SpaceX Gets FCC’s Approval to Bid in a Federal Auction for Rural-Broadband Funding

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SpaceX Gets FCC’s Approval to Bid in a Federal Auction for Rural-Broadband Funding

By CircleID Reporter
October 15, 2020, 3:43 pm PDT Views: 13,236 Add Comment

SpaceX’s Starlink project appears to be the only low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite ISP among close to 400 ISPs to qualify to bid in a U.S. federal rural-broadband funding auction. While SpaceX was initially placed in the “incomplete application” list, the announcement seems to indicate that Starlink has overcome the Federal Communications Commission’s doubts about whether the company can provide the performance requirements of less than 100ms latency.

The fund: FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) is a $20.4 billion commitment (through a two-phase reverse auction mechanism) to finance up to gigabit speed broadband networks in unserved rural America.

Other LEO satellites: While SpaceX seems to be the only LEO satellite provider in the approved list of applicants, Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica points out that “Hughes, a traditional satellite provider, is an investor in OneWeb and has said it will use OneWeb’s LEO capacity as part of its bid to get RDOF money.”

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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