Starlink’s Other Network

The Benton Institute recently wrote an article that reminded me that Starlink is operating a second satellite network, separate from the one used to serve residential and business broadband customers. The company announced this network, which it dubs Starshield, at the end of 2022. Today, this network is now highlighted on the SpaceX website.

Starshield is touted as a military-grade network, which in layman’s terms means a separate network that doesn’t share any traffic with commercial customers. In the U.S., the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has launched several hundred Starshield satellites. This is the federal agency that has always operated military and spy satellites. The British Ministry of Defense is also said to be migrating to the Starshield platform. Other militaries around the world that use SpaceX, like the well-known use of Starlink in Ukraine to direct drone traffic, use the normal commercial Starlink satellite platform. Benton reports that Starshield and Starlink are not yet fully separate, and that a Starlink outage affects Starshield performance, but it’s likely that the company is working towards total independence.

SpaceX touts several benefits of Starshield. They can use whatever level of encryption of traffic required by a government customer. The satellites can also carry custom payloads, which likely means spy cameras or other devices. SpaceX also says it can integrate Starshield into other satellite networks.

Since nobody I know will even be using a government spy satellite, you might wonder why I am writing about Starshield. I’ve been wondering lately about Starlink’s claim that it is interested in providing backhaul to cell sites and bigger broadband connections to rural businesses. This has always puzzled me because, at the local network level, a satellite network is no different than any other network. If Starlink were to connect to a handful of cell sites in a given rural area, the bandwidth used for the cell sites would reduce the capacity available to residential customers. There is only so much bandwidth available in a localized satellite footprint.

We know this is true, because even today, there are stories of localized Starlink areas getting overwhelmed. There were reports during the Burning Man festival last year that nearby Starlink customers complained about loss of bandwidth when festival attendees brought along their Starlink Mini satellite dishes.

This makes me wonder if Starlink plans to have separate satellites just for backhaul. We know what that might look like. OneWeb, owned by Eutelsat, provides big bandwidth to European government locations and large businesses. The company currently has around 650 satellites in orbit to support bigger bandwidth users.

It wouldn’t be hard for Starlink to carve out satellites that specialize in large customers. The company currently has 11,100 satellites in orbit and should be close to its original approved constellation of 12,000 by the end of the year. The FCC has already given the company permission to grow the constellation to 15,000. And since SpaceX is never satisfied, it’s already asked the FCC for permission to double the constellation to almost 30,000 satellites. It doesn’t seem like it would be much of a challenge for Starlink to carve out 500 satellites from the large constellation to specialize in backhaul. This would not only open up new revenue opportunities but would also mean not diluting bandwidth delivered to its millions of residential customers. This is all pure speculation on my part, but its an idea that makes sense.

Where Are the Missing BEAD Locations?

It seems that almost everybody I’ve talked to in the last week is wondering what NTIA is up to when the agency said that non-deployment funds can be used to serve locations missed by the first round of BEAD grants. The common question I’m being asked is where NTIA and State Broadband Offices are going to find more BEAD-eligible locations. It’s a great question.

I can only think of three sources of locations for that were missed by BEAD the first time around. One group of locations are the ones being turned back to State Broadband Offices when BEAD awardees decide not to accept a BEAD grant. The broadband offices have been trying to find other ISPs to take these locations at the original award price. But I already know of several examples where there are no takers – at least at the dollar level of BEAD that was awarded after the Benefit of the Bargain round. Perhaps NTIA will loosen the purse strings a bit to allow for higher awards for some of these locations. I’ve also hear speculation that unclaimed BEAD locations will all go to satellite.

This option is risky for NTIA. The first time an offer is made to a new ISP that is higher than the original award, ISPs everywhere are going to be clamoring for more money. One of the cooperative associations recently made that request. I can foresee lawsuits arising if NTIA allows increases in funding for some locations but not others.

Another potential source of locations comes from each update of the FCC mapping fabric, when new locations are added to the FCC map. Some of these are new construction, and others are corrections of the fabric. I can’t imagine that is a whole lot of places in this category, but there are always going to be some with each new map. What’s not being talked about is that with every release of a new fabric, there are also locations that are being removed from BEAD. NTIA is quietly whittling away at the BEAD grants that have already been awarded, and almost everybody I know with a BEAD grant is seeing some reduction in eligible BEAD locations.

