It is no wonder people are delirious with excitement about Starlink, which promises to provide access from a constellation of thousands of tiny satellites blanketing the Earth, using a cutting-edge phased array antenna in the dish to quickly track the satellites moving across the sky. If the United States were in Europe, it would have the most expensive broadband in the region.)Īnyway, American broadband policy stinks, and we all pay too much money for slow speeds and terrible customer service.
(By contrast, in Europe, where the prevailing philosophy is called “service-based competition,” large incumbent providers are required to lease fiber access to competitors and there is a thriving market for internet access with much lower prices for much faster speeds. Reality, as I have said, is quite irritating. Of course, the only thing a decades-long commitment to “facility-based competition” has brought to most Americans is… a total lack of competition. “ That is the American way.”Īmerican broadband policy stinks, and we all pay too much money for slow speeds and terrible customer service “ Facility-based competition,” telecom lobbyists feverishly whisper while handing out their dirty, sweat-stained checks in Congress.
In that context, Starlink also represents something else: the American telecom policy establishment’s long-standing, almost religious belief that consumers are best served by something called “facility-based competition.” Starlink is a new facility for accessing the internet, one that does not rely on existing infrastructure. It represents competition, something the American broadband market sorely lacks. The idea of ordering a $499 dish with a $99 monthly fee that can deliver Starlink’s current goal of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up would indeed be a dream come true - especially since Starlink has set a long-term goal of 1Gbps down. That is ridiculous, especially since wireless carriers, in particular, have begged for lax regulatory oversight against the promise of delivering rural broadband over LTE and now 5G. Where I live in rural New York state, the best available data suggests that only 43 percent of people connect at 25Mbps or above. In rural America, the situation is even worse: a combination of bad policy and greed means there are huge swaths of the country where people aren’t even connecting at 25Mbps down, the pathetic standard for “broadband speed” used by the federal government. Starlink currently has very limited availability. In beta, it promises up to 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds. Starlink is a new satellite-based internet service from SpaceX.