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Comment by beauzero | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate. The service maps they are using are extremely poor, being charitable. Anecdotally our area is supposed to have 25/3 and I haven't met anyone that has achieved that speed from our DSL provider. Most go with Hughes, etc. Yet our entire service area shows up as 25/3 serviced. On the other side of that there are several areas that are served with cable and a couple with fiber...none of those areas show in the over generalized 25/3 DSL service area.

This feels like part of a larger game. Someone is going after SpaceX, in the government space, is the general feel. First Bezos says that he will discount the moon contract by $2B...and now this. My opinion is that lobbyists are being employed to turn money away from SpaceX and move it back towards more "traditional"/entrenched government contractors across several fronts.

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> The service maps they are using are extremely poor, being charitable.

charity is incorrect, poor by design. from:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26347380

"Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block"

hilarious. surely the burden of accurate reporting is cost prohibitive for our poor ISPs

I would like to point out that the FCC has a mobile app now called "FCC Speed Test". It measures your ISPs speed and reports the results to the FCC. If enough people install it. It will help improve FCC data about where the most pressing needs are.

the fcc was entirely under regulatory capture under trump.

thats the sole difference

This is my feeling too.

Was this contest run poorly? Definitely. Is the claim that SpaceX is getting funds for census areas that really shouldn't have funds attached true? Almost certainly.

Are they the primary beneficiary of the contest being poorly run? That seems very unlikely. The FCC and Ajit Pai attempted to exclude them from this competition entirely [1], it seems pretty clear from the start that this competition was designed to give too much money to the incumbents, not SpaceX.

Do I think that the FCC would be trying to clawback money if SpaceX hadn't won? I wish I did, but the fact that they're primarily trying to clawback money from SpaceX makes me skeptical. It seems much more likely that this is just corruption in action trying to stop money going to the "wrong" recipient.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/elon-musks-promi...

> Do I think that the FCC would be trying to clawback money if SpaceX hadn't won?

Looking at this as a clawback attempt is the wrong framework. The awards are tied to contract terms with clawback-with-penalty provisions. The FCC has identified cases where it is unlikely that the contract terms could be met and provided an opportunity for those with grants to surrender them without penalty if they feel they could not meet the award terms. No effort is being made to undo awards, and if winners think they can meet the terms, they can keep the money.

Its win-win if award winners avail themselves of this opportunity, where they can't meet the terms, because it avoids an after-the-fact clawback with penalty which is good for the winner, and enables the funds to be redirected in advance rather than recovered in arrears, which is good for the government.

The mismanagement is that the places where it is almost certaibly impossible for the terms to be fulfilled, the FCC should not have granted the awards in the first place (of course, it is also true that applicants should have done their due diligence and not applied, so its not exclusively the FCC at fault.)

It's fascinating how many here if someone goes against a Musk company immediately assume that it's due to corruption or protection for the incumbents. Considering how Tesla benefits significantly from regulations (they make more money from carbon credits than selling cars), I think they are very good at taking advantage of regulation themselves.

Also regarding the current article, maybe it is like in the article SpaceX bit largely on census blocks that do not deserve government subsidies? Maybe they even did it on purpose because they knew they could use other means to provide broadband if they can't get starlink up quick enough?

> It's fascinating how many here if someone goes against a Musk company immediately assume that it's due to corruption or protection for the incumbents.

Legacy aerospace players tried to sue SpaceX multiple times over (lucrative) exclusive government contracts.

There's no local monopoly for cars, it's a relatively open market with multiple players. Telecom and Space, well that's a different story.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/20/21377025/spacex-air-force...

https://spacenews.com/spacex-air-force-reach-agreement/

https://www.ulalaunch.com/about/news/2014/04/28/united-launc...

Last quarter 3% of Tesla's revenue was from carbon credits.

That result came out yesterday or the day before.

