FCC pays $340k/year to keep 100's of empty Alaska buildings wired for internet

https://www.propublica.org/article/adak-island-alaska-internet-subsidy-fcc

by Teever • 2 days ago

37 16 2 days ago

This sounds like less of a "let's get mad at the FCC!" situation, but more of a "let's get mad at companies defrauding the US Government" situation.

LorenDB2• 2 days ago

Yeah, at $340,000/yr, this situation is costing individual Americans less than 1 cent per person per year. Nothing more than a rounding error.

Saris• 2 days ago

That part that frustrates me is this is just one example of spending for no reason, so how many others like it are also out there?

rootusrootus2• 2 days ago

I think the point is not that Adak gets this money wasted on them, but that this is endemic across the US. Adds up to way more than 340K.

exe34• 2 days ago

I'm surprised doge didn't cut it - maybe he owns shares in some of the companies.

Jtsummers• 2 days ago

No reason to be surprised, it was an unserious effort that didn't look for real fraud, waste, and abuse. They looked for things that could play well to their constituents, like when it turned out the State Department had subscription to Politico (oh the horror, informed public servants making critical decisions?!?!).

RiverCrochet• 2 days ago

Looks like they all use Starlink and no one uses the FCC-subsidized fiber.

Starlink is nice, but I'd still want the option to switch to an alternate provider if Starlink suddenly raises their prices or otherwise becomes uncompetitive for some reason. I guess they do have cell service out there, though.

I wonder how the copper PSTN is out there, or if it's totally replaced by that fiber.

happyPersonR• 2 days ago

In a lot of rural places in general, don’t know about Alaska, it was either you got starlink or nothing after the fiber only rules were withdrawn

Which basically means if starlink goes if there’s not another sat vendor … basically there’s nothing. I don’t think any other providers service that far up(hughesnet maybe?)

I’m also not sure if starlink and the others will be forced to do COLR (carrier of last resort) but I think the answer might be “no”.

jazzyjackson• 2 days ago

Small villages up the coast of Alaska are linked by a microwave backhaul.

When I worked in Togiak ten years ago, it was about a 100mbit connection shared with the other few hundred households in town. If you were up at 6am you could watch YouTube just fine, but the internet crawled once everyone got online checking Facebook (this is my villain origin story of building local first low bandwidth software, I couldn’t believe the megabytes that slack and Facebook soaked up)

exabrial2• 2 days ago

We should play whack-a-mole with fraud.

We should ALSO reduce the federal budget to a trickle and return the money to where it belongs, the taxpayer.

CursedSilicon• 2 days ago

Can we start with the military?

exabrial2• 2 days ago

absolutely. The fact that the US Navy thought it'd be a _good idea_ to make cannon shells that cost $100k/unit tells you how big the problem is.

The only way to stop it is to take away in the infinite money glitch.

nubinetwork• 2 days ago

I'm a little confused about why there is an ongoing fee... unless someone didn't pay for the fibre pull upfront.

rootusrootus2• 2 days ago

As an interesting side note, this island gets a couple flights a week by an Alaska Airlines 737. That is impressive if the population is really down to a couple dozen.

Edit: like the Internet access, the flights are heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer

g8425• 2 days ago

I checked the prices for a round trip in December - $1200+ per passenger. I can't imagine how much it would be without a subsidy.

FCC pays $340k/year to keep 100's of empty Alaska buildings wired for internet

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