Thousands of Starlink Users Tell FCC to Reject Dish Network's 5G 12GHz Plan
A SpaceX petition against Dish Network has prompted thousands of Starlink subscribers to send messages to the FCC, demanding it protect the satellite internet system.
“Do NOT allow Dish to screw over consumers yet again,” wrote(Opens in a new window) one Starlink user named John Davidson to the FCC.
On Tuesday, SpaceX began recruiting US-based Starlink customers to sign a petition calling on the FCC to reject a Dish Network plan to use the 12GHz radio spectrum for a 5G cellular network. The FCC’s filing website(Opens in a new window) now has about 3,000 messages from Starlink users urging the commission to dismiss Dish Network’s effort to secure the radio spectrum.
The outpouring of support occurs as SpaceX is claiming Dish Network’s plan to tap the 12GHz band risks making Starlink “unusable.” This is because Starlink also uses the same radio spectrum to offer high-speed downloads.
“If Dish’s lobbying efforts succeed, our study shows that Starlink customers will experience harmful interference more than 77% of the time and total outage of service 74% of the time, rendering Starlink unusable for most Americans,” SpaceX claimed earlier this month.
For months now, both companies have been arguing about the matter within FCC proceedings. But on Tuesday, SpaceX decided to escalate the dispute by calling on Starlink users to lobby against Dish Network in its favor.
The company’s petition(Opens in a new window), which is hosted on votervoice.net, is designed to send a pre-written message to both the FCC and US lawmakers, demanding they intervene. As a result, the petition made it easy for Starlink users to generate a flood of complaints to the FCC.
It’s unclear how many of the complaints might be from duplicate users.
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