For a third time, the Federal Communications Commission is denying $886 million in federal funding to SpaceX’s Starlink, this time by dismissing a citizen-led petition. On Friday, the commission rejected a petition from Virginia resident Greg Weisiger, who urged the FCC to reverse its controversial August 2022 decision to deny SpaceX the funds.In December 2023, the FCC shot down SpaceX’s official appeal to secure the funding, its second rejection. The next month, Weisiger sent a petition, requesting the FCC once again reconsider the matter, which would source the $886 million from the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).RDOF’s goal is to expand high-speed internet access to rural areas. So, Weisiger argued that the FCC had deprived him and other Virginia residents of a way to connect to the internet by denying Starlink the $886 million in funding.”Petitioner is at an absolute loss to understand the Commission’s logic with these denials,” he wrote at the time. “For rural and insular locations, satellite and other wireless technologies capable of providing reliable, high-speed broadband service are the most cost-efficient delivery mechanism currently available.”In his petition to the FCC, Weisiger even cited PCMag’s review of Starlink to underscore how SpaceX’s satellite internet service can deliver fast internet to rural and remote areas, which often lack access to ground-based fiber networks. (We tested the service in rural Idaho.)”It is abundantly clear that Starlink has a robust, reliable, affordable service for rural and insular locations in all states and territories,” he wrote at the time. But in Friday’s four-page dismissal, the FCC said Weisiger had failed to provide any new information. Weisiger also filed the protest nearly four years too late, according to the FCC, which said Weisiger’s main gripe appeared to be with its rules for the RDOF program itself. “The Petition does not provide any data of its own, and instead only cites a positive review of Starlink’s service which, notably, did not provide any specifics about the service Starlink offered,” the FCC added.
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Friday’s rejection also reiterates why the FCC originally denied the funding. “Starlink was not eligible for RDOF support because Starlink failed to demonstrate that it had the technical and financial ability to serve the specific areas where it won support,” the Commission says. The RDOF fund was designed to subsidize broadband of at least 100 megabits per second in downloads and 20 megabits per second in uploads, although most of the funding was meant to support even faster gigabit deployments.
Official map from Starlink.com showing the range of download rates for the satellite internet system across the US. (Credit: Starlink.com)
Although Starlink download speeds can top 200Mbps, the broadband quality of the satellite internet system can vary across the US. SpaceX’s own map shows that download rates for Starlink sometimes dip below 100Mbps, particularly in the southern US. Even so, Friday’s dismissal from the FCC isn’t sitting well with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “How exactly does SpaceX not have the technical or financial ability to do something that it is already doing? They’re just flat-out lying,” Musk tweeted. In the meantime, his company has been offering a steep discount on the Starlink dish hardware to US consumers nationwide.
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About Michael Kan
Senior Reporter
I’ve been with PCMag since October 2017, covering a wide range of topics, including consumer electronics, cybersecurity, social media, networking, and gaming. Prior to working at PCMag, I was a foreign correspondent in Beijing for over five years, covering the tech scene in Asia.
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