Monday, December 7, 2020

You get a Starlink! And you! And you! Everybody gets a Starlink!

Apparently the FCC has decided that Starlink needs about a billion dollars. This means service will be available in at least 35 states, including Hawaii and Florida.

The funding indicates that Starlink is nearing general availability, but the exact terms of availability are still unclear. There has been no indication that current $99 pricing will continue and a big question mark is the cost of the satellite receiver. The receiver currently goes for $499, but there are strong questions about this and suggestions that the price is heavily subsidized. So far there is no word on how the FCC subsidy will be used.

From an enterprise perspective even more interesting is what you will be allowed to do with Starlink connectivity and whether there will be traffic quotas or shaping, as hinted to by Starlink engineers.

Starlink bid for Above Baseline broadband which equals ≥ 100/20 Mbps with a data cap of no less than 2 TB.

Even if the data cap is implemented, a Starlink connection would be a good tool in the data engineer's fallback circuit toolbox.

All in all it's really heartwarming to see that if you are a billionare, the government will give you hundreds of millions of dollars to do something that you would have done anyway :)

More at: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/spacex-gets-886-million-from-fcc-to-subsidize-starlink-in-35-states/



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