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.
That is true for absolutely every connection type. Bandwidth is not unlimited, and for any sort of wireless system it is going to be limited by physics in a way wired connections are not.
Your home Wi-Fi connection does the same thing if you have a bunch of devices doing things at the same time. There’s a reason MIMO is becoming a necessity even on home Wi-Fi networks, the average home now has a ton of devices when you start adding things like home assistants, smart devices, phones, tablets, doorbells, etc. onto that network. On a larger scale, the mobile networks have congestion issues all the time as well.
Fiber will never be coming to the rural areas where satellite is really the only option now. The return on investment simply doesn’t exist. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy, and the number of customers is simply too low. Unless the government subsidizes it, it will never be installed. And even then, the providers will still not install it and lobby to remove the deployment requirements after they have been paid to do it. They have already done that multiple times since the 1990s, and we’re still being charged for these via surcharges on our monthly bills for things they never did.