Tag Archives: StarLink

Future Satellite Competition

I’ve been thinking about the long-term trajectory for satellite broadband in rural areas. I saw a recent estimate that Starlink has around 2.6 million customers in the U.S. and is still growing. I have to think that most of these customers live in places that don’t have a fast broadband alternative to satellite broadband.

I got to thinking about satellite after a recent conversation with an Uber driver. She lives in a small rural town in my county, and she and most of her neighbors use Starlink today. She says that it works adequately well for the way her family uses broadband, but that it’s far too expensive. She expects to be changing to fiber in 2026 when Frontier builds fiber in her area. She said she already knows people nearby who changed to Frontier fiber that was built in 2025. I researched her neighborhood, and Frontier is building fiber with the help of a broadband grant funded by the State of North Carolina.

There has already been a lot of rural fiber built with grant funding. There are fiber construction projects underway from CAF II, RDOF, ReConnect, NTIA Tribal, and EA-CAM. States awarded a huge amount of grants from the Capital Project Funds, from ARPA, and from State general funds. My best estimate is that these various programs will fund the construction of fiber to around 8 million rural fiber passings. My estimates are that there are still 2.2 million passings to be built from these programs in 2026 and another 1.2 million passings in 2027. On top of these programs, it looks like there will be roughly another 2.5 million rural fiber passings coming from the BEAD grants that have been tentatively announced.

I don’t have a good estimate for the coming passings from rural fixed wireless construction, but there is still construction of WISP networks being funded by RDOF and other grant programs. It looks like BEAD has tentatively awarded grants for fixed wireless to a little less than half a million new passings. WISPs are building networks with speed capabilities in the range of 500 Mbps download, which is a lot faster than what is being delivered by Starlink today.

These various grant programs are going to cover a lot of rural America with fast broadband, and that is going to eat into the potential market for Starlink and Amazon LEO. Starlink faces the issue of having a price that is significantly higher than the large majority of ISPs that are building grant-funded networks. That’s something that the company can fix by lowering rates. But even with lower rates, Starlink will not match the speeds of the grant-funded networks, at least with current satellite technology.

We have no real ideas about the pricing and speed capabilities of Amazon LEO. There is a lot of speculation that the company will create interesting bundles for satellite broadband with Amazon video and shopping.

The bottom line of my speculation is that the U.S. households that will be interested in satellite broadband will be shrinking over the next few years as millions of rural homes get faster broadband alternatives from fiber or fixed wireless.

It’s also likely that there will be serious competition between Starlink and Amazon LEO as they each try to lock down a share of the U.S. market. Will the two companies collude to keep prices high, or will they devolve into the kind of fierce competition we see in the cellular industry today?

On a worldwide basis, both U.S. satellite providers are going to see significant competition from the Guowang (the National Network) from China and the Quinfan (Thousand Sails) constellation from Shanghai. My best guess is that these two companies will undercut the prices of the U.S. providers to try to corner the markets in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Starlink has a unique market opportunity today since it brings the only fast broadband option to huge numbers of homes. But in North America and Europe, those opportunities will decrease as faster terrestrial networks are constructed. Starlink’s unique monopoly disappears when Amazon LEO enters the market, and possibly gets really competitive when other worldwide constellations come online.

Another Look at Starlink Performance

The Internet Society published a blog by Isabel Suizo of Carnegie Mellon University that looks at Starlink’s impact on digital equity.

The blog made three interesting points about Starlink. First, Starlink is not meeting the regulatory performance goals in the U.S., the EU, and Australia. The blog cites speed tests from M-Labs that show that only 24.7% of U.S. speed tests, 13.6% of EU speed tests, and 42.2% of Australian speed tests exceeded 100 Mbps. That speed requirement to qualify as broadband came from the BEAD grants in the US, the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF) in the EU, and the Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) regime in Australia.

The analysis noted that Starlink comes closer to meeting the regulatory goals if it is judged only by the peak speed measured at a given location, versus looking at average speeds over time. This is a major finding that has not been widely discussed before. It means that Starlink speeds vary for a customer and that Starlink does not deliver a reliable speed of at least 100 Mbps. The blog contrasts this with fiber, where average and maximum speeds are similar, meaning fiber delivers a reliably steady speed.

The second finding of the report is that there is little difference in Starlink broadband throughput between the top 10% and bottom 10% of households ranked by household incomes. That means, at least at the global level, that Starlink delivers the same broadband to everybody.

