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The FCC announced today<\/a> that it won\u2019t award Elon Musk\u2019s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn\u2019t able to \u201cdemonstrate that it could deliver the promised service\u201d and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn\u2019t be \u201cthe best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink\u2019s bid<\/a> last year, which led to this appeal<\/a>. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload \u201clow-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,\u201d funded by the RDOF.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe FCC is tasked with ensuring consumers everywhere have access to high-speed broadband that is reliable and affordable,\u201d FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. \u201cThis applicant had failed to meet its burden to be entitled to nearly $900 million in universal service funds for almost a decade.\u201d FCC commissioner Brendan Carr dissented<\/a>, writing that \u201cthe FCC did not require \u2014 and has never required \u2014 any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Christopher Cardaci, head of legal at SpaceX, writes in a letter to the FCC that \u201cStarlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n