The only other source of new BEAD locations I can think of would be from fixing the many errors introduced in the BEAD map challenge process. The only word I can use to describe the map challenge process is ludicrous. NTIA created a set of rules to challenge the BEAD maps that were impossible to comply with. I know counties, cooperatives, and other ISPs that made numerous claims to the map challenge that were denied. Many of these challenges tried to add legitimate locations that were missing from the fabric.

A much larger number of challenges tried to add locations where an ISP was falsely claiming speed capabilities of 100/20 Mbps or faster that were overstated. A successful speed challenge required a local government to find actual customers of suspect ISPs and get them to take a complicated series of speed tests at defined times and intervals. That whole process was largely unachievable, particularly when the map challenge process was rushed through. In my opinion, the folks who designed the map challenge rules were either completely out of touch with the real world, or else the process was rigged on purpose to hold down the number of BEAD-eligible locations. I’ve seen some credible estimates that there are at least a million locations that were incorrectly thrown off the BEAD map. My own back-of-the-envelope estimate, which is admittedly based only on work in about twenty counties, is that this could be more than two million locations.

I can’t imagine a process where NTIA reopens the map challenge with challenge rules that work. I could see that process dragging out for a year.

There is an easier way to do a map challenge, which would be for NTIA to buy the entire Ookla speed test database of actual speed tests and compare it against ISP speed claims in the fabric. I’ve already written a future blog about how that might work. But I suspect this would lead to lawsuits and chaos as ISPs fight to not get overbuilt with BEAD grant funding.

My gut reaction when I heard this announcement is that won’t amount to a hill of beans. I talked to several people who think this announcement is just another way for the NTIA to put off the announcement of how they will spend the remaining $22 billion in nondeployment funds. NTIA had promised to make that announcement before the end of summer – which is next week. I sure hope this was not that announcement, because I don’t think there is any hidden stash of BEAD-eligible locations that will use more than a tiny amount of the nondeployment funds.

My Favorite Telecom Books

One of my recent blog posts reviewed a new book, Digital Equity Ecosystems, by Colin Rhinesmith. A reader asked me about some of my other favorite telecom books. I have a personal interest in the history of telecom, so many of these books discuss major events in telecom history. I’m sure I’m missing some great books, but here is the list that first came to mind. Feed free to add others in the comments.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. I’ve always been fascinated by Bell Labs and was lucky enough to visit it in its heyday. The scientists and engineers at the lab generated more than one new patent per day for new technologies.

Fundamentals of Wireless Communication by David Tse & Pramod Viswanath. This is the only textbook on the list. This describes the fundamentals of wireless communications and a huge range of wireless technologies.

Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan P. Crawford. This is an interesting look that examines how the U.S. was poised to be the world leader in broadband, but how much of the rest of the world was able to build networks that delivered faster speeds with lower prices. This is the story about an industry hijacked by a small handful of monopolies.

Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications by Hugh P. Slotten. As a kid, I was fascinated by satellites and remember tracking the path of the first communications satellites, Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, across the sky at night. This is a good history of the development of satellite communications networks.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley with a foreword by Steve Wozniak. This book describes the history of long-distance calling and how hackers learned to exploit the weaknesses in the AT&T network to steal billions of dollars of long-distance calls.

Optical Illusions: Lucent and the Crash of Telecom by Lisa Endlich. This is a story about the 2000 telecom crash by concentrating on Lucent, the manufacturer spun off from AT&T. In a short period of time, Lucent went from the sixth largest company on the stock exchange to being in complete shambles. Great read to learn about that momentous period.

The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells & Info-Scandal by Bruce A. Kushnick. This is one of a series of books by the author that looks at how the Baby Bell companies like Bell Atlantic and BellSouth were able to gain huge concessions from regulators in return for promises to build future-looking broadband networks, and how most of those promises were broken.

Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity by Christopher Ali. This book discusses the federal broadband policies that led to the stark digital divide between urban and rural broadband. I wrote a review of this book when it first came out in 2021, and it’s still an interesting read today.

Tough Calls: AT&T And The Hard Lessons Learned From The Telecom Wars by Dick Martin. This is an interesting book written by an ex-head of public relations at AT&T that tells the story of the struggles the company faced after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the telecom market to competition.

Don’t Ignore Remediation

One of the most common tasks required when building a new fiber network, particularly when burying fiber, is fixing the damage caused during the construction process. In the industry, we refer to this work as remediation, which means, in plain English, putting everything back to the way it was before the start of construction.