However, that’s not entirely true since Starlink does offer priority service to businesses and users like ships in the ocean. These priority customers pay extra to guarantee good broadband. It has also not been widely discussed that Starlink restricts broadband speeds for customers who exceed its 1 terabyte data cap in a month.

The final conclusion of the paper is that LEO networks have the potential to improve broadband performance in remote, underserved users. That is not surprising since it matches the stated goals for both Starlink and Kuiper. These companies have touted since they began that they can bring broadband to the underserved and unserved around the world.

Overall, this analysis adds to the evidence of how Starlink works in practice. The biggest revelation from the research I that speeds to a given customer vary, and that speeds are sometimes solid and sometimes aren’t. The research shows that, at least for now, Starlink is largely delivering the same broadband to everybody, with the caveat that there are customers who are willing to pay more for a higher priority. Only time will tell if priority for pay becomes a regular feature of LEO broadband. Finally, Starlink seems to be meeting its stated goals of bringing broadband to places outside of the reach of landline broadband networks.

Why BEAD to Kuiper?

There is no question that this has turned into one of the oddest years for broadband during my career. We’ve seen Digital Equity grants killed. We’re seeing the spending for BEAD being cut in half. And maybe oddest of all, we’re seeing States make sizeable BEAD grant awards to Kuiper, although the company isn’t close to having its first broadband customer.

You might think we should have learned a lesson from when Starlink was a big winner in the RDOF reverse auction. The FCC eventually killed those awards after it determined that Starlink was not ready to fulfill a major commitment to serve large numbers of locations in specific geographies.

As of the date of this blog, Kuiper has 153 working satellites in orbit. It has scheduled launches of an additional 72 satellites before the end of the year. It’s worth noting that previous planned launches have all been seriously delayed.

Kuiper was granted permission in July 2020 to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites. The satellites will be deployed at three altitudes of 370 miles, 380 miles, and 390 miles. The company says it will begin beta testing when it reaches 578 satellites deployed at 390 miles. To put this into perspective, Starlink launched commercial service when it reached 1,260 satellites. Even with that number, early Starlink customers complained about short service lapses between satellites. Kuiper is under pressure from the FCC to have 1,618 satellites in orbit by mid-2026 to maintain its spectrum licenses.

For the last month, I’ve been perplexed by the magnitude of the BEAD awards being made to Kuiper. As of the date of this blog, Kuiper has tentative BEAD awards for 324,000 locations, second only to Starlink at 427,000. The next biggest award winner is Comcast with 233,000 locations. These are tentative awards, and NTIA is still reviewing and may reject some of the tentative awards to fiber, which would likely increase the awards to satellite.

Kuiper is not nearly as ready as Starlink was with RDOF. The RDOF reverse auction closed at the end of 2020, and Starlink invited selected customers from its waiting list to try the service in January 2021. Starlink started taking pre-orders nationwide in April 2021. Starlink could finally reach every part of the lower 48 states in March 2022.

One of the oddest things about Kuiper is that nobody knows how fast the service will be until it is deployed. Early Starlink customers received speeds that were faster than advertised, but speeds went downhill quickly as customer additions outpaced satellite deployments.

Starlink is only now on the cusp of delivering consistent 100/20 Mbps broadband. According to a report from Ookla, Starlink speed tests in the second quarter of 2022 showed a median download speed of 53.95 Mbps, meaning half of customers had speeds faster than that speed, and half were slower. Median upload speeds in that quarter were 7.5 Mbps. In the first quarter of 2025, Ookla reported that Starlink had climbed to a median broadband speed of 104.71 Mbps download and 14.84 Mbps upload, nearly double the speeds in 2022. The Ookla report said that only 17.4 % of Starlink customers fully met the FCC definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps per second, with the limiting factor for many customers being slow upload speeds.

I saw a recent quote from a State broadband manager, when asked why he made an award to Kuiper, said it was because they bid the lowest cost per passing. That seems like a cynical response, and it makes me wonder if State Broadband Managers have thrown up their hands and are just following NTIA’s rules without questions.

The chances are good that Kuiper will complete the constellation and will eventually deliver satellite broadband. But history has also shown that new technology companies are often late in meeting commitments and sometimes fail altogether. The BEAD grant process is taking a big chance that Kuiper will meet its obligations and that speeds will be reasonably fast – something that nobody can know until it happens.

