Satellite

Elon Musk’s SpaceX rolled out its Starlink early access program to the public six months ago, with the satellite internet service growing to more than 10,000 users in the first few months. CNBC spoke to more than 50 people who have been using Starlink. Those surveyed included households in Canada and 13 states: California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

A research note from telecom financial analysts at MoffettNathanson Research shows the firm estimates SpaceX’s total addressable US market at full deployment at between 300,000 to 800,000 households, or less than 1% of the market. It’s a particularly noteworthy number, considering that SpaceX is poised to receive nearly $900 million from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) to cover some of the costs of bringing broadband to unserved rural areas.

The Starlink broadband network will probably stick with one price instead of offering different tiers of service, said SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell. SpaceX has been charging $99 a month for the Starlink beta service, plus $499 upfront for the user terminal/satellite dish, mounting tripod, and router. Even if SpaceX has just one price for most customers, it will probably offer a cheaper plan to people with low incomes.

The White House’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan proposes $100 billion for broadband. Right now, however, it is hard to get broadband to large expanses of this country unless the infrastructure is in space. Low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations could bring high-speed internet access to those areas. Elon Musk’s Starlink is the best known, but there are a few other companies in the mix. Who could benefit from this new version of satellite internet? Sascha Segan from PCMag says, "This is going to be transformative for people in rural areas.

Do you know how much money your state is getting from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)? We crunched the data to find out how much RDOF money each state will get to expand internet access to rural Americans, breaking it down to dollars per resident.

If at least 200 MHz of point-to-point mid-band spectrum were made available for fixed wireless, the US could reduce the need to subsidize rural broadband deployments, said Claude Aiken, president and CEO of the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA). The recommendation was part of what WISPA is calling a Path to Gigabit plan, which Aiken referred to as a “holistic” approach to making broadband available throughout the US.

Some students in Hyde and Swain counties will soon be able to access high-speed internet via satellite technology, thanks to a pilot program aimed at improving internet access to support remote learning.

SpaceX and Dish Network are fighting at the Federal Communications Commission over Dish's attempt to block a key designation that SpaceX's Starlink division needs in order to get FCC broadband funding. Dish's "baseless attempt" to block funding "would serve only to delay what matters most—connecting unserved Americans," said SpaceX in a filing.

Starlink is currently in a semi-public beta, serving more than 10,000 users at speeds up to 170 Mbps, with no data caps. Ookla located US counties with at least 30 Starlink samples since December, and charted Starlink's speeds county by county against all other fixed internet providers.

AT&T agreed to sell a stake in its pay-TV unit to private-equity firm TPG and carve out the struggling business, pulling the telecom giant back from a costly wager on entertainment. The transaction would move the DirecTV and AT&T TV services in the US into a new entity that will be jointly run by the new partners. AT&T will retain a 70% stake in the business. TPG will pay $1.8 billion in cash for a 30% stake.