FCC boss starts bringing up Musk's Starlink dominance, antitrust concerns When Elon Musk's Starlink hit its 7,000th broadband satellite milestone, it's unlikely he expected the FCC chair to suggest his space dominance might be stifling competition—but here we are. Speaking at the US Chamber of Commerce's annual Global Aerospace Summit, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel expressed a desire to encourage …
SpaceX has already launched three batches of Oneweb satellites. If Amazon ever builds enough Kuiper satellites three batches of them will launch on Falcon.
Both companies may be getting a discount off $70M for buying in bulk but I doubt it comes close to SpaceX's internal cost of about $20M. Oneweb did not have the budget to invest in mass production for satellites so theirs are expensive to build as well as launch. Amazon's Kuiper has adopted Blue origin's motto: Gradatim mañana. They are going for economies of scale from mass production but the delays cost money. To get sufficient satellites in orbit in time to meet their spectrum license requirements Kuiper bought launches on Atlas V, Vulcan, Ariane 6 as well as New Glenn. (Falcon was added later so it would have all the integration work completed and ready to fly in case any of the last three were delayed.) The first three vehicles will always be expensive. Amazon might get a good deal on New Glenn. Until then they will be at a strong disadvantage on operational costs too.
I think Jeff will subsidise Kuiper for years to make it cost competitive with Starlink. Combining that with Musk's proven ability at Tesla to drive customers to the competition should be enough to establish Kuiper in the market eventually. China will back Qianfan creating a third operator and it is possible Europe will add a fourth. More than three people cannot agree on anything of importance which should reduce the chance of a cartel. We will see how much extra people are willing to pay to whom for not funding Musk.
People really don't like it when unconventional things become successful, do they? Some upstart has the damned nerve to build a reusable rocket, ignoring the mockery of established players until it works, and then makes money out of. To add insult to injury, they then use it to build and launch a similarly unconventional and annoyingly successful broadband satellite service. How very dare they?
SpaceX has such a massive headstart because they got off their ass and built the infrastructure, from launch facilities to vehicles to satellites. Anyone with enough money could have done it, and indeed Blue Origin are trying, but up to now nobody has come close. Why? Because the would-be competitors were / are unwilling to take the risks involved. That doesn't amount to SpaceX stifling competition, it amounts to the competition being too timid to compete. Fortune favours the bold, the rest need government to hold their hand.
At first old space laughed at SpaceX for trying something they would not be able to do themselves. If the prime contractor on a government contract suffers a moment of insanity and reduces their costs all the subcontractors will increase theirs to soak up the budget. Vertically integrated manufacturing was an important part of SpaceX's success. Old space did not start hating SpaceX for being unconventional. The hate came from lower costs and high reliability enticing their commercial customers away. Space enthusiasts loved SpaceX for reducing the cost of access to space and cheered for unconventional booster re-use. That changed because Musk openly promoted RWNJ politics. Voting with wallet works for cars. Internet service varies by location. Some people have the option to pick the lesser evil and some do not have that option. Pretty much the only person on Earth able to choose launch provider is Jeff Bezos. Most people do not buy launches and those that do are limited by national security restrictions or fiduciary duty to select the most cost effective provider.
SpaceX hit a window of opportunity. They only had to compete with old space. For everyone else that window closed 4 to 8 years ago because they have to compete against SpaceX. Anyone not called Jeff also needs investment capital. Oneweb took a huge risk because they did not have the finance to do everything themselves but went ahead anyway - and went through bankruptcy. There is a whole batch of new launch providers taking far more risk than Musk ever did with SpaceX. Most are going to fail. The reasons will be different for each: entering a highly competitive market, lack of access to investment capital or not focusing the money the have on creating an outstanding product. Lack of courage is certainly not the issue.
Monopolies are bad for everyone but the owner of the monopoly. Breaking into a monopoly market is almost impossible without government hand holding. (It requires having about as much money as God.) ULA had a monopoly on US launches. SpaceX only survived its start up phase because of government hand holding: $400M contract to develop and operate Cargo Dragon.