BEAD Awards and Satellite

North Carolina, where I live, recently announced its preliminary awards for BEAD. The State has allocated $408.5 million for preliminary BEAD awards out of an allocation of BEAD money to the State of $1.5 billion. That leaves an astounding $1.1 billion on the table and likely unspent. There is some hope that the unspent money, referred to as non-deployment funds, will be at least partially available to the State for broadband-related activities. But that possibility seems to be dwindling every day.

The State had to cover 93,138 homes and 374 community anchor institutions with the BEAD funds. The State made awards to build fiber to 68% of the locations, to deploy cable or fixed wireless to 2% of locations, and to subsidize low-orbit satellite providers for the remaining 30% of locations.

Now that the awards have been announced, we can finally see the proposed BEAD areas by location and technology. I live in Western North Carolina, that was devastated a year ago by Hurricane Helene. There was a lot of hope in this part of the state that most of the awards would go to fiber. The State mostly did okay for Western North Carolina. Of the 29,400 BEAD-eligible locations in this part of the state, over 24,000 went to ISPs who promise to build fiber, leaving 5,300 locations that will get awards for low-orbit satellite. Most of the satellite funding in the State went to Kuiper, which got $15.9 million out of the $18.3 million awarded to satellite. People here are scratching their heads, wondering why a company with only a hundred satellites is being awarded grant funding.

But now that the funding for satellite has sunk in, I’m starting to see what this means for Western North Carolina. First, there are five counties where satellite was awarded to all of the eligible BEAD locations – Clay, Madison, Mitchell, Polk, and Yancey.

What do County officials in those counties tell people? NTIA is giving money mostly to Kuiper and some to Starlink to be able to offer them satellite broadband. All of the BEAD-eligible locations in these counties can already buy satellite broadband from Starlink. The only benefit of BEAD for these residents is that they will probably get a free receiver for enrolling as a BEAD customer. Any hope these counties had of filling in the map with fiber is now gone.

There may be future broadband grants. For example, USDA is planning a new round of ReConnect grants. But even if we assume that ReConnect can be used to cover areas served by satellite, ReConnect won’t make a big dent in areas given satellite from BEAD. So far, with 45 states reporting preliminary BEAD results, the two satellite companies have been awarded $707 million in BEAD. That’s a lot of locations nationwide, and the number is likely going to grow significantly before BEAD grants are final.

It was understood from the time that the BEAD rules were adopted by Congress that there would have to be some remote locations that can’t be reached with fiber. But nobody thought it would be nearly as many as we are seeing. The BEAD grants were originally going to award $45.5 billion in grants, but it now looks like the actual awards will be less than half of that amount.

In North Carolina, a lot of the 5,300 locations in Western North Carolina could have gotten fiber if the state had been able to use more of the $1.1 billion it will be returning to Treasury. I fully understand the desire to be cost-conscious with federal funding, but BEAD was intended by Congress to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build long-term broadband infrastructure for a lot of rural America. I always assumed that the BEAD emphasis on fiber first would have meant that States would be judged for the whole portfolio of grants being awarded, and wouldn’t shy from awarding BEAD for areas where construction costs are higher than average.

I have to mention that the proposed grant awards are far from final. I’ve heard from multiple States that NTIA is now asking them to either reduce the amount of funding for some grants or reassign the money to somebody else. That likely will mean even more locations will go to satellite by the time the dust settles and the BEAD grants are final.

Space Shorts September 2025

Space has been a part of the communications networks since the communications satellite Telstar was first put into orbit in 1962. I remember as a kid tracking Telstar across the sky. Space today is an increasingly important part of communications. The following are a few pieces of space news I recently found to be interesting..

Low-Orbit LEO. The Spanish startup Kreios Space is working to develop a new type of satellite that can fly at lower altitudes. LEO satellites today typically fly at altitudes from 220 to 350 miles above the Earth. Kreios is working on satellites that would fly at an altitude of 125 miles. LEO satellites for companies like Starlink are parked high enough to avoid the drag caused by the upper atmosphere. Kreios would be able to fly lower by using air intake to drive electric motors that would generate enough thrust to maintain altitude. This would allow for long-duration orbits and the ability to move the satellite without needing any traditional fuel.

