alt.hn

7/20/2026 at 4:15:52 PM

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

 https://www.propublica.org/article/adak-island-alaska-internet-subsidy-fcc

by Teever

7/20/2026 at 4:33:09 PM

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.

by pavel_lishin

7/20/2026 at 4:39:33 PM

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.

by LorenDB

7/20/2026 at 7:52:49 PM

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?

by Saris

7/20/2026 at 9:37:12 PM

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.

by LorenDB

7/20/2026 at 10:38:01 PM

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.

by rootusrootus

7/20/2026 at 5:09:19 PM

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

by exe34

7/20/2026 at 5:16:03 PM

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?!?!).

by Jtsummers

7/20/2026 at 5:20:49 PM

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.

by RiverCrochet

7/20/2026 at 6:09:15 PM

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places in general, don’t know about Alaska, it was either you got starlink or nothing after the fiber only rules were withdrawn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

by happyPersonR

7/20/2026 at 8:35:30 PM

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)

by jazzyjackson

7/20/2026 at 10:39:17 PM

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

by rootusrootus

7/21/2026 at 6:27:06 AM

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.

by g8425

7/20/2026 at 7:36:47 PM

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

by nubinetwork

7/20/2026 at 6:35:18 PM

[flagged]

by JesseHowell

7/20/2026 at 6:10:45 PM

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.

by exabrial

7/20/2026 at 6:50:47 PM

Can we start with the military?

by CursedSilicon

7/20/2026 at 8:36:18 PM

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.

by exabrial