There is a huge list of things that can go wrong and messes that can be made during the fiber construction process. The problem that often gets headlines is when the construction crews hit and damage other buried utilities like water, gas, electric, or other communications lines. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) issues periodic reports that tally the reasons for damaged underground utilities, and one of their recent reports said that one-fourth of all damage to underground utilities has been coming from fiber contractors.

The more common problems that plague contractors are damages to property. The construction process can damage sidewalks and driveways, cut water system lines, cut into a buried sewer tank, or damage the utilities entering the home. I heard about a recent incident where a cut sewer line ended up filling a home with raw sewage. There are a lot of complaints made about damaged flower beds, injured shrubbery, and cut watering systems. A really common problem is the mess created from excavated dirt, particularly after it rains.

Every construction contractor is supposed to clean up any mess they made, and most do a good job. But some contracts only pay contractors for completing specific units, like the feet of fiber installed or the number of splices made, and some contractors put in only the minimal amount of effort to fix damages. Full remediation can be expensive. It might mean replacing sections of sidewalk. It might mean re-sodding grass. It definitely means carting away leftover debris.

The key to doing remediation well is to react immediately to homeowner complaints. Most ISPs understand that they will be operating the market for a long time after the contractors are gone, and don’t leave it up to the contractor to make amends. The ISPs I know who do this well have an ‘ambassador’ who immediately goes to see people who complain about problems, and who makes sure the problem gets fixed. Anybody who has worked construction knows that some homeowners get incredibly irate over any disturbance to their property, and this is not always an easy job.

There can be serious consequences for an ISP who bungles remediation. Bad local press can kill their marketing efforts. In the most extreme cases, ISPs have lost construction permits. There are a lot of examples of when construction remediation didn’t go well, but there are no sizable buried fiber projects that didn’t have plenty of stories. But some ISPs lose control of the construction and remediation process. The following are a few examples that were bad enough to make the press.

The City of Albuquerque, New Mexico issued a stop order on fiber construction being done by Ezee Fiber and Vexus Fiber. Construction contractors had hit multiple gas and water lines, including a broken water main that resulted in over $100,000 in residential damages. Crews routinely left open potholes, tore up sidewalks without restoring them, worked outside allowed hours, and failed to display proper identification. The City pulled the ISPs’ permits and required the ISPs to comply with strict new regulations, including stricter work area rules, a 30-day notice for residents before construction, and fines for violations of $500 per day, per event.

The Village of Orland Park, Illinois, ordered a complete freeze on Astound Broadband after the company cut an underground electrical line that knocked out power to 300 homes during freezing weather. The village also had numerous complaints about unrepaired property damage and open holes left in public sidewalks. The village required stricter rules before allowing a resumption of construction.

As expensive as mediation can be, it’s not as expensive as the lost goodwill of a community that will likely manifest in lower penetration rates.

The Consequences of Shutting Copper Networks

AT&T and Verizon (and now the newly purchased Frontier) have continued with their big push to shut down copper networks. There are good reasons to finally walk away from this obsolete technology. Copper networks are largely far past the end of economic life and are rotting on the poles. Vandalism is rampant since the price of copper is making it attractive for people to rip down copper for the resale value. A large majority of customers who have a good alternative have fled the copper networks, so there are fewer people each year on the remaining copper networks.

But there are still good policy reasons for not tearing down the networks. For many rural households, a telephone landline is the only way to reliably reach 911 or to make the daily calls needed to connect to doctors, banks, and other necessities of daily life. The FCC and state regulators have all said they support tearing down copper as long as customers have an equivalent alternative for voice. And that’s where the rub comes. The Internet is full of stories of people who have lost their copper with no alternative available. Unless a telco is replacing copper with fiber, they generally tell customers to change to wireless broadband. Everybody who lives in rural America knows that cell coverage is poor or nonexistent in much of rural America. But the lack of cell coverage doesn’t seem to be a deterrent for the big telcos that want to get rid of the copper.

People can always change to Starlink, assuming they live in a place where they don’t have to cut down a bunch of trees or put up an expensive tall pole to receive service. But this means replacing a $30 landline bill with a $130 Starlink bill. Even then, a customer has to be sophisticated enough to subscribe to a WiFi calling service through a web connection and worry about losing 911 when power goes out.

