Ajit Pai apparently mismanaged $9B fund–new FCC boss starts “cleanup”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/ajit-pai-apparently-mismanaged-9-billion-fund-new-fcc-boss-starts-cleanup/

by LinuxBender • 5 years ago

256 73 5 years ago

explains why my internet is twice as expensive and the same speed!

atlgator• 5 years ago

Is it odd they are going after SpaceX? The funding they received was earmarked to support unserved census blocks. If any company is in a position to help unserved rural areas it is SpaceX, no?

giacaglia• 5 years ago

Not odd. Expected

drooby• 5 years ago

It only effects something like 6% of blocks that SpaceX would get the funds for… so basically instead of SpaceX getting $880m they’ll get $825m.

SloopJon• 5 years ago

If up to $100 million of that was to places like highway medians and a "parking garage ... surrounded on all sides by multiple companies offering gigabit service," then no, it's not odd at all.

TheParkShark2• 5 years ago

If I understand correctly SpaceX internet is from a satellite. Surely it would would in a larger area than a parking garage or a median right?

ogjunkyard• 5 years ago

I feel like the lean on SpaceX in this article is because it's a popular name at the moment. In the article, it mentions that SpaceX received grants for urban areas for things like airport parking lots. Also mentioned were areas already served by one or more companies with 25/3 broadband. Those were the types of locations that funding was being pulled for.

josefx• 5 years ago

Maybe they currently don't meet all the requirements?[1]

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/auction/904/factsheet

simiones• 5 years ago

If any company is in a position to help unserved rural areas it is SpaceX, no?

Not really - it is very unlikely that SpaceX will be able to cost-effectively serve high-speed internet for any interesting amount of people in a relatively small geographic area, such as the United States, as at any one time only a very small number of satellites can serve a particular area. This becomes especially problematic with any realistically achievable size of the constellation, which is going to be much closer to the current size (~1700 satellites) than to the "promised" size (~42k satellites).

Laying cable seems much more achievable and maintainable than launching 42k satellites every 2-5 years as Elon is "promising" (remember that the maximum life span of any satellite in LEO, as mentioned by SpaceX, is 5 years, after which it will de-orbit naturally).

kaiju0• 5 years ago

The new starship platform should be able to launch 400 satellites per launch. They would only need 30 launches a year to support the constellation.

g_sch• 5 years ago

It looks like they're only trying to claw back a small portion of the overall award to SpaceX ($111m out of $885m), so on its own, this doesn't look like a move to kneecap SpaceX. At least not on the scale of what we see with AWS vs. Azure on the JEDI contract.

TheParkShark2• 5 years ago

Compared to others (Charter) they are having a larger portion pulled back from them. They didn’t even receive the largest contract.

duxup3• 5 years ago

Is it 'gong after SpaceX' or just a case of questioning if they should have gotten the money or not?

I'm not sure any contact or such is 'going after'.

beauzero2• 5 years ago

This is unfortunate. The service maps they are using are extremely poor, being charitable. Anecdotally our area is supposed to have 25/3 and I haven't met anyone that has achieved that speed from our DSL provider. Most go with Hughes, etc. Yet our entire service area shows up as 25/3 serviced. On the other side of that there are several areas that are served with cable and a couple with fiber...none of those areas show in the over generalized 25/3 DSL service area.

This feels like part of a larger game. Someone is going after SpaceX, in the government space, is the general feel. First Bezos says that he will discount the moon contract by $2B...and now this. My opinion is that lobbyists are being employed to turn money away from SpaceX and move it back towards more "traditional"/entrenched government contractors across several fronts.

gpm• 5 years ago

This is my feeling too.

Was this contest run poorly? Definitely. Is the claim that SpaceX is getting funds for census areas that really shouldn't have funds attached true? Almost certainly.

Are they the primary beneficiary of the contest being poorly run? That seems very unlikely. The FCC and Ajit Pai attempted to exclude them from this competition entirely [1], it seems pretty clear from the start that this competition was designed to give too much money to the incumbents, not SpaceX.

