SpaceX has introduced Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in. From a report: "Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities." Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance."

It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points. There's a one-time hardware cost of $150,000, not including installation. "The installation can be performed by your current maintenance organization or Starlink can recommend experienced and qualified installers," Starlink says.

With the recent addition of Antarctica, SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service is now available on all seven continents. PC Magazine reports: The company has shipped a Starlink dish to McMurdo Station, a US research facility based on an island right off the coast of Antarctica. In a tweet on Wednesday, the National Science Foundation said that scientists with the US Antarctic Program have been testing out the dish at the site to supply increased internet bandwidth. The Starlink dish promises to offer faster internet speeds to McMurdo Station, which previously relied on satellite internet from other providers. The broadband quality had to be shared over a 17Mbps connection for the entire research facility, which can house over 1,000 people. Starlink, on the other hand, can offer much faster broadband due to the lower orbits of the company's Starlink satellites. Download speeds can range from 50 to 200Mbps for residential users, and 100 to 350Mbps for business customers through a high-performance dish, which can also withstand extreme temperatures.

To serve users in Antarctica, SpaceX has been launching batches of Starlink satellites to orbit the Earth's polar regions in an effort to beam high-speed broadband to users below, including in Alaska and northern Canada. Normally, Starlink satellites fetch the internet data by relying on ground stations on the planet's surface. But last year, SpaceX began outfitting new satellites with "laser links," which can allow them to send and receive data with each other across space. This can allow the same satellites to beam broadband without relying on a ground station below.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink -- though not the only problem -- is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat, which says Starlink lacks the capacity and speed to meet FCC obligations. In a new FCC filing, SpaceX denounced Viasat's "misguided campaign" against the Starlink funding. "Viasat is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology," SpaceX told the FCC. The new SpaceX filing was submitted on Friday and posted to the FCC's website Monday, as pointed out by Light Reading.

Viasat submitted an analysis (PDF) to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction. Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites." Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing [...].

In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance." SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 (PDF) and December 2021 (PDF). The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review. "Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff -- not competitors -- to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares this report from Ars Technica: Amazon's competitor to SpaceX Starlink is moving through the prototype-development phase, with the company announcing yesterday that it has "completed initial development on the antenna for our low-cost customer terminal." Amazon said its "Ka-band phased-array antenna is based on a new architecture capable of delivering high-speed, low-latency broadband in a form factor that is smaller and lighter than legacy antenna designs" and the "prototype is already delivering speeds up to 400Mbps." Performance will get better in future versions, Amazon said.

Amazon in July received Federal Communications Commission approval to launch 3,236 low-Earth orbit satellites. The company says it plans to invest over $10 billion in its satellite-broadband division, which it calls Project Kuiper... Amazon didn't provide any updates on when Kuiper will be ready for customers. FCC rules give Amazon six years to launch and operate 50 percent of its licensed satellites, with a deadline date of July 30, 2026. Amazon would have to launch the rest of the licensed satellites by July 30, 2029. Amazon previously said it plans to offer broadband to customers "once the first 578 satellites are launched."
"Custom-built antenna architecture will allow Amazon to deliver a small, affordable customer terminal to connect unserved and underserved communities around the world," explains Amazon's announcement.

An anonymous reader shares an article that's part of the Future Agenda, a series from Slate in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement. Here's an excerpt: Consumers in the U.S. face an infuriating lack of transparency when it comes to purchasing broadband services. Bills are convoluted, featuring complex pricing schemes. Roughly 7 in 10 U.S. adults surveyed by Consumer Reports who have used a cable, internet, or phone service provider in the past two years said they experienced unexpected or hidden fees. Unsurprisingly, 96 percent of those who had experienced hidden fees found them annoying. (To the other 4 percent: Are you OK?) We've been here before. In 1990, a similar crisis of consumer confidence prompted one Cabinet secretary to decry that "as consumers shop they encounter confusion and frustration." He said the market had become "a Tower of Babel, and consumers need to be linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see." While this diagnosis could apply almost word-for-word to today's broadband market, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was talking about the grocery store. The solution then offers a ready-made formula for how the incoming Biden administration can help consumers now: add a label.

Before regulatory changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminating in the 1994 adoption of the now-iconic Nutrition Facts panel, consumers were faced with a variety of hard-to-understand food labels peddling often-misleading information. While labels were required to list calories, serving sizes, and other nutritional information, including such a label was voluntary except when a company made nutritional claims about a food (such as "low in fat" or "high in vitamins"), or a food contained added nutrients. Without standards for what nutritional claims actually meant, and with no uniform nutrition label with which to compare products, consumers were left to decipher labels that were, according to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, "at best, confusing and, at worst, deceptive economically and potentially harmful." Today, it's difficult to imagine not having the ability to read straightforward facts about the nutrition content of our food and comparison shop between competing products.

The same could be true for broadband. As far back as 2010, our organization has been advocating for the adoption of a broadband nutrition label. In fact, labeling is such a common-sense measure that it has been adopted in the broadband context before. In 2016, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau together rolled out their version of the "broadband nutrition label." "Broadband Facts" resembles Nutrition Facts, emulating a disclosure method the American public is already familiar with. It breaks down a plan's cost and performance, including all additional fees and taxes, so that people don't have to dig through complicated terms of service and contracts to find simple information.

