Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish and equipment in the Idaho panhandle's Coeur d'Alene National Forest. (credit: Wandering-coder )

SpaceX has been awarded $885.51 million by the Federal Communications Commission to provide Starlink broadband to 642,925 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. The satellite provider was one of the biggest winners in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, the results of which were released today . Funding is distributed over 10 years, so SpaceX's haul will amount to a little over $88.5 million per year.

Charter Communications, the second-largest US cable company after Comcast, did even better. Charter is set to receive $1.22 billion over 10 years to bring service to 1.06 million homes and businesses in 24 states.

FCC funding can be used in different ways depending on the type of broadband service. Cable companies like Charter and other wireline providers generally use the money to expand their networks into new areas that don't already have broadband. But with Starlink, SpaceX could theoretically provide service to all of rural America once it has launched enough satellites, even without FCC funding.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kittichai Boonpong | EyeEm )

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to add 45MHz of spectrum to Wi-Fi in a slightly controversial decision that takes the spectrum away from a little-used automobile-safety technology.

The spectrum from 5.850GHz to 5.925GHz has, for about 20 years, been set aside for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), a vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications service that's supposed to warn drivers of dangers on the road. But as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai today said, "99.9943 percent of the 274 million registered vehicles on the road in the United States still don't have DSRC on-board units." Only 15,506 vehicles have been equipped with the technology, he said.

In today's decision , the FCC split the spectrum band and reallocated part of it to Wi-Fi and part of it to a newer vehicle technology. The lower 45MHz from 5.850GHz to 5.895MHz will be allocated to Wi-Fi and other unlicensed services.

Enlarge / FCC Republican members (L-R) Brendan Carr, Michael O'Rielly, and Chairman Ajit Pai participate in a discussion during the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2018 in Maryland. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The Republican-majority Federal Communications Commission took another vote against net neutrality rules today in its last meeting before a presidential election that could swing the FCC back to the Democratic party.

Today's vote came a year after a federal appeals court upheld FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules and deregulation of the broadband industry. Though Pai was mostly victorious in the case, the judges remanded portions of the repeal back to the FCC because the commission "failed to examine the implications of its decisions for public safety," failed to "sufficiently explain what reclassification [of ISPs] will mean for regulation of pole attachments," and did not address concerns about the effect deregulation would have on the FCC's Lifeline program, which subsidizes phone and Internet access for low-income Americans.

The FCC approved its response to the court's remand instructions in a 3-2 vote today, but didn't make any significant changes. "After thoroughly reviewing the record compiled in response to its request for additional comment on these issues, the FCC found no basis to alter the FCC's conclusions in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order," the commission said in its announcement . "The Order on Remand finds that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order promotes public safety, facilitates broadband infrastructure deployment by Internet service providers, and allows the FCC to continue to provide Lifeline support for broadband Internet access service." A draft version of the decision is available here .

Enlarge / T-Mobile advertisement in New York City's Times Square on October 15, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

The Federal Communications Commission has finished investigating T-Mobile for a network outage that Chairman Ajit Pai called "unacceptable." But instead of punishing the mobile carrier, the FCC is merely issuing a public notice to "remind" phone companies of "industry-accepted best practices" that could have prevented the T-Mobile outage.

After the 12-hour nationwide outage on June 15 disrupted texting and calling services, including 911 emergency calls, Pai wrote that "The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable" and that "the FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers—and so are American consumers."

Pai has a history of talking tough with carriers and not following up with punishments that might have a greater deterrence effect than sternly worded warnings. That appears to be what happened again yesterday when the FCC announced the findings from its investigation into T-Mobile. Pai said that "T-Mobile's outage was a failure" because the carrier didn't follow best practices that could have prevented or minimized it, but he announced no punishment. The matter appears to be closed based on yesterday's announcement, but we contacted Chairman Pai's office today to ask if any punishment of T-Mobile is forthcoming. We'll update this article if we get a response.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaking at a press conference on October 1, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is backing President Donald Trump's proposal to limit legal protections for social media websites that block or modify content posted by users. Pai's views on the matter were unknown until today when he issued a statement saying that he will open a rule-making process to clarify that the First Amendment does not give social media companies "special immunity."

"Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech," Pai said. "But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters."

Trump's attempt to punish social media websites like Twitter and Facebook for alleged anti-conservative bias landed at the FCC because Trump had the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) petition the FCC to issue a new interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This US law says that providers and users of interactive computer services shall not be held liable for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." The law also says that no provider or user of an interactive computer service "shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Enlarge / A SpaceX Starlink user terminal/satellite dish. (credit: SpaceX )

SpaceX is one of 386 entities that have qualified to bid in a federal auction for rural-broadband funding.

SpaceX has so far overcome the Federal Communications Commission's doubts about whether Starlink, its low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite service, can provide latency of less than 100ms and thus qualify for the auction's low-latency tier. With the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) set to distribute up to $16 billion to ISPs, the FCC initially placed SpaceX on the "incomplete application" list, which includes ISPs that had not shown they were qualified to bid in their desired performance and latency tiers. The FCC also said that LEO providers " will face a substantial challenge " obtaining approval to bid in the low-latency tier because they must "demonstrat[e] to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold."

That changed yesterday, when the FCC announced the list of bidders that qualified for the auction that is scheduled to begin on October 29. Besides SpaceX, qualified bidders include Altice USA, CenturyLink, Charter, Cincinnati Bell, Cox, Frontier, Hughes, US Cellular, Verizon, Viasat, Windstream, and many smaller companies. There were 119 applicants that did not make the final list.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 24, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai touted inaccurate broadband-availability data in order to claim that his deregulatory agenda sped up deployment despite clear warning signs that the FCC was relying on false information.

Pai claimed in February 2019 that the number of Americans lacking access to fixed broadband at the FCC benchmark speed of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream dropped from 26.1 million people at the end of 2016 to 19.4 million at the end of 2017, and he attributed the improvement to the FCC "removing barriers to infrastructure investment." The numbers were included in a draft version of the FCC's congressionally mandated annual broadband assessment, and Pai asked fellow commissioners to approve the report that concluded the broadband industry was doing enough to expand access.

But consumer-advocacy group Free Press subsequently pointed out that the numbers were skewed by an ISP called BarrierFree suddenly "claim[ing] deployment of fiber-to-the-home and fixed wireless services (each at downstream/upstream speeds of 940mbps/880mbps) to census blocks containing nearly 62 million persons." This is an implausible assertion and would have meant BarrierFree went from serving zero people to nearly 20 percent of the US population in just six months. BarrierFree admitted the error when contacted by Ars at the time, saying that "a portion of the submission was parsed incorrectly in the upload process."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Cris Cantón)

AT&T and T-Mobile are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to require drive tests that would verify whether the mobile carriers' coverage claims are accurate.

The carriers' objections came in response to the FCC seeking comment on a plan to improve the nation's inadequate broadband maps . Besides submitting more accurate coverage maps, the FCC plan would require carriers to do a statistically significant amount of drive testing.

"In order to help verify the accuracy of mobile providers' submitted coverage maps, we propose that carriers submit evidence of network performance based on a sample of on-the-ground tests that is statistically appropriate for the area tested," the FCC proposal issued in July 2020 said.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson )

The Federal Communications Commission is taking another round of public comments on Charter's petition seeking permission to impose data caps on broadband users and charge network-interconnection fees to online-video providers, following a court ruling that may complicate the FCC's decision.

The deadline for comments on Charter's petition passed on August 6. But in a public notice issued today , the FCC said it is opening an additional comment period that will last until September 2, giving people time to weigh in on the impact of the court ruling.

"To ensure that the [Wireline Competition] Bureau has a full record upon which to evaluate the effects of the conditions, we initiate this additional comment period," the FCC notice said, while also inviting commenters to "address the effect" of the new court ruling on the FCC's consideration of Charter's petition. As before, comments can be submitted on the docket by clicking "New Filing" or "Express." There are more than 1,500 filings, mostly from consumers who object to data caps.