Do I think that the FCC would be trying to clawback money if SpaceX hadn't won? I wish I did, but the fact that they're primarily trying to clawback money from SpaceX makes me skeptical. It seems much more likely that this is just corruption in action trying to stop money going to the "wrong" recipient.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/05/elon-musks-promi...

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Do I think that the FCC would be trying to clawback money if SpaceX hadn't won?

Looking at this as a clawback attempt is the wrong framework. The awards are tied to contract terms with clawback-with-penalty provisions. The FCC has identified cases where it is unlikely that the contract terms could be met and provided an opportunity for those with grants to surrender them without penalty if they feel they could not meet the award terms. No effort is being made to undo awards, and if winners think they can meet the terms, they can keep the money.

Its win-win if award winners avail themselves of this opportunity, where they can't meet the terms, because it avoids an after-the-fact clawback with penalty which is good for the winner, and enables the funds to be redirected in advance rather than recovered in arrears, which is good for the government.

The mismanagement is that the places where it is almost certaibly impossible for the terms to be fulfilled, the FCC should not have granted the awards in the first place (of course, it is also true that applicants should have done their due diligence and not applied, so its not exclusively the FCC at fault.)

cycomanic• 5 years ago

It's fascinating how many here if someone goes against a Musk company immediately assume that it's due to corruption or protection for the incumbents. Considering how Tesla benefits significantly from regulations (they make more money from carbon credits than selling cars), I think they are very good at taking advantage of regulation themselves.

Also regarding the current article, maybe it is like in the article SpaceX bit largely on census blocks that do not deserve government subsidies? Maybe they even did it on purpose because they knew they could use other means to provide broadband if they can't get starlink up quick enough?

beauzero2• 5 years ago

I will also be interested to see if they pull back cash from the local CLECs partnering with electric companies in Georgia. Georgia, a little over 2 years ago, changed their state regulations to allow rural CLECs to partner with electrical coops (it may have been broader than that) to bring better than 25/3 to their customers. In the counties that concern me, Polk, Haralson, Carroll, and Heard, in west Georgia, a partnership between Carroll EMC and SyncGlobal (small rural CLEC) should bring fiber to every Carroll EMC customer over the next six years (2 phases). Funding for this may or may not have come from these allocations. The whole process is incredibly obscured by government and short staffed implementation providers.

For reference https://carrollemc.com/broadband ...I also have a pre order in for Starlink to hold me over.

beckler• 5 years ago

My FIL runs an electrical co-op in upstate SC. He had the choice of creating a new HQ for their co-op, or run fiber to all their customers.

He ultimately chose the new HQ because the cost-per-mile was insane when you got in the more rural areas, and he had no guarantee that all serviceable addresses would subscribe, plus it would increase costs for all their subscribers even if they didn't join their network. He also afraid that something faster or more efficient than fiber would become more widely available over the next 10-15 years and then their network would be obsolete.

kryogen1c• 5 years ago

The service maps they are using are extremely poor, being charitable.

charity is incorrect, poor by design. from:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26347380

"Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block"

hilarious. surely the burden of accurate reporting is cost prohibitive for our poor ISPs

Seattle35032• 5 years ago

I would like to point out that the FCC has a mobile app now called "FCC Speed Test". It measures your ISPs speed and reports the results to the FCC. If enough people install it. It will help improve FCC data about where the most pressing needs are.

irrational• 5 years ago

I honestly didn’t realize that DSL was still a thing. I’ve been on fiber optic for so many years that it’s hard to imagine that people still use DSL. I pay less now for gigabit FIOS than I used to pay for dial up. Clearly everyone having these kinds of speeds is not a technical issue but a money issue.