The Cargo Dragon development contract appears to have been firm, fixed price:
"A. Obligation
(1) The Government's liability to make payments to SpaceX is limited to only those funds obligated annually under this Agreement or by amendment to the Agreement. NASA may obligate funds to the Agreement incrementally."
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/189228main_setc_nnj06ta26a.pdf
Under this contract, which appears to be the master contract governing the per-milestone contracts and subcontracts, Space X would be paid only when milestones were met, and only the amount specified in the agreement. It does not effectively describe "government hand-holding."
People really don't like it when unconventional things become successful, do they? Some upstart has the damned nerve to build a reusable rocket, ignoring the mockery of established players until it works, and then makes money out of. To add insult to injury, they then use it to build and launch a similarly unconventional and annoyingly successful broadband satellite service. How very dare they?
It's not so much the gumption of building an outstanding product. SpaceX didn't get where they were by behaving in an anti-competitive fashion (like, e.g. Microsoft in the 1990s). They did it by fairly out-competing the (much better funded) opposition. Props to them.
The difficulty now is they have a dominant market position. So it is entirely fair and proper that the relevant authorities ensure they do not abuse that market position in an anti-competitive fashion. Particularly in areas outside of launch.
Subsidising StarLink by launching at an internal cost not available to other SatCom operators is one such possible problem.
Just a few years ago, few commercial payloads wanted to risk a "second hand" rocket. These are big expensive satellites, they didn't want to take that risk. So if you're SpaceX, and want to launch rockets until they break to prove your reliability, what do you do?
SpaceX responded with an in-house payload that was mass produced, so if a few launches failed it wouldn't be a problem. And a payload that could earn them significant money in future. That payload was Starlink.
Were the launches cheaper than a regular launch? Sure. But the alternative was a dummy payload, or such a steep discount that it would cannibalise their regular launch prices.
Starlink still helps SpaceX keep their launch tempo up. It also gives them a safe payload if they need to flight test a launcher change.
The whole reason for _building_ F9s was to launch Starlink and the reason for Starlink was/is to support building mars-capable rockets
In any case, rural Internet isn't a big money-spinner. The big money is in arbitrage and once that comes onstream, such services will be chump change
Starlink isn't particularly competitive in markets with decent terrestrial service and it's making a healthy profit from the aviation/ships at sea services whilst still able to nobble Inmarsat, etc. It's high priced and congested in North America thanks to the USA's captive markets and widespread state-level(*) regulatory capture
I think that the market isn't large enough to support multiple dense LEO constellations and Starlink will have first-mover advantage (just like the B747 in the large aircraft market). The biggest threat will be heavily subsidised Chinese competition, not BlueOrigin
(*) In this case. Federal level in others (*ahem*Boeing*ahem*)
"It's high priced and congested in North America thanks to the USA's captive markets and widespread state-level(*) regulatory capture"
I think that's the key point. Starlink may well have an effective monopoly at the moment, but it's a pretty small portion of the ISP market. There are many places in the US with land based ISPs that are more effectively a monopoly that Starlink and yet nothing seems to be happening to change that, other than Starlink, who can connect anyone, anywhere, in any market (licence permitting). It does make one wonder why the FCC would be singling out what is effectively a minnow ISP simply because they have a monopoly in one specific delivery method. Could it be Starlink is taking profits from the incumbents? Are there lobbying efforts behind this? After all, the FCC is supposedly part of the drive to help the more rural areas get better connections and they seem to be failing at that from what I've read. Money is handed out to the terrestrial incumbents to connect rural areas and it's not delivering product, just profits. IIRC, Starlink tried to get some of that subsidy and were rejected on some technical grounds while being pretty much the only ISP actually able to deliver more or less instantly :-)
There are some strange ideas on this subject over on Trump flavoured news sites. The story is that the Democrat's flag ship $42B rural internet project has achieved nothing. As is usual, this should not be taken literally. The project started under the Trump administration and got as far as deciding how to divide the pork. Democrats stopped it so the $42B was not paid. SpaceX is one of many ISPs who have not got paid. The project has achieved nothing. Starlink has happened anyway. It is fair to say that the Democrats have failed to produce a major improvement in rural broadband - just like their predecessors.