It’s not hard to understand the advantage of flying at lower altitudes. The satellites would be able to observe the ground in much greater detail. Communications and broadband satellites at a lower altitude would mean lower latency and faster communications times.  The company thinks the improvement in performance would be between 3 and 16 times better than the current LEO satellites flying at higher altitudes.

 Bluetooth Satellites. Hubble Network is a startup that is building a fleet of satellites to communicate with Bluetooth devices. The Bluetooth devices involved are different than the typical Bluetooth device that is designed to send a lot of data for a short distance. Instead, Hubble will connect to low-power Bluetooth sensors that only transmit a small amount of data. Hubble launched its first two satellites in 2024, now has seven satellites in orbit, and plans on having a full satellite constellation in place by 2028.

The advantage of the technology for Hubble customers is the use of low-power Bluetooth devices that are far less costly than connecting to cellular technology. Sensors can be placed anywhere on the planet that are out of reach of cellular networks and can be used for functions like tracking the movement of cargo ships. Hubble is already tracking millions of devices and expects to be able to keep track of billions. The company today is working with customers like Life360, which has a location-based safety service that can let families and friends share real-time locations with each other. The sensors can be used to track vehicle fleets and can provide instant feedback on things like driving speeds.

 Space Robots. I can’t think of a space sci-fi movie that didn’t have worker robots in the background taking care of the maintenance required to work in space. I saw an article about Icarus, a startup that is raising money to develop robot workers to replace astronauts on the ISS space station. That set me on a search to understand the space robotics market, and there is a space robot-race underway. Established companies like Maxar Technologies, Northrup Grumann, NDA, Honeybee Robotics, and Motiv Space Systems have been active in the field. They are joined by numerous startups, including Astrobotic Technology, GITAI, Rovial Space, BigDipper Exploration Technologies, Space 11, and Novium.

We’ve already seen space robots for many years, like the various Mars rovers like Nasa’s Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance, and China’s Zhurong. The companies listed are working on robots of all sizes, from the inchworm robots being developed GITAI to moon rovers being developed by several companies.

Asteroid Mining. There have now been several trips to explore asteroids and bring back samples. This includes NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex mission that returned samples from the Bennu asteroid in 2023 and the Japanese Hayabusa-2 mission, which returned samples from the Ryugu asteroid in 2020. These missions were government-funded and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and were funded for scientific research purposes.

Startup Karman+ is working on being able to fund a round trip to asteroids for roughly $10 million, with the cost to hopefully drop in the future. This is the first step in developing an asteroid mining industry that would use robots to mine valuable metals from asteroids and round-trip rockets to ferry materials back to Earth orbit. This first mission only plans to bring back one kilogram of material and is a test of concept for the technology. The ultimate technology will need to mine the materials in space needed to create the fuel needed to return heavier payloads back to Earth.

Broadband Shorts September 2025

The following topics are interesting, just too short of a topic for a full blog.

Criminal Damage to Undersea Fibers. Finland filed criminal charges against the top officers of an oil tanker in connection with damage done to undersea cables in December. The National Prosecution Authority in Helsinki indicted the captain and two first officers of the Eagle S, a Cook Islands-registered tanker that is suspected of being part of a shadow fleet of ships that transports Russian oil in violation of international sanctions. The officers are charged with aggravated criminal mischief for allegedly dragging the ship’s anchor for more than 56 miles across the Gulf of Finland on Christmas Day, cutting five electric and telecom cables and causing almost $70 million in damage. Press releases at the time assumed the damage was accidental.

AT&T Class Action Lawsuits. Millions of AT&T customers are eligible to file claims in the $177 million legal settlement related to two data breaches. The first data breach happened in March 2024 and involved customer data, including date of birth and social security numbers. The second breach in July 2024 exposed calling and text records for nearly all AT&T cellular customers. Multiple lawsuits were filed against AT&T and were consolidated into a single settlement, with $149 million for the first breach and $28 million for the second.

Starlink Introduces Introductory Rates. Starlink has joined the ISP competitive fray and now offers introductory rates to attract new subscribers in rural areas where the company has excess capacity. In affected areas, the introductory rate for monthly broadband is cut from $120 to as low as $85. The company also introduced a new Lite plan for as low as $59 per month for customers with low broadband needs. The plan doesn’t guarantee broadband, and speeds might be deprioritized in times of heavy usage in the area. Starlink has also slashed the price of its receiver in some areas to as low as $89. The discounted rates are only guaranteed for a year, and if customers switch plans or have a service interruption, their rate reverts to the full rates.