MisterBastahrd• 5 years ago

I live in a Dallas suburb. Across the street, my neighbors have access to both AT&T 50mbps and Spectrum 200mbps services. The next subdivision over has access to those PLUS AT&T fiber. Spectrum never paid to have the work done to provide their service to my entire neighborhood, and so the homes on my side of the street merely have AT&T 50 to use.

thisisnico• 5 years ago

Living in Canada, I have Fiber optic now, but I definitely pay for it. We have total telecom monopolistic practices that send prices upwards over time. It's in the news all the time, Canadians pay more than most countries in the world for internet services as well as wireless data.

asdff2• 5 years ago

The money issue is that ISPs don't pony up to put up fiber on connections they already own, they install it ad hoc. I have spectrum internet, its shit. My alternative is ATT DSL, back to the stone age, so spectrum it is for me. I pay for the fastest spectrum speed offered at the time, but I notice that they had been advertising for fiber in my city. So I called them up and asked if the could set me up with fiber internet. They could, but I would be out hundreds of dollars since they charge me to run fiber from the street to the rental that I live in. Not even the property owner, but the subscriber. They won't upgrade the line they own running to the building themselves, only if a customer pays for it out of pocket. This probably explains why so few people have fiber internet in the U.S. if for most cases, you only can get it if someone who lived in your unit previously or your neighbor on the same line from the street already paid to get the wire to you, or you pay for the install yourself.

lumost• 5 years ago

I'd venture that half of SpaceX's success in the traditional government contracting market has been due to using their own capital rather than government capital for product development. Government funding seems to slow everything down in this space, which as with all high CapEx projects immediately translates to cost via interest rates.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

I used to use Hughesnet, we had 25 gigabytes of data that we got for the month (costed ~$75/month), and then paid $15 for every gigabyte over the cap we went. At it's fastest (high priority, recently reset data cap, night usage), it started to approach half of the 25/4 figure that the government was pushing so hard for.

I use Starlink now, and I feel horrible that I paid for such shitty service for so long. Please, if you're anyone in a rural area: do not support Hughesnet or Viacom. Find local options, look around online or talk to people. You'll almost always get a better deal when you search, and that's exactly what these incumbent powers are lobbying against.

donatzsky• 5 years ago

Here in France the official maps from the telecoms authority shows the speed for each provider, for individual addresses.

http://maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr/

cyanydeez2• 5 years ago

spacex and leo sattellites are not going to services rural areas any better than dish tv provided internet.

easton_s• 5 years ago

TLDR: FCC used outdated maps to award funds. They updated the maps and are now awarding companies based on revised maps.

ashtonkem2• 5 years ago

This always leaves the regular issue we have when it comes to Ajit Pai; was this incompetence of corruption? Always a close run thing with that dude.

Edit: surprising number of Ajit Pai defenders here. Didn’t see that coming.

strbean• 5 years ago

I think the more appropriate question is:

Was this corruption intended to benefit specific players, or just general sabotage of our government institutions?

fitzie• 5 years ago

it was neither, there was a process to fix the map but not wait for a perfect map before the grants could occur.

ccleve2• 5 years ago

This is an absurd hit piece. I promise you that Ajit Pai did not personally review each census block to determine if it needed service or not. That happens at the staff level.

Plus, the assertion in the headline that Pai "mismanaged $9 billion fund" is bloviation -- the FCC is simply asking some grant recipients to return a small portion of the money (6%) based on revised maps. Honestly, do we need to politicize everything?

drzaiusapelord• 5 years ago

Honestly, do we need to politicize everything?

The FCC is a political organization, so yes, it should be politicized. It often makes decisions due to politics, and in this case the Republican ideals of business being more powerful than the government and monied interests and capital owners being more powerful than democracy and working people.

I promise you that Ajit Pai did not personally

That's not how leadership works. They can't fail and then say "Oh well I wasn't reviewing every little thing."

I'm not sure why you're carrying water for a crony like Pai, but its not convincing in the slightest.

pb7• 5 years ago

Honestly, do we need to politicize everything?

