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ViaSat asks FCC to halt SpaceX Starlink launches because it can’t compete

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5 years ago

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Under the hollow pretense of concern for the environment, Starlink satellite internet competitor ViaSat has asked the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to force SpaceX to stop Starlink launches and threatened to take the matter to court if it doesn’t get its way.

A long-time satellite internet provider notorious for offering expensive, mediocre service with strict bandwidth restrictions, ViaSat has also been engaged in a years-long attempt to disrupt, slow down, and even kill SpaceX’s Starlink constellation by any means necessary. That includes fabricating nonsensical protests, petitioning the FCC dozens of times, and – most recently – threatening to sue the agency and federal government as the company becomes increasingly desperate.

The reason is simple: even compared to SpaceX’s finicky, often-unreliable Starlink Beta service, ViaSat’s satellite internet is almost insultingly bad. With a focus on serving the underserved and unserved, SpaceX’s Starlink beta users – many of which were already relying on ViaSat or HughesNet internet – have overwhelmingly described the differences as night and day.

In simple terms, if given the option, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that a single public ViaSat subscriber would choose the company’s internet over SpaceX’s Starlink. While Starlink currently requires subscribers to pay a substantial upfront cost – ~$500 – for the dish used to access the satellite network, ViaSat internet costs at least as much per month. Currently, new subscribers would pay a bare minimum of ~$113 per month for speeds up to 12 Mbps (akin to DSL) and an insultingly small 40GB data cap. For a 60GB cap and 25 Mbps, subscribers will pay more than $160 per month after a three-month promotion.

What $80 gets you with Viasat. After using 40GB (about 4 hours of youtube), you get throttled to this. If you don't like waiting 40 minutes for a 5 minute video @ 144p (lowest possible youtube video setting) to load, DO NOT GET Viasat.
byu/D3athN0te101 inViasat
ViaSat’s internet plans as of 2021.

With a fixed cost of $99 per month, truly unlimited data, and uncapped speeds that vary from 50 to 200+ Mbps, any ViaSat “silver” subscriber would receive far better service by switching to Starlink and save enough money to pay off the $500 dish in less than a year. While Starlink is currently in beta and often unstable and unreliable as a result, users continue to notice major improvements in speeds and uptime as SpaceX works to continuously improve the network.

In the US, ViaSat has less than 600,000 household internet subscribers, all of which are almost certainly liable to switch to better alternatives. Short of local and state governments actually standing up for their citizens and forcing monopolistic ground-based internet service providers (ISPs) to fairly serve rural customers, Starlink is currently the only real hope for rural Americans who are tired of settling for second-class internet service.

[deleted by user]
by inStarlink

ViaSat began its latest push to hamstring a looming competitor with regulation when it asked the FCC to perform an environmental review of Starlink’s impact last December. The FCC unsurprisingly failed to heed the company’s spurious, nakedly self-serving demands. Since then, the FCC approved a long-standing SpaceX request to modify its Starlink constellation by lowering thousands of satellites, thus improving service and drastically decreasing the debris risk posed by satellite failures, which would take a few years to reenter from 550 kilometers instead of decades for spacecraft orbiting at 1000+ kilometers.

To a very small extent, there are some real questions worth asking about the environmental impact of megaconstellations. A few recent studies have begun to do so, though it’s such a new field of inquiry that virtually nothing is known with any confidence. However, ViaSat is transparently disinterested in the actual environmental impact given that its petition for the FCC to immediately halt all Starlink launches focuses on Starlink alone and not competitor OneWeb – also in the process of launching satellites – or prospective constellations being developed by Telesat and Amazon.

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What ViaSat actually wants is for the FCC to catastrophically hamstring Starlink, thus saving the profit-focused company from having to actually work to compete with an internet service provider that is all but guaranteed to capture most of its subscribers on an even playing field. Incredibly, ViaSat actually removes its greenwashing mask in the very same FCC request [PDF], stating that it “will suffer competitive injury” if Starlink is allowed to “compete directly with Viasat in the market for satellite broadband services.”

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner

Elon Musk sat beside Trump as AI leaders signed a voluntary White House safety accord.

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8 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Elon Musk had the seat right next to President Donald Trump on Tuesday as the White House hosted the leaders of America’s biggest artificial intelligence companies for a lunch that ended with a voluntary industry accord on AI safety.

A seating chart Trump posted on Truth Social placed Musk at the president’s left in the East Room, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on his right, according to an Associated Press reporter. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also attended, along with Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson.

After the lunch, Trump told reporters outside the West Wing that the executives had signed “The White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities.” Johnson described it as a voluntary statement of principles built on “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review,” while Zuckerberg said company boards would independently review reports from outside auditors. Trump called the document “morally binding,” said he would name a new AI czar within days, and signed an executive order formally renaming artificial intelligence “super intelligence,” CNBC reported.

Musk was not in the room for Tesla alone. Since SpaceX absorbed xAI, he runs the company behind Grok and one of the largest AI training operations anywhere. On September 25, he said another 220,000 Nvidia GB300 chips would come online at Colossus 2 within a week, with more expected in November and December.