What has many important people spitting tacks is that the Democrats utterly failed to distribute the $42B in pork that lobbyist thought they had secured from the previous administration. One person in particular is loudly whining on antisocial media that he has been singled out. That is particularly strange as in other areas he demands special treatment and that laws and regulations should not apply to him.
Who actually gives a damn. Amazon has claimed they were going to launch this same type of satellite network, where the hell are they? SpaceX actually has done it, now the government wants to bitch about it. SpaceX took out all the damned unnecessary licenses, jumped through whatever BS the government threw at them and delivered. Not their problem if no one else has come through on this. Those who can't do, whine and bitch about the accomplishments of others.
And yes, Starlink is my only option, had HughesNet before this, that was absolute garbage. Yes, I'd like a lower price than the $120/month, but this service is better than cable services I've had at other locations in the past.
RDOF was never intended to provide Internet access to foreign countries or fund an authoritarian lunatic’s politically weighted on/off switch.
None of Leon’s Ponzi schemes should be receiving taxpayer funded subsidies while building monopolies. Any company receiving taxpayer subsidies should have to make access to its infrastructure available at a fair market price to other companies.
This is about giving Amazon waivers on getting 50% & 100% of its satellite fleet into orbit - according to Wikipedia* "Under its granted FCC license, Amazon is required to launch and operate 50% of its satellites no later than July 30, 2026, and must launch and operate the remaining satellites no later than July 30, 2029".
There appears to be no chance of Amazon hitting at least the first target since they've launched exactly zero production satellites so far - just two test satellites. They need to have 1,618 satellites in orbit and functional by 30th July 2026 and that looks somewhere between extraordinarily unlikely and impossible, so they will need an FCC waiver. This "we need competition" line from the FCC is softening us up for Amazon getting a free pass.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems
The biggest problem is lack of satellites. If Amazon had any they would be launching on Atlas V right now. There are 8 Atlas's booked and ULA launched that number in 2013. Ariane 5 could do one per month. Assuming the same for Ariane 6 means it is just about possible to do those 17 launches in time. Even if all the required engines magically appeared right now I do not believe 38 Vulcans can launch before August 2026. 27 New Glenns in that time is also fantasy.
If Amazon launches most of the Atlases and Arianes plus a few Vulcans and a New Glenn and shows a stack of satellites ready to go with the contracts to launch them then I think they will have shown enough commitment to get a license extension. Some extra Falcon launches would be a cherry on top. Blue Origin lobbyists are good enough to get funding for Blue Moon so the license extension should be no trouble for them. They do not need to lobby against Starlink. Musk does a fine job of that single handed. They do need to manufacture satellites. A shred of evidence for that before then end of the year would be a great start.
Yeah, in general on FCC licenses, the deployment requirements are to prevent spectrum squatting. Company would buy a license, build nothing and hold onto it until they could sell it at a higher price to someone else. The maximum penalty is having your license revoked, it goes back to the FCC for reauctioning.
But in reality, they do consider both
a) Intent. If company either launches nothing, or run out of funds and quit launching anything before they have a functional service, they might get that license revoked. In this case, the schedule's slipped and they have sats all scheduled up to build and launch starting toward the end of the year.
b) Demand. If there's not other companies planning to build another satellite constellation that want that spectrum and orbital slots, then revoking the licenses and reauctioning them would be kind of a moot point.
Just an odd side note -- Dish network's current 5G network (they never had 1G-4G..), several bands it uses were originally auctioned for 1-way pagers and the like, WAAAAY after pagers went obsolete. Charlie Eigen (head of Dish Network) is a shrewd businessman.. The FCC continued to auction off these chunks of 2-way spectrum that the cell phone companies would bid up, then another bit for 1-way use. Dish would buy the 1-way licenses up for almost nothing since pagers were long gone (and the ones that were left could continue using the band they already used.). Some of these had no buildout requirement; some did, but with 0 demand for pagers they'd persuade the FCC to not bother revoking those ones. Then Charlie got FCC permission to drop the "1-way" requirement so it's now used in their 5G network.
Charlie Eigen (head of Dish Network) is a shrewd businessman...
Given that Dish as a whole may go bankrupt before the year is out, I don't know shrewd that makes Eigen.