When you're dealing with a known corrupt individual, it's worth pointing out.

rbanffy2• 5 years ago

a known corrupt individual,

A known corrupt individual, who was nominated by another known corrupt individual who was then president.

yellow24• 5 years ago

He was head of the FCC. He also politicized his position in making decisions that benefited him and his friends. If he signed the check worth 9 billion I would have hoped he did his research or at least take ownership in where our money went. He is not a victim here.

duxup3• 5 years ago

That sounds more like a great method of deflecting any criticism rather than actually talking about what happened.

I feel like 'that's political' or similar sentiments have been used lately to just deflect criticism. It seems like it could be used endlessly.

ccleve2• 5 years ago

Um, what? I am talking about what happened. It is others who are motivated to criticize Pai not because of what happened in this specific instance, but because of general disagreement with him over other issues (like net neutrality).

trentnix• 5 years ago

It's Ars.

refurb• 5 years ago

Yup. This is “new leadership 101”. Buy as much political capital as you can - blame everything on the prior person, even if it hadn’t happened yet. Even better if you can claim your first steps are “fixing” the problems the old guy left you - even if you’re actually just instituting a new policy.

You think these people end up running major US govt orgs and aren’t ruthless cunts? You can’t survive in DC without knowing how to throw people under the bus.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Honestly, do we need to politicize everything?

Government management of funds is political, by definition. It can't be “politicized”; the weird thing is pretending that it was ever apolitical to start with.

dogleash• 5 years ago

This is an absurd hit piece. I promise you that Ajit Pai did not personally review each census block to determine if it needed service or not.

Of course he didn't do it manually but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Nobody thinks it's his job to manually review census blocks, people think it's his job to ensure the data is in order before the auction happened.

samstave• 5 years ago

Ajit Pai is an ultra-douchebag.

He deserves prison for how he mishandled the FCC.

I met him twice back in the day and he was so slimy and douchey each time, it was sickening to talk to him.

vernie• 5 years ago

Just get used to the fact that the vast majority of Trump appointees will suffer no professional or personal consequences and move on.

genericone• 5 years ago

Yes DJT appointed him Chairman, but I recall his name from the earlier 2010's and wikipedia confirms he was initially appointed Commissioner unanimously by the Senate in 2012.

tl• 5 years ago

From Wikipedia: In 2011, Pai was then nominated for a Republican Party position on the Federal Communications Commission by President Barack Obama at the recommendation of Minority leader Mitch McConnell. Mitch is the real enemy of the US here -- a tyrant of a sham election who continues to wreck havoc on attempts to run a healthy democracy.

LightG• 5 years ago

That muckerfother ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J02-BtZ1bxE

99_00• 5 years ago

The headline sounds scandalous, but the article leaves me thinking that the system works.

They allocated funds based on data, and made small course corrections based on better data.

Better to move it forward with good enough data and course correct than to wait for perfect data.

inetknght2• 5 years ago

I have been watching the housing market in Texas (rural areas around Houston, Dallas, and Austin) for a while. I've been actively looking at homes for the past few months. I'm closing on a home in a week assuming it all goes well. As a software developer one of my criteria for buying a home has been "fast" internet.

FCC's website [0] is the absolute opposite of reliable. Information there is, at best, not up to date. There are some cases where I'm convinced that the internet service providers are maliciously claiming service in an area that they do not actually provide.

Then there's the internet service providers themselves. They'll offer fast service on their website just because they offer it in the zip code. Then you call to order, spend an hour on the phone, and discover that they don't provide service to that address. Sometimes it's because the telephone pole is too far by a few feet or a few miles. Or sometimes it's because they don't provide service to that zip code at all.

And then if you ask how much it will cost to build service to that address... you're lucky if they'll give you a quote. Most of the time they'll refuse to build.

Some of them will tell you to go to their "partner" [19] who will figure out who your ISP is... and that partner will then send you right back to that same ISP who will deny service.