SpaceX confirms third massive compute deal at Colossus data center

 

Musk also used the trip to restate his energy ambitions. “SpaceX is aiming together with Tesla to do 200 gigawatts of solar production per year,” he said at an event in Washington. It is the same combined target he laid out that feeds directly into Terafab, the Tesla and SpaceX chip venture that will need enormous amounts of power.

The showing between Musk and Trump has come a long way, since the two had the very public split in mid 2025 after Musk opposed the “Big Beautiful Bill” and left DOGE. They reconciled at Charlie Kirk’s memorial that September, and Trump later called their relationship “good”. Since then, Musk has joined Trump’s China delegation in May and attended last week’s White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

For Tesla, that access to government official could pay dividends. As Teslarati noted in January, federal autonomy rules, NHTSA oversight and a single national standard for driverless vehicles all run through an administration Musk can more easily reach directly as Tesla works to scale Robotaxi and Cybercab beyond Texas.

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Elon Musk

Tesla Roadster’s new patent preps white-knuckle speeds, keeping it grounded

Published

22 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/Twitter

Ahead of its highly anticipated unveiling, Tesla’s upcoming Roadster received a new patent that aims to keep it grounded while enabling white-knuckle speeds.

The patent, which was granted on September 29, is titled “Electric Car Fan,” bluntly stating its design but not its purpose, which is further detailed in the text of the application. Interestingly, it comes two weeks before the Roadster event, which was delayed due to unfavorable weather on Thursday, which could cause issues, as Tesla revealed the event must be held outdoors.

The purpose is to solve a problem that is relatively unique to high-performance electric cars. Instant motor torque is useless if the tires cannot plant that force, and conventional wings and underbody tunnels generate downforce only when air is already rushing past the car. At launch, in slow corners, and under hard braking from modest speed, passive aerodynamic additions contribute essentially very little to downforce.

Tesla’s filing says that its fans can produce the downforce needed, independent of vehicle velocity, then ease off so the same hardware does not pile on drag at highway speeds, an issue that can come from excessive body modifications.

The hardware outlined in the patent is a ducted-fan package that is placed into the rear of the vehicle. An underbody inlet between the rear wheels feeds a duct that rises to a wide outlet in the diffuser. In that outlet are four axial fans, which are divided by vertical strakes. They will pull air from under the floor and press the chassis onto the pavement.

The language in the patent claims it can cut drag rather than add to it while simultaneously increasing downforce.

Tesla Roadster event requires restricted airspace, and the FAA obliges

The fans run from the high-voltage battery and a vehicle control system, so output can be modulated rather than left on as a fixed penalty.

There are additional strengths that can come from this design, like extra tire load at low speed, which can contribute to even more face-melting acceleration rates, decrease stopping distance, and sharper turn-in before a wing has air to work with. Adjustable fan speed lets the car add grip only when needed, so it can be catered to the force of a turn or acceleration.

These designs were previously used, and banned, in some competitive settings. The Brabham BT46B was banned in F1 competition for using a similar fan design and being labeled as too effective.

Tesla still lists the Roadster as having a sub-two-second 0-60 MPH time and a 250-plus-MPH top speed, and there are expectations for a SpaceX cold-gas thruster package that could not only increase acceleration but potentially cause the vehicle to hover.

It is important to note that a patent is not a production part, and packaging four fans in a rear diffuser, managing noise, and potential debris are all things Tesla must consider. With that being said, the patent being granted shows Tesla is designing the Roadster to go fast, but it is also attempting to use unique strategies to combat any issues it might have at those speeds.

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Investor's Corner

Tesla showrooms picked clean ahead of Q3 end as demand looks strong

Published

23 hours ago

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September 29, 2026

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Credit: @thaichiminh1907/X

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) showrooms have been picked clean ahead of the end of the third quarter of the year, as demand looks to be strong and delivery estimates for new vehicles are pushed into late 2026 and early 2027.

Tesla appears to have sold out of many of its Model 3 and Model Y trim levels in the United States, as only the Model Y RWD and Model Y All-Wheel-Drive are available for delivery before the end of the year.

Additionally, many showrooms are either completely empty or void of all but just one demo unit within the buildings themselves in an effort to bolster what could be one of Tesla’s best quarters in vehicle deliveries in recent memory.

Additionally, when I spoke to the guys at Tesla Mechanicsburg two weeks ago, when I returned the Model Y L, their third hauler of the week had just arrived, and every vehicle on it, along with every vehicle in their delivery lot, was accounted for and had a name attached to it for delivery.

Tesla saw a 25 percent increase in deliveries in Q2 compared to the same quarter the year before. The vast majority of the 480,126 units it delivered, 467,762 vehicles to be exact, were the Model 3 and Model Y.

In Q3 2025, Tesla delivered 497,099 vehicles, once again a figure that was dominated by the company’s two mass-market vehicles. Analysts have unusually wide predictions for this quarter, likely because so many firms missed the Q2 delivery figure by such a substantial margin; Wall Street predicted 408,000 cars, while Tesla delivered 480,000.

Goldman Sachs has Tesla slotted for 435,000 deliveries in Q3, while JPMorgan said it anticipates 482,000. The median guess is about 449,000 deliveries for Q3.

Interested in ordering a Tesla? Use my referral code for three free months of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) here.

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