Sting for Starlink: FCC rejects plan for rural areas

Starlink’s promises did not convince the FCCwhich rejected plans to exploit Elon Musk’s satellite network infrastructure designed to connect rural areas of the United States.

The proposal had emerged at the end of July and in the last hours the dry rejection the initiative by the FCC, which believes that what the company promises is unrealistic. In practice it comes disputed every aspect of the Starlink proposal, starting from connection speed (there was talk of 100 Mbps in download and 20 in upload), defined far higher than what the service is able to provide (a report from Ookla confirms the decline in network performance in recent months).

The FCC has also been particularly critical of the hedging plan itself, since Starlink’s proposal appears unrealistic and based on overly optimistic premises. It is therefore clear that the FCC sees a serious possibility that Musk’s company plan could suffer delays or a final result below expectations, which is why they did not want to give the green light to the project.

The expansion of Starlink was supposed to have been financed with the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, thanks to a loan of 885.5 million dollars, but it seems that for the moment the matter has lapsed. It remains to be seen whether Starlink will have the ability to present a new plan more in line with FCC expectations or not.