They already had to "re-merge" Dish mobile back to former parent company Echostar to bail them out financially. And now the whole shebang is on spindly legs and they may have to resort to selling wireless spectrum to keep the whole thing afloat. The terrestrial wireless network has been a disaster so far.
https://coloradocommunitymedia.com/2024/08/16/echostar-in-constructive-financial-talks-amid-more-reported-losses/
More tens of thousands of stuff orbiting in LEO and clogging up the night sky ?
I'm not sure we need that. Besides, SpaceX has competition in the Internet space. I don't need it, I have fiber. Starlink may be the only space-based Internet provider, but it is an Internet provider, and there are a number of those in almost every country.
Re: Fibre and 4G/5G are the main competition. Simple as.
If only...
I'm in the process of buying a house (rural but not halfway up a mountain) with the following non starlink options for internet access.
1. adsl with an estimated "Up to 1mb download" (neighbours report ~512k down / 64k up)
2. mobile (3g/4g) only one provider with signal - 1 bar (and only from the upstairs window on the north side)
3. FTTP (if we want to pay openreach > £20k to lay the fibre)
"2. mobile (3g/4g) only one provider with signal - 1 bar (and only from the upstairs window on the north side)"
Then you need to buy an outdoor directional antenna to get a proper signal to a cellular router. Similarly you may need to buy a higher gain TV antenna if you live in a blind spot.
I agree that fiber (or old copper) isn't usually a solution if you leave outside of population clusters. Sure it can be done but you'll pay throught the nose (as you wrote).
I didn't mention that the single cell which gives coverage at the house also covers a good number of huge caravan parks so throughput is very variable (150Mb+ in January / 1Mb maybe in August), the joy of being near the coast.
Tv signal is great (2 inches of wire in an antenna socket will get everything), belmont transmitter is relatively close
"3. FTTP (if we want to pay openreach > £20k to lay the fibre)"
Out of curiosity, roughly what proportion is that if the cost of the house? And would it increase the re-sale value of the house in the future? Maybe it's worth paying if your moving into a 1/2 to 1 million quid+ property Maybe share the cost a bit if the run passes other properties :-)
Realistically it is very unlikely that others (Amazon, Oneweb) can compete with Starlink as they have the cheapest launch option and its basically the same business. Also there are far too many satellites up there already. What makes more sense is to regulate any de-facto monopolies so they are behaving moderately honestly.
Why are we still using terrestrial instruments for astronomy?
There's no reason to put them at the bottom of a well full of stuff to distort the picture.
Learn how to put your instrument on a satellite and launch it. I hear there's a fairly cheap launcher out there...
More seriously, this "clogging up the night sky" is like the people who don't want a moon base because humans might cause pollution.
"Why are we still using terrestrial instruments for astronomy?"
Because there are vastly more eyes demanding access than there are instruments available to give it to them and (at the moment) the physical size limits get in the way
This may change a little after Starship starts working
In the meantime, satellite light trail interference is only an issue around the terminators - which means they're interfering with sunward-looking observations, not the rest of the night. Looking in that direction has always been problematic and will benefit most from space instruments
"tyrfing":
More seriously, this "clogging up the night sky" is like the people who don't want a moon base because humans might cause pollution.
Besides the aesthetics of it, it's a well-documented fact that a large number of astronomers and astrophysicists bitterly complained about Starlink starting before they launched a single satellite.
But of course that fell upon deaf ears because of other political and commercial special interests, as usual.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22396388/space-x-elon-musk-starlink-too-bright-astronomy-stars-pollution
https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/21/23649937/starlink-spacex-satellite-light-pollution-nature-astronomy
> Why are we still using terrestrial instruments for astronomy?
> Learn how to put your instrument on a satellite and launch it.
Where do you start replying to someone who has clearly never bothered to spend even ten minutes to learn what astronomical observation is all about?
Who can not even distinguish between "an instrument" and a telescope that you can attach the instrument to?
Or spend another ten minutes learning (or just thinking) about the costs (in all areas) of using space-based instruments to deal with the lack of available and upgradable resources (power, maintenance, in-situ compute, planned upgrades, unplanned upgrades when a post-grad makes a stunning discovery).