I recently read an article on Medium by Bruce Kushnick that points out another motivation for the big telcos to tear down copper. When a telco eliminates the last copper infrastructure in a state, it is theoretically no longer subject to Title II traditional regulation. The FCC and courts have rules that broadband and voice services carried across all other technologies are subject to Title I regulation as an information service.

This is a big deal that is not being talked about. Carriers subject to Title II regulation are required to offer just and reasonable rates. Title II carriers are subject to strict rules about protecting customer information. Title II carriers are subject to all sorts of rules for things like having specific rules about when and how a customer can be disconnected for nonpayment. Title II carriers are subject to mandatory obligations to interconnect with other carriers.

If a telco can change to become regulated by Title I rules, all of these regulatory obligations would go away. If a big telco could get every single customer off copper in a state, they’d have a good case to make that they are no longer subject to any Title II regulation. I’m positive that this is where AT&T and Verizon are headed. They would probably have to petition a state to make the change, but in most states they will win their argument.

An argument that can be made that smaller telco that has fully converted to fiber could petition to walk away from Title II regulation today. I haven’t heard of anybody who has tried this because there are still advantages to sticking with Title II regulation. Small telcos aren’t ready to cavalierly walk away from the ability to interconnect with other carriers. Many small telcos don’t want to lose the ability to participate in various subsidy programs funded by the Universal Service Fund or from similar State funds.

But if AT&T or Verizon are successful in walking away from Title II regulations, even if it’s only in a few states, then I expect we’ll see smaller telcos doing the same thing, particularly if the FCC guts the High Cost as it is contemplating. It’s odd that the whole Title II regulatory scheme is so closely aligned with copper, but that alignment is going to be challenged when the big telcos no longer have any copper.

Broadband Shorts September 2026

The following are topics I found interesting, but which don’t warrant a full blog – although the first item might still be expanded.

NTIA Announces a New Round of BEAD Funding. In a surprise announcement, NTIA told state broadband offices it is going to allow them to hold a new round of infrastructure grant awards using some of the money from the leftover non-deployment funds. I remember at one point that the agency said that BEAD has effectively solved the rural broadband problem. But this announcement acknowledges that there are still locations that won’t have good broadband after BEAD has been fully implemented. Many of the locations that will likely be part of new awards are those that current grant awardees are walking away from. ISPs have been loudly complaining that the level of funding from the Benefit of the Bargain round of BEAD pushed the awards too low to make economic sense, particularly considering the current high rate of inflation related to telecom construction. States are still eagerly awaiting news of the disposition of the rest of the non-deployment funds, which at this point represent more than half of the funding for BEAD established by Congress.

AT&T Stops Reporting Copper Customers. In its latest quarterly report, AT&T stopped reporting on the number of copper customers still using DSL. The company is still reporting on legacy revenues, and the company said that the legacy segment revenues dropped by $570 million for the quarter compared to a year earlier. I think there are likely several reasons why the company made this change. First, they are in the midst of a major effort to walk away from copper technology across the country, and it’s likely that they don’t want to highlight the number of people who are being booted from DSL. I’ve seen estimates that they will have walked away from hundreds of copper wire centers by the end of this year. Also, by only reporting on gains in fiber and FWA customers, they are painting a more positive picture of growth, without acknowledging that a lot of the customers for those two technologies are changing technology due to discontinued copper. One annoyance of not reporting copper customers is that we no longer know how many total broadband customers the company is serving.

SpaceX Continues to Lobby Against the High-Cost Fund. On several occasions over the last few months, SpaceX has told the FCC that the $4.5 billion High-Cost program that is part of the Universal Service Fund has outlived its purpose and should be phased out. In two different filings at the FCC in August, the satellite company says that the High-Cost program should be discontinued and that the federal government is now subsidizing rural companies to compete with Starlink. That’s an interesting argument that says the federal government shouldn’t be using money to overbuild satellite. Rural telcos and cooperatives counter this argument, pointing out that Starlink has major capacity issues and can’t serve everybody in rural areas, while small ISPs are still willing to serve everybody. The FCC is reconsidering every aspect of the Universal Service Fund, and we should start hearing their intentions over the next quarter.

Texas Pause of BEAD Funding is Still in Effect. Under pressure from the legislature, the Texas Broadband Development Office put the BEAD grant process on hold. The newly seated Texas Comptroller Dan Huffines, who oversees the broadband office, ordered a comprehensive review and audit of the BEAD process. This effort was the result of several elected officials claiming that too many locations were awarded to satellite broadband, and that satellite companies are also getting significant payment upfront when they sign a BEAD contract. It’s possible that the freeze won’t be lifted until the legislature returns in January.

