FCC pays $340k/year to keep 100's of empty Alaska buildings wired for internet

FCC pays $340k/year to keep 100's of empty Alaska buildings wired for internet(propublica.org)

35 points by Teever 13 hours ago | 15 comments

This sounds like less of a "let's get mad at the FCC!" situation, but more of a "let's get mad at companies defrauding the US Government" situation.

LorenDB 13 hours ago | |

Yeah, at $340,000/yr, this situation is costing individual Americans less than 1 cent per person per year. Nothing more than a rounding error.

Saris 10 hours ago | | |

That part that frustrates me is this is just one example of spending for no reason, so how many others like it are also out there?

rootusrootus 7 hours ago | | |

I think the point is not that Adak gets this money wasted on them, but that this is endemic across the US. Adds up to way more than 340K.

exe34 12 hours ago | |

I'm surprised doge didn't cut it - maybe he owns shares in some of the companies.

Jtsummers 12 hours ago | | |

No reason to be surprised, it was an unserious effort that didn't look for real fraud, waste, and abuse. They looked for things that could play well to their constituents, like when it turned out the State Department had subscription to Politico (oh the horror, informed public servants making critical decisions?!?!).

RiverCrochet 12 hours ago |

Looks like they all use Starlink and no one uses the FCC-subsidized fiber.

Starlink is nice, but I'd still want the option to switch to an alternate provider if Starlink suddenly raises their prices or otherwise becomes uncompetitive for some reason. I guess they do have cell service out there, though.

I wonder how the copper PSTN is out there, or if it's totally replaced by that fiber.

happyPersonR 11 hours ago | |

In a lot of rural places in general, don’t know about Alaska, it was either you got starlink or nothing after the fiber only rules were withdrawn

Which basically means if starlink goes if there’s not another sat vendor … basically there’s nothing. I don’t think any other providers service that far up(hughesnet maybe?)

I’m also not sure if starlink and the others will be forced to do COLR (carrier of last resort) but I think the answer might be “no”.

jazzyjackson 9 hours ago | | |

Small villages up the coast of Alaska are linked by a microwave backhaul.

When I worked in Togiak ten years ago, it was about a 100mbit connection shared with the other few hundred households in town. If you were up at 6am you could watch YouTube just fine, but the internet crawled once everyone got online checking Facebook (this is my villain origin story of building local first low bandwidth software, I couldn’t believe the megabytes that slack and Facebook soaked up)

rootusrootus 7 hours ago |

As an interesting side note, this island gets a couple flights a week by an Alaska Airlines 737. That is impressive if the population is really down to a couple dozen.

Edit: like the Internet access, the flights are heavily subsidized by the US taxpayer

nubinetwork 10 hours ago |

I'm a little confused about why there is an ongoing fee... unless someone didn't pay for the fibre pull upfront.

exabrial 11 hours ago |

We should play whack-a-mole with fraud.

We should ALSO reduce the federal budget to a trickle and return the money to where it belongs, the taxpayer.

CursedSilicon 11 hours ago | |

Can we start with the military?

exabrial 9 hours ago | | |

absolutely. The fact that the US Navy thought it'd be a _good idea_ to make cannon shells that cost $100k/unit tells you how big the problem is.

The only way to stop it is to take away in the infinite money glitch.