Windstream Reunites with Uniti. A decade after the company split into two parts, Windstream and Uniti are reuniting into one company. The original split was unique in the industry and established Uniti as a Reit (Real Estate Investment Trust) that took ownership of the network and leased it back to the telco. The companies are being recombined since the company believes the value of the recombined business will be greater than the value of the two separate companies. The new company will retain the Uniti name and the UNIT stock symbol. The company will keep the Kinetic brand for Windstream fiber customers.

Wi-Fi 7 Adoption at 2%. Ookla reports that one year after introduction, WiFi 7 adoption is just under 2% in the U.S. Nobody expected instant adoption because ISPs need to update customer routers, and customers need to upgrade home devices to be able to use the 6 GHz spectrum being used for WiFi 7. Ookla reports that average speeds with WiFi 7 are almost 400 Mbps faster than the average speeds on Wi-Fi 6E devices and more than 600 Mbps faster than basic Wi-Fi 6. The big advantage of WiFi 7 is the multiple channels available with 6 GHz and the larger size of the channels, which together eliminate contention at a customer site of multiple devices trying to use a small number of channels.

FCC to Bar Chinese Testing Labs. The FCC has begun the process to withdraw the ability of three Chinese labs to certify devices for us in the U.S. The FCC has already withdrawn the testing capability of four other Chinese labs. Many people are not aware that the FCC approves broadband and wireless devices to make sure they meet the claimed specifications. This is particularly important for wireless devices since poorly designed devices can bleed into nearby spectrum bands. In recent years, as many as 75% of devices have been tested and certified in China.

AT&T Accelerating Copper Retirements. The FCC placed a two-year moratorium on notifications related to copper retirement in March and proposed changes to make this permanent. AT&T reacted quickly to the change in regulation and has begun the process of retiring copper in around 500 wire centers, or 10% of the AT&T telco exchanges.

Broadband Technology Improving

As has happened continuously since the introduction of DSL and 1 Mbps cable modems, the major broadband technologies continue to evolve and get faster.

Cable HFC technology is getting faster. Harmonic, one of the makers of core cable broadband technology, recently announced that the company had achieved a 14 Gbps speed with DOCSIS 4.0. The test was achieved during a CableLabs interoperability event. The speed was achieved in a mock-up that included achieving the faster speed using technology provided by multiple other vendors.

The test was achieved with an updated CMTS (which is the main hub router in a cable modem network). The speed beats the old record of 10 Gbps, also achieved by Harmonic. It’s unlikely that any cable companies will try to achieve that speed since it would mean sacrificing some upload speeds with current DOCSIS 4.0 technology. But a faster CMTS would allow a cable company to offer a true 10 Gbps download product. These kinds of breakthroughs are also important since they are the first step towards developing the next generation of electronics.

Faster home broadband service from fiber is also improving. Earlier this year, Nokia announced the availability of two different 25 Gbps customer modems, making it realistic for ISPs to offer the faster 25 Gbps service on a PON fiber network.

Nokia also recently announced the release of a 25G PON card for the network core that can simultaneously support all of the flavors of PON, including GPON, XGS-PON, and 25G PON. The company said the card would easily be able to handle the upcoming 50G PON. Having a core with this flexibility will allow ISPs to keep customers on older GPON technology without having to force an update when the newer technologies are introduced to the network.

Finally, Nokia announced the release of some new home WiFi 7 gateways for the home. The  Beacon 4 gateway can reach speeds of 3.6 Gbps, and the tri-band Beacon 9 gateway offers 9.4 Gbps speeds. These are added to a line of gateways that top out with the Beacon 24, which can achieve home WiFi speeds of 24 Gbps. The new generation of WiFi 7 routers offers the possibility of superfast speeds inside the home using 6 GHz spectrum, while at the same time still connecting to older devices using 2.5 and 5 GHz spectrum.

Another major announcement is the new generation of Tarana radios for fixed wireless. The specifications on the new radios are a leap forward in capacity and performance. The first-generation G1 radio platform could support up to 1,000 customers per tower, 250 per sector. Each sector could accept up to 2.5 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth. The new G2 platform can support up to 512 customers per sector (2048 for a tower). The radios can accept as much as 6 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth per sector.

