Former broadband director calls for “betrayal” to Musk’s Starlink handouts to rural America
The most expensive broadband investment in the United States has just lost its top leader and supporter Evan Feinman. Feinman sent a sharp warning to colleagues in an email Sunday morning that millions of Americans could be struggling by the slow internet speed if the rules were changed to favor Elon Musk’s satellite internet company Starlink.
In a CNET interview, Feinman responded to this warning and advised consumers. ProPublica’s Craig Silverman first reported his farewell email to colleagues in a Bluesky post, alerting the proposed changes to broadband interests, access and deployment plans, maximizing the shift from fiber-leading approaches to one that hopes for satellite internet.
“Obviously, there is a very prominent figure who is a major player in this administration, who happens to have a low-Earth orbit satellite network,” Feinman told CNET.
Until March 16, Feinman was a director of Bead, a $42.5 billion fund as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Employment Act of 2021. Feinmand said the Trump administration refused to renew the contract.
Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet service is essentially the only satellite game in town. Amazon’s project is also technically eligible for bead funding, but currently only have two prototype satellites in the sky, while Starlink has over 7,000. (Site-stationary satellite internet providers such as Hughesnet and Viasat are not eligible for bead funding because they do not meet their delay requirements.)
The funds of Bead are allocated to each state by the State Telecommunications and Information Administration, which belongs to the Ministry of Commerce. Under the Biden administration, the NTIA clearly favors the deployment of fiber to rural areas, which is widely regarded as the gold standard type of internet connectivity.
According to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick plans to adopt a more “technologically neutral” approach to beads. That would benefit Starlink from $10 billion to $20 billion in payments, up from $4.1 billion expected to receive under the old rules.
“Some of the horrible situations I’ve been hearing from NTIA and people close to the Department of Commerce will give Elon Musk 50% or more of the money,” Gigi Sohn, executive director of the American Public Broadband Association, told CNET.
fiber yes Expensive in many areas. A spokesperson for the Texas auditor general told me in a last interview that some rural households in West Texas cost as much as $130,000 per person to connect to fiber.
“Lutnick obviously believes that like Trump and Musk, paying for fiber rather than satellites is a waste of money,” Blair Levin, a former FCC chief of staff and telecommunications industry analyst at New Street Research, told CNET.
How much bead money Starlink will be able to earn can depend on where NTIA sets that threshold. A source told me that the speed of the Bead Act – a bill proposed in the house in early March – initially included a $25,000 cost threshold per location, but was later removed. If a region exceeds that number, the state’s broadband office will be able to turn to “alternative technologies” like Starlink.
Feinman said this shift from fiber to satellite will cause great harm to rural America.
“To subsidize political allies or misunderstand these things, it is unacceptable to delegate a group of communities to worse educational outcomes, worse economic outcomes, worse health outcomes (all with good connections) in a way that’s not acceptable,” Feinman told CNET.
This boils down to two issues with Starlink services: speed and price. It hasn’t proven that it can meet the speed requirements of the beads, and in most regions it’s also much more expensive than most internet providers.
Neither Starlink nor the Ministry of Commerce spokesperson immediately responded to CNET’s request for comment.
Can Starlink keep up with the future?
Critics believe that Starlink’s speed does not meet the bead’s speed requirements: 100Mbps download speed, 20Mbps upload and 100ms delay. The only requirement Starlink is currently facing is delays and is still much worse than the US median.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime investment that can be offered to expensive, slow services that aren’t scalable, it’s not the future, it’s just throwing money in the toilet,” Sohn said.
Ookla data shows that Starlink’s speed has actually dropped as more people join the network.(Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET.)
Since its debut in 2019, Starlink has launched thousands of satellites, but has also added millions of customers. Even when Starlink puts more satellites into the sky, its speed has dropped, and customers in many cities in the United States are currently unable to use it.
“I’m not sure if Lutnik is aware of this,” Levine said. “Starlink has a waiting list. They have a waiting list because they’re running out of capacity.”
Starlink said its new satellite will openly solve the capability issues, but it has not proven that it can do that — especially if millions of other homes are connected by beads.
“The way we’re sure people use data and computing power is that you never use less than you did yesterday,” Feinman said.
This tracks the rules of thumb, and I’ve heard a lot in the time I cover broadband. Nelson’s Law states that the connection speed of high-end Internet users increases by about 50% per year, doubling every 21 months. This has been the case every year since 1983, and that’s exactly what Feinman is worried about. Starlink may be good enough today – it has not proven to be proven by the FCC definition – but it may not handle future applications.
That is, Feinman points out in our conversation, Star Link have It is an incredible boon in rural areas, and there were no other good choices before. But the service that extends the star-striped link on the beads may reduce the ability to be truly the only place to choose, Feinman said.
What’s next for the bead?
There is a lot of change now for beads. Lutnick is expected to announce rules overhaul the plan in the next week or two, which helps explain some of the urgency in Feinman’s emails.
“People absolutely need to contact members of Congress. They need to contact the governor’s office,” Feinman told CNET. “These members and governors need to be brave enough to speak out what they know is loyalty to the Trump administration and say, ‘We want to get the best connection for our community on the budget.'”
If you want to have changes to the bead program with your elected representative, you can download 5 call apps in the App Store or Google Play Store. The application studies and scripts for various issues, determines relevant decision makers, and collects phone numbers for their offices.