Here in France the official maps from the telecoms authority shows the speed for each provider, for individual addresses.

http://maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr/

I will also be interested to see if they pull back cash from the local CLECs partnering with electric companies in Georgia. Georgia, a little over 2 years ago, changed their state regulations to allow rural CLECs to partner with electrical coops (it may have been broader than that) to bring better than 25/3 to their customers. In the counties that concern me, Polk, Haralson, Carroll, and Heard, in west Georgia, a partnership between Carroll EMC and SyncGlobal (small rural CLEC) should bring fiber to every Carroll EMC customer over the next six years (2 phases). Funding for this may or may not have come from these allocations. The whole process is incredibly obscured by government and short staffed implementation providers.

For reference https://carrollemc.com/broadband ...I also have a pre order in for Starlink to hold me over.

My FIL runs an electrical co-op in upstate SC. He had the choice of creating a new HQ for their co-op, or run fiber to all their customers.

He ultimately chose the new HQ because the cost-per-mile was insane when you got in the more rural areas, and he had no guarantee that all serviceable addresses would subscribe, plus it would increase costs for all their subscribers even if they didn't join their network. He also afraid that something faster or more efficient than fiber would become more widely available over the next 10-15 years and then their network would be obsolete.

> He also afraid that something faster or more efficient than fiber would become more widely available over the next 10-15 years and then their network would be obsolete.

Faster or more efficient than fiber? When they're already maintaining aluminum/copper cables to every customer anyway? What kind of change would something like that actually require to happen... new physics?

Not new physics; new business model and new technology:

"a few cell phone towers can be run for cheaper than FTTH, and 5G is fast enough for some home use cases", at which point your fiber install costs may never make back their money.

The third choice was no new building and save the money for the future. C-levels always seems to go for the shiny new executive suite though.

I'd venture that half of SpaceX's success in the traditional government contracting market has been due to using their own capital rather than government capital for product development. Government funding seems to slow everything down in this space, which as with all high CapEx projects immediately translates to cost via interest rates.

I honestly didn’t realize that DSL was still a thing. I’ve been on fiber optic for so many years that it’s hard to imagine that people still use DSL. I pay less now for gigabit FIOS than I used to pay for dial up. Clearly everyone having these kinds of speeds is not a technical issue but a money issue.

The money issue is that ISPs don't pony up to put up fiber on connections they already own, they install it ad hoc. I have spectrum internet, its shit. My alternative is ATT DSL, back to the stone age, so spectrum it is for me. I pay for the fastest spectrum speed offered at the time, but I notice that they had been advertising for fiber in my city. So I called them up and asked if the could set me up with fiber internet. They could, but I would be out hundreds of dollars since they charge me to run fiber from the street to the rental that I live in. Not even the property owner, but the subscriber. They won't upgrade the line they own running to the building themselves, only if a customer pays for it out of pocket. This probably explains why so few people have fiber internet in the U.S. if for most cases, you only can get it if someone who lived in your unit previously or your neighbor on the same line from the street already paid to get the wire to you, or you pay for the install yourself.

Living in Canada, I have Fiber optic now, but I definitely pay for it. We have total telecom monopolistic practices that send prices upwards over time. It's in the news all the time, Canadians pay more than most countries in the world for internet services as well as wireless data.

I live in a Dallas suburb. Across the street, my neighbors have access to both AT&T 50mbps and Spectrum 200mbps services. The next subdivision over has access to those PLUS AT&T fiber. Spectrum never paid to have the work done to provide their service to my entire neighborhood, and so the homes on my side of the street merely have AT&T 50 to use.

I used to use Hughesnet, we had 25 gigabytes of data that we got for the month (costed ~$75/month), and then paid $15 for every gigabyte over the cap we went. At it's fastest (high priority, recently reset data cap, night usage), it started to approach half of the 25/4 figure that the government was pushing so hard for.

I use Starlink now, and I feel horrible that I paid for such shitty service for so long. Please, if you're anyone in a rural area: do not support Hughesnet or Viacom. Find local options, look around online or talk to people. You'll almost always get a better deal when you search, and that's exactly what these incumbent powers are lobbying against.

spacex and leo sattellites are not going to services rural areas any better than dish tv provided internet.

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