The FCC announced today that it won’t award Elon Musk’s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The cash would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), however the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t capable of “display that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the very best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”
That was the identical reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last yr, which led to this appeal. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency web to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.
“The FCC is tasked with ensuring consumers all over the place have access to high-speed broadband that’s reliable and reasonably priced,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. “This applicant had failed to satisfy its burden to be entitled to just about $900 million in universal service funds for nearly a decade.” FCC commissioner Brendan Carr dissented, writing that “the FCC didn’t require — and has never required — another award winner to indicate that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.”
Christopher Cardaci, head of legal at SpaceX, writes in a letter to the FCC that “Starlink is arguably the one viable option to right away connect most of the Americans who live and work in the agricultural and distant areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency web has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was alleged to connect.”