FCC pays $340k/year to keep 100's of empty Alaska buildings wired for internet(www.propublica.org)
35 pointsby Teever14 hours ago6 comments
  • pavel_lishin14 hours ago
    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.
    • LorenDB14 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.
      • Saris11 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?
        • LorenDB9 hours ago
          Yes, that is true. I just felt like this article hyped this one specific case as the financial ruin of all Americans, whereas I don't particularly care if a few cents of my taxes were spent suboptimally.
      • rootusrootus8 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.
    • exe3414 hours ago
      I'm surprised doge didn't cut it - maybe he owns shares in some of the companies.
      • Jtsummers13 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?!?!).
  • RiverCrochet13 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.

    • happyPersonR13 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places in general, don’t know about Alaska, it was either you got starlink or nothing after the fiber only rules were withdrawn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”.

      • jazzyjackson10 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)

  • rootusrootus8 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

    • g842518 minutes ago
      I checked the prices for a round trip in December - $1200+ per passenger. I can't imagine how much it would be without a subsidy.
  • nubinetwork11 hours ago
    I'm a little confused about why there is an ongoing fee... unless someone didn't pay for the fibre pull upfront.
  • JesseHowell12 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • exabrial13 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.

    • CursedSilicon12 hours ago
      Can we start with the military?
      • exabrial10 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.