US agency will not reinstate $900 mln subsidy for SpaceX Starlink unit

News@lemmy.world – 206 points – 7 months ago

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.

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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.

That being said, Starlink still saw multi-server latencies under 60 ms in the U.K. (51.26 ms), Spain (53.37 ms), Portugal (55.84 ms), and Belgium (59.34 ms). Starlink saw most countries’ multi-server latencies between 60 and 90 ms.

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.