Broadband Adoption to Drop? Several national witnesses told a Pennsylvania House committee in an August hearing that the State’s next big challenge with broadband will be keeping households connected. They warned that the changes in 2027 coming from the One Big Beautiful Bill, like another big increase in healthcare costs, are going to make it a lot harder for homes to afford a broadband connection. One witness estimated that 233,000 Pennsylvanians in the lowest income quintile are in danger of not being able to afford broadband.

Stock Buybacks Instead of Expansion. Elliott Investment Management has been pressuring Deutsche Telekom to pursue stock buybacks rather than pursue the major merger with T-Mobile. Elliott is a large hedge fund that is known for activism and putting pressure on companies it has an ownership share in to stress short-term returns over long-term strategies. The company is known for pushing through cost-cutting and similar actions at companies like Crown Castle, Southwest Airlines, and Salesforce. Customers of the big companies would rather see companies roll profits back into infrastructure, technology, and customer service rather than using profits to buy back stock to benefit stockholders.

Telephone Numbers

Somebody recently asked me about the origins of telephone numbers. I told them to search my blog, assuming I must have written about numbering some time over the years – but I hadn’t.

The original purpose of a telephone number was to identify a specific customer. When telephones first came into use, they could only be used to call people in the immediate area who could be connected by the local neighborhood operator. Callers identified who they wanted to talk to by name. The idea of using telephone numbers started in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when the town was suffering from a measles epidemic. Dr. Moses Greeley Parker suggested that the operators assign a number to each of the 200 subscribers so that substitute operators would be able to complete calls if the normal operators became ill. Dr. Parker was so impressed by the telephone’s potential that he began buying stock and became one of the early largest shareholders in the American Telephone Company and New England Telephone and Telegraph.

In the early days, telephone numbers were short, with just enough digits to have a number for every customer. Some rural telephone switchboards only needed one or two digits. When telephone wires were strung in larger towns and cities, the exchanges needed to have more digits. New York City was the first place to use the seven-digit dial code, which consisted of two letters and five digits. The most famous example is Murray Hill (MU) 5-9975, the number for the Ricardos’ on I Love Lucy. The show was so popular that New York Bell Telephone created the fictitious number just for the show. The phone company assigned the two-letter code to represent a neighborhood, with Murray Hill being the east side of midtown Manhattan. For youngsters who have never used an old dial phone, the letters corresponded to numbers, and the letters were printed on the phone dial pad. The MU in Murray Hill translates to 68.

In 1947, AT&T introduced the North American Numbering Plan that mandated 7-digit dialing across 25 regions in twenty countries that covered the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. This plan used the country code of ‘1+’, which is why you can still dial a Caribbean island today using only the leading 1+, while calls outside of North America require a different country code. It took until the early 1960s for the numbering plan to be implemented everywhere in North America.

The current 10-digit dialing scheme was first introduced in 1951 as a way to help automate long-distance calls. Area codes were assigned geographically, with major metropolitan areas getting the easiest codes to dial, like the 212 for New York City. For many years, calls could still be made within a region using 7-digit dialing, and the extra 3-digits for the area code were only required to make a long-distance call outside a region. The first place to mandate 10-digit calling for local calling was Atlanta, Georgia, which implemented 10-digit dialing ahead of the 1996 Olympics. This stopped visitors from other parts of the country from making local calls when they intended to dial somebody in their home state. The transition to mandatory 10-digit calling was implemented across the country over the next several decades, as adopted by State Regulatory Commissions. Full mandatory 10-digit dialing wasn’t implemented everywhere until 2021, when the FCC mandated the 988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline number.

Telephone numbers stopped representing specific neighborhoods when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated local telephone competition and number portability, meaning that a customer could change carriers and keep the same number. In 1998, the FCC mandated number portability to the top 100 metropolitan areas. I remember asking for a new telephone number in the DC suburbs around that time and being offered a number from different towns as far away as Annapolis. If you moved outside the metropolitan area, you had to get a new number.

In 2003, the FCC ordered Wireless Local Number Portability, which fully decoupled the telephone number from a location. From that point forward, a person could keep their cellular number anywhere within the North American numbering plan.