We can’t leave out satellite technology. The first-generation Starlink satellite weighed around 570 pounds and had a total downlink budget of about 20 Gbps. Starlink is introducing its third generation of satellite that weighs almost 4,200 pounds and has a downlink budget of 1 Tbps and 160 Gbps in aggregate uplink capacity.

This is a sampling of technology improvements and is not meant to exclude improvements being introduced by other vendors. There are many other important improvements including faster lasers for long-haul fiber routes and point-to-point broadband connections using light.

Starlink Disputes Virginia BEAD Awards

In an action that surprises nobody, Starlink has taken exception to the BEAD awards being proposed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) of Virginia, which is administering the BEAD grants in the State.

The Starlink comments were filed in response to the proposed final report from DHCD that informs NTIA of its proposed BEAD awards. Each state must solicit public comments on the proposed awards. These comments are forwarded to NTIA, and the agency has the final say on making the awards.

Starlink objected to the BEAD awards and said that it should have been awarded $60 million. To put Starlink’s complaint into perspective, Virginia is proposing to award BEAD funds to cover 133,500 locations. The proposed award to Starlink was $3.26 million to cover 5,579 locations for an average award of $584 per location. Project Kuiper was also awarded funding for satellite broadband, with a proposed award of $4.46 million to cover 6,967 locations for an average award of $641 per location. The two companies together have proposed awards to cover 9.4% of the BEAD locations in the State.

Virginia proposes to award 1,519 locations for fixed wireless technology, or 1.1% of BEAD locations. Most of the proposed funding went to fiber. It’s not easy to cite the exact percentage going to fiber since Comcast won awards for 24,343 locations, some to be served with fiber and some to be served by traditional cable TV technology. Over 89% of the awards went to either fiber or cable TV technology.

The Virginia public comment period on the proposed BEAD grants is for seven days, and other states will have similar comment periods. All of the states are hurrying to get a final report generated by the September 4 deadline set by NTIA, and most states are expected to meet the deadline. That means there will be a lot of opportunities over the next month for Starlink to make similar comments in other state’s proposed final reports.

To put Starlink’s request for $60 million into perspective, the company says that amount would cover almost all of the eligible locations in the State. We’ll have to wait to see how NTIA reacts to the Starlink comments. The agency has the flexibility to agree with or ignore Starlink. This final decision rests with Arielle Roth, the newly seated head of NTIA.

This issue has to be a hot potato in a purple state like Virginia. The state has a Republican Governor who recently praised the proposed BEAD awards. I’m sure that County and State elected officials have been publicly praising the proposed awards that will bring fiber to a lot or rural Virginia. Nobody knows what happens if NTIA agrees with Starlink. NTIA could decide which fiber grants to undo, but it would more likely pass the issue back to the State.

To complicate matters even further, Starlink’s filed comments in the BEAD process is not necessarily the end of the line, and Starlink or fiber providers who lose proposed grants in this process could file a lawsuit if they disagree with the final decision of NTIA or DHCD. BEAD could still get very messy before it’s done.

Satellites in the News

It seems like there is daily news concerning satellites used for broadband and telecommunications. Following are a sampling of some of the recent announcements.

Starlink Outage. Starlink experienced a worldwide 2.5-hour network outage on July 23 that was blamed on “key internal software services that operate the core network”. This raises questions about using satellite broadband for mission-critical uses, such as for military field operations.

T-Mobile Satellite Texting. T-Mobile has been plastering the airwaves with ads that tout the ability of T-Mobile customers to use its satellites to send text messages from remote locations. The service is available free to T-Mobile cellular and broadband customers and is available to others for $10 per month. T-Mobile enabled the service for free to everybody in the Kerr County, Texas area after the recent flooding, and the company said it would do the same for future disasters. The company says that by the end of the year, 911 texting will be available to all cellphone customers in the U.S., regardless of their subscribed carrier.

Project Kuiper. The company is now in the deployment phase of its satellite constellation that will compete with Starlink. The latest launch of 27 satellites brought the number of deployed satellites to 102. The company has scheduled 80 more launches and believes it can begin offering some commercial services by the end of this year. The first planned constellation will consist of 3,236 satellites.

Echostar. The company announced a deal with MDA Space to launch 200 satellites that will provide cellphone service from satellites by 2029. The satellite constellation would use Echostar’s existing 2 GHz AWS-4 spectrum, which they hope will justify keeping the spectrum.