Some leaked speedtests from beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service "aren't showing the gigabit speeds SpaceX teased," writes Ars Technica, "but it's early." Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared their report: Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps. The same tests, conducted over the past two weeks, showed latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms. This isn't a comprehensive study of Starlink speeds and latency, so it's not clear whether this is what Internet users should expect once Starlink satellites are fully deployed and the service reaches commercial availability....

Links to 11 anonymized speed tests by Starlink users were posted by a Reddit user yesterday... A new Reddit post listing more speed tests shows some Starlink users getting even lower latency of 21ms and 20ms.

Beta testers must sign non-disclosure agreements, so these speed tests might be one of the only glimpses we get of real-world performance during the trials. SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.

While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas where SpaceX is likely to see plenty of interest.

Proudrooster writes: Can SpaceX's Starlink deliver less than 100ms latency? That is the $16 billion dollar question as the FCC looks to pump more money into rural broadband (PDF). Will rural America ever get broadboand? What will America get for giving billions of dollars to incumbent providers? Is this all just FUD or a publicity stunt by the FCC to stop states from building out their own networks? Will American's continue to pay the highest prices on earth for broadband? Will broadband and Internet access ever be considered a human right. So many questions, so few answers. Stay tuned. "FCC Chairman Ajit Pai backed off a plan that would have completely prevented SpaceX and other LEO companies from applying for rural-broadband funding as low-latency providers," reports Ars Technica. "But the FCC's full order was released today and suggests that SpaceX will have a tough time convincing the commission that its service will deliver latencies below the FCC standard of 100ms."

The FCC has "serious doubts that any low-Earth orbit networks will be able to meet the short-form application requirements for bidding in the low-latency tier" and that companies like SpaceX thus face a high chance of being rejected when they apply for funding as low-latency providers: "Service providers that intend to use low-Earth orbit satellites claim that the latency of their technology is "dictated by the laws of physics" due to the altitude of the satellite's orbit. We remain skeptical that the altitude of a satellite's orbit is the sole determinant of a satellite applicant's ability to meet the Commission's low-latency performance requirements. As commenters have explained, the latency experienced by customers of a specific technology is not merely a matter of the physics of one link in the transmission. Propagation delay in a satellite network does not alone account for latency in other parts of the network such as processing, routing, and transporting traffic to its destination. Short-form applicants seeking to bid as a low-latency provider using low-Earth orbit satellite networks will face a substantial challenge demonstrating to Commission staff that their networks can deliver real-world performance to consumers below the Commission's 100ms low-latency threshold."

As Proudrooster mentioned, if SpaceX is rejected from the low-latency category, it "will be at a disadvantage in a reverse auction that will distribute $16 billion -- $1.6 billion yearly, over ten years -- from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)," the report says. "The FCC will prioritize low-latency networks when awarding funding, so SpaceX and other LEO providers could come up short against terrestrial networks. Even DSL providers would have an advantage over LEO networks in funding battles if the satellite companies are placed in the FCC's high-latency category."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T doesn't want its home Internet speeds to be measured by the Federal Communications Commission anymore, and it already convinced the FCC to exclude its worst speed-test results from an annual government report. "AT&T this year told the commission it will no longer cooperate with the FCC's SamKnows speed test," The Wall Street Journal wrote in an investigative report titled "Your Internet provider likely juiced its official speed scores." AT&T already convinced the FCC to exclude certain DSL test results from last year's Measuring Broadband America report. The reports are based on the SamKnows testing equipment installed in thousands of homes across the U.S.

"AT&T was dismayed at its report card from a government test measuring Internet speeds" and thus "pushed the Federal Communications Commission to omit unflattering data on its DSL Internet service from the report," the Journal wrote. "In the end, the DSL data was left out of the report released late last year, to the chagrin of some agency officials," the Journal wrote. "AT&T's remaining speed tiers notched high marks." "AT&T developed a best-in-class tool to measure its consumer broadband services," the company said in a statement provided to Ars. "This tool measures performance on all AT&T IP broadband technologies and is more accurate, versatile, and transparent. For these and other reasons, our tool provides better and more useful information to our customers."

You asked, he answered!

Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers.

A joint project involving NASA and MIT researchers had demonstrated technology last year that could supply a lunar colony with broadband via lasers ("faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get") and has already demonstrated its worth in communications with spacecraft. From ComputerWorld's article: "The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite [formerly] orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment. LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800." Communicating at such distances means overcoming various challenges; one of the biggest is the variability in Earth's atmosphere. The LLCD didn't try to power through the atmosphere at only one spot, therefore, but used four separate beams in the New Mexico desert, each aimed "through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increased the chance that at least one of the beams would reach the receiver on the LADEE. Test results [were] promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power." At the CLEO: 2014 conference in June, researchers will provide a comprehensive explanation of how it worked.

