or two along a major highway, and a few rows of residential streets. The density is at least as good as the suburban area I live in for a square mile or so.

Drive a few miles out of town though, and your on some kind of wireless or sat service.

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