I have documentation. Would the Texas AG file a criminal complaint? No, I don't trust he would. The Texas AG is demonstrably as corrupt as the rest of the current Texas government.

There are some regional ISPs that are "better" because they don't seem to employ the scummy tactics about zip codes... but they also don't provide a wide service area and often won't build out.

The FCC's website is so unreliable that I'd end up just having to call every ISP and asking whether they service the address. And even more importantly is I'd have to ask specifically about serviceability of that address and beware of the representative just parroting the zip code offer. I'd end up spending multiple hours to check a single address for internet service. Then I'd end up trying to filter a dozen addresses a week. It's fucking infuriating.

[0] https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/

[1]: Altice (Suddenlink): https://www.suddenlink.com

[2]: Altice (Optimum) https://www.optimum.com/alticeone

[3]: CableOne (Sparklight, NewWave): https://www.sparklight.com

[4]: Windstream: https://www.windstream.net/high-speed-internet

[5]: Comcast: https://www.xfinity.com/learn/offers

[6]: AT&T: https://www.att.com/buy/bundles

[7]: Entouch https://www.entouch.net/

[8]: Frontier https://frontier.com/

[9]: GCTR (Vyve) https://vyvebroadband.com/

[10]: Spectrum (Charter) https://www.spectrum.com/

[11]: Consolidated https://www.consolidated.com/

[12]: CenturyLink https://www.centurylink.com/

[13]: EarthLink https://internet.earthlink.com/

[14]: Livingston Communications https://livcom.us/

[15]: Lake Livingston Telephone Company https://lakelinkgstontel.com/

[16]: Colorado Valley Telephone Co-operative https://www.cvctx.com/

[17]: People's Telephone Co-operative https://peoplescom.net/

[18]: Eastex https://www.eastex.com/

[19]: SmartMove.US is fucking trash https://www.smartmove.us/

cweagans• 5 years ago

Getting a quote to build out service to an address through any residential sales channel at an ISP is an exercise in futility. They generally won't quote it to residential customers because the quote usually ends up being for some astronomically high amount (dozens/hundreds of thousands) that few residential customers could reasonably afford.

If you really want to have something built out for you, I recommend the following approach:

1. Find neighbors that are both frustrated with their internet options and have some money to spend

2. Call the business sales line for whatever ISP you want to go with.

3. Request a quote for yourself and mention that there are some neighboring businesses that would be willing to go in on the build cost.

Usually, you can at least get a quote that way and you can decide from there whether or not it's worth it. Once they've built out service to your location, other residential customers can re-use that same infrastructure, so they don't all actually need to have businesses of their own.

Sparklight is a provider in my area as well and they will build out business service to a residential location if there is business being conducted there (it's a pretty low bar to meet, and when in doubt, you could simply set up an LLC for yourself. I think it's ~$300 in Texas, which would essentially be a rounding error on the cost of the service buildout).

Another option that you could look into is setting up your own ISP. I found that in my previous home, I would have been able to set up a tiny neighborhood ISP for ~$30k (for 15 homes). It's a large chunk of money, but divided up across multiple homes + ongoing service fees, it would have been pretty manageable. This was the cost for fiber-to-the-home and it was so low only because I didn't have to cross any public right-of-way, I was able to find a path for the fiber that didn't cross any other utilities or anything, there was fiber nearby (Zayo Communications publishes a map online where you can find this info), and I was willing to do much of the installation work myself. I ended up selling the house and moving instead, but it would have been a pretty fun project. You could also consider starting a WISP. https://startyourownisp.com/ has come across HN several times and is a really interesting resource.

inetknght2• 5 years ago

the quote usually ends up being for some astronomically high amount (dozens/hundreds of thousands) that few residential customers could reasonably afford.

Yes. I was prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars.

Another option that you could look into is setting up your own ISP.

I'm interested in doing so but not as part of a purchase of a home. Maybe a few years down the line I might.

Ajit Pai apparently mismanaged $9B fund–new FCC boss starts “cleanup”

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