bead wanted 100% ftth. Other accommodations were lip service to attempt to appear fair.
Sent from my iPhone I'm not sure how the projects that received BEAD funding in Illinois are compliant with the BOTB-round requirements. A vast majority of the projects I looked at are FTTH, which is simply not compatible with the new rules that were implemented when the BOTB requirements were put into place - that is obviously assuming that there were any other technologies competing. It's also pretty interesting that, as far as I can tell, there were zero terrestrial fixed wireless projects approved. Yes, Illinois preliminary BEAD plan has all satellite going to Amazon Kuiper Leo. Not approved by NTIA yet. And no they don’t haven enough sats in orbit yet to even offer commercial service. It’s not clear to me what about Amazon’s bid scored better than SpaceX to win the Illinois satellite locations. The state broadband office is run by technocrats, I doubt they would do it just to spite Elon for forcing them to allocate money to satellite rather than fiber. If anything, they would do the politically expedient thing to help get approval from NTIA. I doubt they really consider the satellite part of the BEAD program as accomplishing much. Let’s face it, those people can get Starlink now if they are willing to pay $80/mo. Maybe that factored into the decision, Starlink needs a competitor to drive prices down, so let’s help Amazon Leo get going. What I suspect is that they will sell the $120 and $80 plans in an area as long as there is capacity, or at least capacity that no one notices is below what's advertised. Once the higher-priced plans are saturated, they might offer the $40 plan in an area, or shoot up another 29 sats to fill in the area. They are launching ~~ 100 sats a week it seems. What's that? 5,000 a year? Local operators are noticing that Kuiper is winning grants in some of their service areas. What's up with that? Do they even have 100 birds flying? bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>On 12/19/2025 10:35 AM, Robert wrote: I would think they found out that the customers were downloading just as much data just using more network time to do it. It's a false premise that the "extra" b/w in your network can be used for low speed customers, they take just as many or more timeslices... On 12/19/25 9:07 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: People with the $40 service who bumped it up to $80 or $120 for the holidays may get a surprise when they find out they can’t go back in February. The ones who dropped down to $40 while it was available may have been surprised to find out that 100 Mbps is just fine and they didn’t need 250 or 400 Mbps. Interesting also that the 100 Mbps plan is the same as Lite but with a 100 Mbps speed limit. Lite vs Standard is described as de-prioritization not a speed limit per se. So Josh was probably right they got rid of that plan because $120 customers were turning into $40 customers. Somebody at Starlink marketing said oops, why did we think that was a good idea. Sounds like Uber surge pricing. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>On 12/19/2025 7:17 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: That’s the thing, it’s location dependent. And not in the sense of we only have enough capacity in your area for Lite service. More like we don’t have excess capacity in your area so we aren’t going to try too hard to get your business. Checking right now for my home address (Chicago suburbs), I see the $40 service is not being offered, it was a couple weeks ago. But it says I can get deprioritized 250 Mbps Residential Lite for $80/mo or 400+ Mbps Residential for $120/mo. Both say $0 hardware cost, but $21.65 due today which I’m guessing is maybe shipping? It says if you cancel you have to return the rented equipment. It used to say a 12 month contract was required to get the $0 hardware. Starlink prices and speeds are like airline tickets or market price lobster, it varies depending on location and what day you check. Service plans are explained here: https://starlink.com/legal/documents/DOC-1728-44881-79?regionCode=US From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Josh Luthman
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2025 10:03 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] $40 Starlink tier already gone At that price one would hope...but it's location dependent.
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