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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Results:

Despite these numbers, the Ookla report found that Starlink’s 2025 median U.S. speeds still don’t meet federal benchmarks. For 2025, Starlink’s median U.S. download speed was 117.74 Mbps — over the federal standard of 100 Mbps — but the median upload speed was 16.91 Mbps, falling short of the federal standard of 20 Mbps.

On one hand, embarrassingly close for Elon Musk, as the media coverage is quick to point out.

On the other hand, a) it's not a target that Starlink was optimizing for, since they've spent the last three years cut off from the RDOF program, hence the far larger number of subscribers under current service than in their RDOF submission, and perhaps more critically, b) the 2025 milestone only required 40% completion. We don't have the information to know what the range and distribution of upload speeds hit, and for some strange reason Musk-unfriendly media doesn't seem interested in the question.