"After careful legal, technical, and policy review, we are rejecting these applications. Consumers deserve reliable and affordable high-speed broadband,"
So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC! The hypocrisy in this statement is laughable since rural customer's only choice is dial-up, HughesNet(which is worse than Starlink) and mobile hot-spots. I think there is more to this than that statement.
That's exactly what the grants in question are for
And no, there isn't more to it, the only reason we're even here is because they had to play along with Starlink's initial application that had too optimistic numbers because it's not their job to question pie in the sky numbers, but instead, to tentatively approve it until it's proven false.
> So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC!
You don’t want that. They (and others like Verizon) have repeatedly taken government grants to extend their networks into unserved areas (both rural and urban) and then just not done the work. Ars Technica follows this stuff pretty closely and they’ve done some good reporting on it.
AT&T took $500M back when to extend fiber to rural areas, back when that seemed like a lot of money. They ran fiber to 1/10 mi from my house. Then, never lit it, because the grant they took didn't require that. FCC staying on top of telecomm companies' follow-through is a welcome change.
So make ATT and other ISPs serve the rural market, FTC! The hypocrisy in this statement is laughable since rural customer's only choice is dial-up, HughesNet(which is worse than Starlink) and mobile hot-spots. I think there is more to this than that statement.