Landline numbers became fully portable with the introduction of Voice over IP. VoIP providers like Skype and Vonage hit the market in 2003, and States and the FCC began allowing VoIP numbers to be used from anywhere.

Ookla Looks at FWA Broadband

Ookla recently published an article that looked at speed test and coverage characteristics of FWA cellular broadband provided by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. FWA is always an interesting topic since the three companies have collectively attracted over 17 million broadband customers to the new business line. There were some interesting findings from Ookla worth discussing.

Ookla noted that 70% of FWA speed tests come from urban areas. That doesn’t seem surprising to me since that is where most people live. While FWA was originally touted as a rural technology, the fact that it’s marketed at prices below other broadband technologies makes it very attractive in urban areas.

Ookla notes that T-Mobile has the fastest download speeds, with a recent median speed of 222.7 Mbps, which is 38.4% faster than AT&T and 76% higher than Verizon speeds. I think Ookla missed the likely reason for this, which is that AT&T and Verizon both have legacy telco bases and have legacy customers. T-Mobile has no legacy business and likely sells FWA only to customers within a few miles of cell towers. The other two companies are using cellular technology as the alternative that allows them to tear down copper lines. They will offer this technology far away from towers, even if the speeds are exceeding slow, as long as a connection will support a voice signal – which is the regulatory requirement they are supposed to meet to justify discontinuing copper. Both companies also have a significant base of legacy cellular hotspot customers who can be far away from a tower getting much slower speeds. These hotspots are functionally equivalent to FWA, but are marketed differently, with small monthly data caps. When I’ve examined the speed tests for the three carriers for customers within a few miles of a cell site, they all deliver similar speeds.

Ookla also notes that T-Mobile’s Q2 2026 median upload speed of 18.1 Mbps was 80.1% higher than AT&T and 48.5% higher than Verizon – for many of the same reasons. The really interesting finding was that less than 40% of FWS speed tests in 48 states are exceeding the FCC’s definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. I assume that most of those that don’t meet that standard are doing so because of upload speed. This goes a long way towards explaining why the current FCC is not willing to consider increasing the definition of broadband above 100/20 Mbps, since that might declare that FWA, satellite service, and some WISPs are not really broadband per the FCC definition. The current FCC seems hellbent on being able to claim that satellite broadband has solved the rural broadband gap.

All three companies saw slower speeds in the second quarter of 2026 compared to the first quarter. Ookla likely correctly pinned this on foliage. It’s easy to forget when we discuss cellular coverage that it is weakened by foliage just like every other wireless technology. It raises the interesting question of whether a service is really broadband if it only meets the FCC definition of broadband in the winter?

Ookla recognized a huge 60% increase in AT&T broadband speeds comparing the second quarter of this year to the third quarter of 2025. AT&T has deployed 50 MHz of additional spectrum during that time that it purchased from EchoStar. The AT&T cellular speeds at my house more than doubled this past spring. This is a good reminder that the carriers are constantly taking steps to increase performance. They are engaged in a fierce marketing war, and none of them wants to look like they have an inferior network.

Finally, Ookla noted that rural FWA broadband speeds and latencies are lower than in urban areas for all three carriers. There are two explanations for this. First, not all rural cell towers are equipped to the same standard as urban towers. But this also comes back to the distance issue. In rural areas, customers are willing to try FWA even when it doesn’t have superfast speeds – because a 25 Mbps download on FWA beats the alternatives available. A household can often add FWA for $35 per month to an existing cellphone plan, which is considerably cheaper than Starlink at $130.

FCC to Examine USAC

In its August meeting, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking titled Maximizing Efficiencies in Universal Service Administration Company (USAC) that looks at changing the rules governing USAC, the Universal Service Administration.

USAC is a non-profit corporation that was formed by the FCC after passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which created the Universal Service Fund. The FCC decided to create USAC to administer the fund in order to shield the day-to-day operations of the USF from politics and the changes that always come after a change in administration. USAC has a single purpose, which is to operate the Universal Service Fund under guidelines established by the FCC and approved by the FCC.

The Universal Service Fund has been somewhat controversial since its formation. However, most of the controversy comes from the direction that the FCC gives to USAC. For example, USF is funded by fees levied against interstate revenues for voice services. Over the years, as the amount of voice services has dropped, the percentage of the fee levied against voice has increased. But this can’t be blamed on USAC since the FCC determines who should pay into the fund. There are many critics who don’t like the programs funded by the USF. But again, these programs were established by the FCC and not by USAC.