New submitter thule writes "A story at Gigaom talks about how Level 3 is trying to pull peering into the net neutrality issue. Regulating peering could hamper how the Internet is interconnected, potentially turning it into a bureaucratic mess. Should peering be regulated?" Reader raque points out that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is banging the net neutrality drum, too: "Some major ISPs, like Cablevision, already practice strong net neutrality and for their broadband subscribers, the quality of Netflix and other streaming services is outstanding. But on other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. ... Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience."

sgt scrub writes "If you have put Yellow Dog Linux on a PS3 or a Pre X86 Apple, or have an interest in the Cell Broadband Engine, you will be pleased to know that Fixstars has purchased Terra Soft. '"A Cell/B.E. software developer and long-time user of Yellow Dog Linux, Fixstars has great faith in Yellow Dog Linux," said Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars. "This business acquisition allows us to offer a reliable and stable Linux distribution with sense of ease for our customers. I have no doubt that in the expanding Cell/B.E. ecosystem we will offer the best Cell/B.E. solution of the High Performance Computing generation."' I can't think of any group of people better suited to expand the Cell horizon."

boyko.at.netqos recommends his article up at Network Performance Daily, which notes the recent reports that up to 30% of households do not have a landline telephone, preferring a VoIP or cell-phone based solution. What to do with the miles of last-mile phone line infrastructure already in place in almost all the homes across the country? Maybe there's a solution to rural broadband by using the high-reliability frequencies reserved for voice purely for data — and using VoIP to make phone calls. From the article: "Repurposing the broadband of 0-25kHz would result in... speeds of around 14.4 kBytes/s (or 115.9 kbits/s) upload and 28.8 kBytes/s (231.3 kbits/s) download. That's not much of a speed boost. Still, if you've been plodding along on a '56.6k' modem, at speeds of 7.2kBytes/s, this would be like an oasis in the desert. And what about those phone calls? Well, if you make the same phone calls with VoIP that you were with the standard 0-4kHz landline, it would only take about 20.8kbits/s using the G.723.1 codec — that still leaves you with 80% of your broadband capacity when on the phone — and 100% of your broadband when you're off it." Only the US FCC calls 231K "broadband," but as noted it does beat dialup.

Anonymous Coward writes "Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia's first WiMax operator, sat down at the recent International WiMax Conference in Bangkok and unleashed a tirade about the failings of the technology, leaving an otherwise pro-WiMax audience stunned. His company, Buzz Broadband, had deployed a WiMax network over a year ago, and Freeman left no doubt about what conclusions he had drawn. He claimed that 'its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.' We've previously discussed the beginnings of WiMax as well as recent plans for a massive network in India.

Michael J. Ross writes "Every Internet user's impressions of a Web site is greatly affected by how quickly that site's pages are presented to the user, relative to their expectations — regardless of whether they have a broadband or narrowband connection. Web developers often assume that most page-loading performance problems originate on the back-end, and thus the developers have little control over performance on the front-end, i.e., directly in the visitor's browser. But Steve Souders, head of site performance at Yahoo, argues otherwise in his book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

morpheus83 writes "Akustica today introduced the first High Definition Microphone that enables HD voice quality in laptop PCs and other broadband mobile devices. The AKU2103 is a digital-output microphone with a guaranteed wideband frequency response. It is the first digital microphone to guarantee compliance with the TIA-920 audio performance requirement for wideband transmission in applications such as Voiceover-Internet Protocol (VoIP)."

Slashback tonight with a response from Sony that removes the DRM 'rootkit' that has caused so much commotion, more hijinks from the MPAA, continued battery advancement, a followup to the UK broadband plan that had so many American's drooling, a catch in the recent Netflix settlement, and continued financial trouble for Silicon Graphics. Details on these stories and more, below.

Clueless User asks: "Due to the lack of any wire based broadband solution in my area, I have been looking at using a CDMA2000 1x 3G wireless solution for Internet access. Verizon is offering an unlimited access solution over their cell network, and with a cell tower within visible distance of my home this seems almost feasible. Does anyone have any real life experience with CDMA2000 for home Internet access? (ie. gaming, P2P, large downloads, etc.) The only other option available is Satellite, but the high latency takes it off my list." This question basically boils down to which high latency solution has the least performance hit. Could you squeeze a faster-than-modem pipe thru such a link and have it be more cost effective than using a modem?

jessemersonuy asks: "Multicasting plays an important role in the design, development, operation, and application of next generation networks that rely on the efficient delivery of packets to their destinations. Due to the advent of broadband, wireless and web-based system design technologies, it has become possible and feasible to design and construct large scale, heterogeneous and complex wireline and wireless communication networks that can support multimedia conferencing, streaming media distribution, distributed data sharing, distance learning, 'push'- oriented, and QoS for wired-cable and wired-wireless applications. Now, we have a small High Performance Computing system in our university campus and I would really like to use that system for testing multicasting applications. However, I do not know what would be the best way to use the cluster for multicasting purposes. Has anyone experimented with this before? What might be the best multicasting application to use to be able to fully utilize the power of the cluster?"

Recently you asked Indrema founder John Gildred about the Linux-based console system his company plans to introduce. Here's what he has to say about its hackability, strategy, developers and more -- thanks for the in-depth answers, John.