Or just find out the difference between the number of space-borne 'scopes and instruments compared to the number of ground-based (oops, you just counted the Big Boys in Hawaii and forgot all the observatories in Universities, schools, local astronomy groups, back gardens - and the ones not in observatories, just taken out when possible...).
> Long term contracts prevent both you and Starlink from making sensible changes when necessary.
“Starlink does not require a contract. Service is billed on a month to month basis and you can cancel at any time if you decide the service is not a good fit for you.”
"Taken direct from Starlink's website https://www.starlink.com/gb : Long term contracts prevent both you and Starlink from making sensible changes when necessary."
I think that's Starlinks justification for NOT offering long term contracts. Posting that out of context is strongly implying the exact opposite of what it actually means,
It's a commercial market. Nothing stopping anyone launching their own Starlink constellation /s
Get with the program Elon and all your litigous issues will evaporate. Else the Washington blob will get you :o
“The way I see it is our economy doesn't benefit from monopolies so we've got to invite many more space actors in many more companies that can develop constellations and innovations in space”
There's only space for so many communications satellites in a particular orbit. Not to mention a limited number of channels.
This sounds like a natural monopoly to me. In a natural monopoly, there are high costs to entering a market, and the size of the market is sometimes not that large. So it's that much harder for new entrants to enter the market. Not impossible, just more difficult so you tend to have fewer if not a monopoly then fewer competitors.
The standard practices in an illegal monopoly... before Standard Oil was broken up (the Sherman antitrust act was basically written originally to break up Standard Oil, who was very anticompetitive.) Two common practices they had to maintain their monopoly was to drop prices in an area with a new entrant to below costs to put the competitor out of business, then jack prices back up. And order capacity on trains, pipelines (if they had them that long ago), etc., EVEN if they weren't planning to use it, to prevent competitors from getting access to transportation for their oil.
They just got going launching their constellation first, and have been launching 'em at a rapid clip, so they have the most satellites and customers. Using the "Standard Oil" tests, they're bringing in $6.6 billion a year in revenue from a constellation they expect to cost $10 billion total to build (the $10 billion was from 2018 so this is probably higher, but still..), so I imagine they're turning a tidy profit (they're not selling below cost to lock out competitors.) And these constellations are all using different altitudes etc. so they aren't taking up orbital slots etc. that competitors need to operate in; Amazon's getting launch capacity from SpaceX so they aren't being anticompetitive by not selling launch capacity to their competitors.
That said -- it's certainly worth the FCC looking in to. It makes sense to take a look at anyone that has like 60, 70% of a market. I don't think they'll find anything, but they can let competitors make comments and see if there is anything worth looking into.
These days the reaction to upstart competitors is typically to first decry the effort using a PR barrage decrying the viability of the product followed by the onslaught of the tenured legislators passing appropriate laws and prodding Federal agencies to act. Since a lot of competition is coming from China its easy to frame this in patriotic / national security terms . The problem is that SpaceX is 100% American, though, so hobbling it using the usual tools of sanctions, entity lists and tariffs isn't going to work.
Still, the Chinese do get in on the Starlink act but in a way that is likely to cause serious unforeseen problems for the US. It seems that the Starlink constellation is just the illumination source you need for forward scattering radar and some Chinese academics recently reported being able to use it to locate small radar cross section devices over sea**. The technology is still in its infancy but promises to make stealth aircraft visible to air defense radars.**
Oops.
(**Reported in "South China Morning Post" earlier this week.)
Starlink now provides my ISP service. Centurytel used to provide it. In the 20+ years I have lived here, Centurytel never re-invested a dime in improving their infrastructure. Still chugging along at 6mb/s DSL.
Enter Starlink and modern Internet speeds. Centurytel has actually stopped offering DSL and signing up new customers in my area. They tell people to seek alternative communications, to which there is only one.
Starlink can only be considered an ISP "monopoly" because all the competitors gave up and left the room. Centurytel could have competed **IF** they had invested years ago in infrastructure improvements, running fiber in to rural communities. No, they kept their monthly "Infrastructure Improvement Fee".
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