Chairman Brendan Carr issued a separate statement that said, “It has been nearly three decades since the FCC designated USAC—the Universal Service Administrative Company . . . In all of that time, there has never been a comprehensive review of USAC’s functions or organization.”

That’s not entirely true. In May 2023, Senator Ted Cruz asked the General Accountability Office (GAO) to examine USAC to see if the company is properly administering the USF. The GAO audit gave high grades to USAC.

The NPRM is a comprehensive review of USAC. The NPRM considers the following:

  • It asks for public comments on ways the agency can be more efficient.
  • The NPRM asks if there should be changes in the USAC appeal process when USAC accepts or denies challenges from USF recipients.
  • It asks if USAC should have a shot clock for some processes to force a decision to be made within a set amount of time.
  • Probably the most important part of the NPRM, and the likely reason for this docket, is a lot of questions to the public and proposed changes in the way that USAC audits USF recipients, and how the company handles fraud. Over the years, USAC and the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau have uncovered instances of fraud in the E-Rate, Rural Health, High-Cost, and Lifeline programs.
  • The NPRM asks if there should be an operational cost cap. It cites the company’s operating budget for 2025 at more than $266 million.
  • USAC uses subcontractors, and the NPRM asks for public comment on whether the subcontractors are knowledgeable.
  • The NPRM asks if there are better ways for USAC to report its annual results to the FCC.
  • The NPRM asks if the number of USAC board members should be reduced from the current size of 20 members, and if meetings must be held in Washington, DC rather than virtually.

The USAC audit is part of the FCC’s overall examination of the Universal Service Fund. The agency is separately examining individual components of USF like E-Rate, the High Cost Fund, and Lifeline.

The Risk of Space Collisions

A recent article in Scientific American looked at the likelihood of collisions between satellites and other devices in orbit today and in the foreseeable future. This is becoming an increasingly important question because of the increasing number of satellites. There are currently 18,000 satellites in orbit, and 29,000 total objects, including spent rocket bodies, dead satellites, and large pieces of space debris. Goldman Sachs research says there could be as many as 305,000 satellites in orbit by 2031 and 1.7 million by 2036. Even if the actual numbers are half that, it means a huge number of orbiting objects in space.

As we put more satellites in space, the chance of collisions increases. This matters because major collisions can be disastrous, as colliding satellites break up into smaller debris that can act as orbital bullets to smash other satellites. Scientists have postulated many scenarios where some parts of space become unusable. Space debris generated at the lowest orbits can fall out of space after a few years. However, the article cites a scientist who says that debris at higher altitudes stays in orbit a lot longer. He said that at 1,200 miles above Earth, debris can persist for 100,000 years.

One prediction in the article is that there is already a 29% chance of collisions per year at altitudes between 520 and 605 kilometers since there are numerous discarded rocket stages the size of school buses at those altitudes that can’t be maneuvered to avoid a collision. The danger  of collisions at those higher orbits is that the debris will rain down and endanger all other satellites below. This might not create dead orbital zones, but it would greatly increase the risk of operating a constellation and would compel satellite operators to send excess satellites into orbit in anticipation of losing some of them.

Perhaps the biggest concern of all is the process of monitoring satellites to avoid collisions. Until recently, this process was done manually, but this now requires automated tracking of satellites to predict collisions. In the last year, Starlink says it performed 300,000 adjustments to avoid collisions, which works out to 40 maneuvers per satellite per year. Scientists worry that this will become impossible at some point as the number of satellites grows. It’s particularly worrisome since many of the counties and companies that plan to put satellites in orbit may not interface well with rival companies and countries. There’s nothing that compels them to do so.

A really scary scenario is the aftermath of a major solar storm that knocks out the electronics of many satellites. We’ve had several such solar storms just in the century we’ve been tracking solar events. A satellite that is disabled by a solar storm would become a dead object that would not be able to maneuver to avoid collisions. The article cites an expert who predicts that a killer solar storm would lead to major satellite collisions within days.

The biggest concern of all for me is that nobody is governing satellite traffic safety. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Switzerland, which is part of the United Nations, approves worldwide spectrum for satellites and loosely coordinates assigned orbital slots. However, the ITU doesn’t consider the capacity of a given orbit to handle satellites as part of its review process. With dozens of countries planning to launch satellites, space is becoming the Wild West. It might take a major event to get the world interested in doing the hard work needed to make this work.