Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr said on Tuesday that the former President Joe Biden‘s administration revoked $885 million in funding for Elon Musk-led Starlink, believing the service would not be able to attain high-speed internet.
$885 Million Revoked By Biden
In a post on the social media platform X, Carr slammed the previous Biden regime, saying that the FCC had revoked an award for Starlink that the company had won to “provide high-speed internet to millions of Americans” despite Carr’s opposition to the decision.
FCC back then had claimed that it was “unlikely” that Starlink could reach high speeds by the end of 2025, Carr said. “I dissented at the time,” he said, outlining that the decision “could not be squared with any objective application of law,” and that Starlink was on track to achieve the 100/20 Megabit per second (Mbps) speeds, according to the available data.
“The Biden era decision to revoke the award only slowed down efforts to bridge the digital divide and raised costs for doing so,” Carr said.
Starlink’s Next-Generation Terminals
The comments come as SpaceX’s VP of Starlink Engineering, Michael Nicolls, shared that the latest satellite terminals for flights can support peak speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, saying that the 220 Mbps figure is the actual, real-time speed offered by Starlink on flights.
Starlink has deals in place with multiple airline operators. Airlines like Virgin Atlantic and United Airlines Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:UAL) are providing the service on board their flights, while SpaceX is also reportedly negotiating with American Airlines Group Inc. (NASDAQ:AAL) to provide its satellite internet service.
Notably, Starlink could also stand to benefit from revised guidelines on satellite constellations. The company could see its fleet of low Earth orbit satellites rise as much as sevenfold under new rules outlined by the FCC, which previously restricted spectrum-sharing for non-geostationary satellite operators like the company.
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