Starlink tries to block Virginia's plan to bring fiber Internet to residents

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/starlink-tries-to-block-virginias-plan-to-bring-fiber-internet-to-residents/

28•worik•2h ago

Comments

barbazoo•37m ago

> Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia's plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.

Classy.

MarkusQ•29m ago

SpaceX bid $60 million, a competitor bid over $600 million, and the state is giving it to the highest bidder. SpaceX is objecting that that's not how competitive bidding is supposed to work.

Terretta•18m ago

Starlink is generally seen as more beneficial in harder-to-serve areas because of its capacity limits, but Starlink and the Trump administration want satellite technology to be treated the same as fiber when it comes to giving out grants.

"more"? The rest of the sentence makes more sense with the word "less". From later in the article:

"project areas span from mountains and hills to farmland and coastal plains... tree canopy, rugged terrain, and slope can complicate installation and/or obstruct line-of-sight" [meaning] low-Earth orbit satellite technology "can have signal degradation, increased latency, and reduced reliability".

Meanwhile, Virginia said its plan will allocate $613.3 million to serve 133,472 locations, including:

- SpaceX's Starlink: $3.26 million for 5,579 locations

- Amazon's Kuiper: $4.46 million for 6,957 locations

- All Points Broadband: $171.4 million for 19,801 locations

- Comcast: $146.4 million for 24,343 locations

cman1444•11m ago

More beneficial in rural areas than in urban areas because of the capacity limits.

Not more beneficial in urban areas than alternative providers.

jethronethro•13m ago

Reminds me of a voting machine company that tried to sue a state back in the early 2000s for going with a competitor. Then there's the attitude of entitlement that Musk and his companies seem to have. So much for the free market ...

North Korean hackers target open-source repositories in new espionage campaign

TSMC 6-Inch Wafer Fab Exit Affirms Strategy Shift

Individual Bestbuy email subscription pages are apparently indexed by Google

Why is LED light so bad?

African Union urges adoption of world map showing continent's true size

Citybound: City building game, microscopic models to vividly simulate organism

ldial: Best independent and community radio stations in the US

Create custom Apple-like gradients using shaders

Beijing's first World Humanoid Robot Games open with hip-hop and martial arts

AI Assisted Editors: A Comparison (Part 1)

The fixed length bottleneck and the feed forward network

I wanted to take more pictures, so I vibecoded a portfolio

Microsoft game workers call out company over Israeli military ties

Show HN: Project Chimera – AI Debates Itself for Better Code and Reasoning

Rabbits with 'horns' in Colorado are being called 'Frankenstein bunnies.'

AI Is Forgetting Everything – and It's Killing You

The Omarchy Manual

The Tragedy of the Computer Science Major

"Soft Skills the Hard Way", a business novel by Claude code opus 4.1

Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on?

FormulaOne: A reasoning benchmark that all models score 0% on

Plex Media Server – Security Update

Can you play VR without a headset?

Palantir might be the most overvalued firm of all time

Most-translated Wikipedia article in the world is about a lover of Aryan culture

Trump's export deal with Nvidia and AMD: The Constitution says it's illegal

Automatic Transcription of Phone Calls From 10ft Away Using mmWave Radar Sensing

Data integrity scandals in biomedical research: Here's a timeline

Fashionable Badminton (1986) [video]

An Accurate and Rapidly Calibrating Speech Neuroprosthesis