Dave Wechsler: The Case Against Defunding Terrestrial Broadband
Satellite has brought availability to remote regions. But availability is not infrastructure.
SpaceX is pushing for the FCC to wind down $4.5 billion in rural broadband subsidies, arguing that Starlink's growing coverage precludes the need for them. If satellites can reach every zip code, fixed broadband buildout is redundant. Why pay for infrastructure where connectivity already exists?
It's a compelling argument, but it doesn’t address what modern broadband actually needs to do.
Availability and performance are two different things
Starlink's coverage story is genuinely remarkable. Connectivity now exists in places where it simply didn't before, such as remote farming communities, wilderness areas, and underserved tribal lands. That matters enormously, and Starlink has rightly received praise for expanding access.
But the U.S. home has changed. Today's rural household does more than stream video on a Saturday night. Households are remote offices processing large file transfers during business hours. They’re a classroom on a live video call. They’re a telehealth endpoint connecting a patient to a specialist three states away.
And, as AI-assisted applications (including smart home systems, local inference models, and real-time modeling) move closer to the consumer, they’re becoming an edge compute node. Those use cases require more than connectivity. They require low latency, sustained throughput, and consistency under concurrent load. Terrestrial networks have a structural advantage in delivering all three. Geostationary satellites face the physics of a 22,000-mile signal path.
Low-Earth orbit constellations like Starlink have improved dramatically. But under load, in dense usage periods, performance variability remains real. That variability is manageable for casual use. It's a problem when the stakes are a patient consult, a court hearing, or a student final exam.
Satellite vs. terrestrial? Pick both
The smarter framing isn't a competition - it's a stack. Satellite excels at coverage reach. Terrestrial networks excel at performance density. Hybrid connectivity, where satellite provides availability in the most geographically isolated areas and fixed or wireless terrestrial infrastructure handles performance-critical use cases, is already emerging.
Consumers in underserved areas are combining providers for redundancy. Carriers are exploring partnerships across modalities. The trajectory of the industry is toward convergence rather than substitution.
Defunding terrestrial buildout before it reaches completion forecloses on an essential future. The communities left without fixed infrastructure will have a single-provider dependency on a technology that, however impressive, wasn't designed to carry the full performance weight of a modern digital household.
Infrastructure policy shouldn't optimize for today's use case
The strongest argument against withdrawing subsidies is about trajectory. We are at the beginning of a decade-long shift in how compute, connectivity, and AI-assisted services interact at the edge. The applications being built today assume a level of network performance characterized by consistent low latency, high upload throughput, reliability under concurrent load. Satellite connectivity cannot structurally guarantee at this scale, at least not today.
Broadband infrastructure decisions made now will define economic opportunity for underserved communities for the next fifteen to twenty years. Roads weren't built because every farmer had a vehicle. They were built because mobility infrastructure creates the conditions for economic participation, and economic participation creates demand that justifies the infrastructure in turn.
The same logic applies here. Reliable high-speed connectivity is economic infrastructure. In a remote community, it enables people to attract remote workers, support local businesses with cloud-based operations, and participate in the digital economy.
And this gap compounds as communities without infrastructure fall further behind with every business that doesn't start there, every professional who doesn't relocate there, and every educational and health outcome that could have improved with the access that connectivity provides.
A hidden national security dimension
There's a dimension to this debate that rarely gets addressed directly: concentration risk. A national broadband strategy that converges heavily on a single satellite operator, even an exceptional one, creates infrastructure dependency at scale. The strength of the U.S. is bolstered by network diversity; it is our resilience. A hybrid infrastructure model, with terrestrial and satellite playing complementary roles, is more robust against failure, more competitive in pricing, and less vulnerable to single-point disruption.
This is, ultimately, a national security question as much as a broadband policy one.
The ask isn't preservation for its own sake
The argument here isn't to fund terrestrial buildout indefinitely regardless of outcomes. It's to complete what was started: ensuring that communities currently mid-buildout aren't stranded, that the infrastructure investment already made isn't wasted, and that hybrid connectivity becomes a genuine option rather than a theoretical one.
SpaceX has built something important. The industry should celebrate that. But availability and infrastructure are different claims. One says connectivity exists. The other says the conditions for full economic and digital participation exist. The US deserves both, and policy should be built to deliver both.
Dave Wechsler is Chief Business Officer at Plume, where he leads global strategy, partnerships, and M&A. He brings decades of experience in connectivity, IoT, and broadband from roles at Comcast, Hippo, and OMERS Ventures, with a track record of scaling smart home and emerging tech businesses. This Expert Opinion is exclusive to Broadband Breakfast.
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