AST SpaceMobile. The company has asked the FCC to launch 243 additional satellites by 2028 that would provide cellular service in direct competition with T-Mobile (and possibly Echostar). The new satellites have a large antenna array of 223 square meters.

New Regulations. The FCC voted on August 7 to accelerate the licensing process for new proposed satellite launches. This was done to keep pace with the explosive growth of the space economy. This implies even more satellites in low orbits, making the space increasingly crowded. As of July 2024, there were over 11,000 satellites in space, with over 10,000 that are active. There are worldwide plans to have as many as 100,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, the vast majority in low-orbit space.

Spectrum. The FCC is in the process of considering four new spectrum bands for satellites. This includes spectrum from 12.7-13.25 GHz, 42-42.5 GHz, 51.4-52.4 GHz, and the “W-band” that includes various ranges including 92.0-94.0 GHz, 94.1-100 GHz, 102.0-109.5 GHz, and 111.8-114.25 GHz. Altogether this is over 200,000 Megahertz of spectrum. The FCC is also considering increasing the power limits on some of the spectrum, which would greatly increase bandwidth utilization. There are some concerns about overuse of some of the proposed bands. For example, meteorologists are warning about overallocation of spectrum in the 52 GHz band.

BEAD Grants. It seems obvious with announcements from some state broadband offices that the amount of the BEAD grants allocated to satellite broadband will increase significantly. There should be some pronouncements coming of grant awards within a month or so, depending on any bottleneck at the NTIA when it tries to process BEAD grants from all states at nearly the same time.

A Peek at the New BEAD

The State of Tennessee released a side-by-side comparison of the new Benefit of the Bargain round of BEAD applications compared to its initial round of BEAD applications conducted before the revised BEAD rules.

The side-by-side comparison (file:///C:/A/Articles/Tennessee-BEAD-Comparison.pdf) is interesting and shows some big differences between the two grant rounds:

  • Tennessee received 541 applications in the new Benefit of the Bargain round compared to 298 applications in the original round of BEAD.
  • The low-orbit satellite companies Starlink and Kuiper bid throughout the state. Starlink didn’t submit any applications in the first round but bid almost everywhere in the new BEAD round. Kuiper bid for most of the state in both BEAD rounds. Satellite is clearly going to win a significant amount of grant funding since there were 68 of 173 serving areas that got proposals from one or both satellite providers and no other technology. The satellite companies surprisingly don’t seem to be fazed by bidding in Appalachia.
  • There were surprisingly few proposals for fixed wireless technology, with proposals only made in 12 of the 173 study areas included in the new round of BEAD. Part of the reason for this might be the mountainous and hilly nature of much of Tennessee, but there are plenty of areas in the central and western parts of the state where wireless will work well.
  • Comcast switched technology from the first to the second round. In the first round, the company proposed to build fiber, and in the new round it mostly changed to traditional hybrid fiber/coaxial networks – apparently to be able to bid at a lower cost. This makes me wonder if it’s really cheaper to build copper coaxial cables than fiber or if Comcast is just willing to take less funding.
  • There has always been a big question of whether big ISPs would show up for BEAD. There are three big companies in the new round of BEAD – AT&T, Comcast, and Windstream. The industry has always wondered if AT&T would join BEAD.
  • There are a number of smaller ISPs asking for funding to build fiber that includes cooperatives and municipalities.
  • There are four service areas that had no proposals. The state will have to talk an ISP into serving these areas before they can close out their BEAD grants.

It’s impossible to make any definitive cost comparisons between applicants because the new BEAD rules allow ISPs to request to serve areas smaller than the serving areas suggested by the state. There are also roughly 7,000 fewer passings on the newest BEAD map than were included in the initial BEAD grants. But in general, the comparison shows:

  • Most companies proposing to build fiber bid less the second time, but some of this could be due to fewer eligible passings and not just to a sharpening of the pencil.
  • Fiber ISPs across the country are wondering how much lower other technologies will bid in BEAD. There is only a single company asking to build wireless in the state, and their proposed grant awards are roughly one-third the cost of those asking for fiber in the same study areas. But without knowing more details, that ratio might not mean anything for other states.
  • However, satellite bids are incredibly low, most at 10% or less than proposals to build fiber. There is a map showing the eligible passings by study area, and I eyeball the satellite bids to be in the range of $400- $600 per passing. Kuiper is generally significantly lower than Starlink. These low bids are going to worry ISPs everywhere.