Musk’s Starlink gets deployed at the White House

The White House is working to “improve Wi-Fi connectivity,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement emailed to The Verge. According to The New York Times, it’s using Starlink to address the issue, which White House officials blame on the property’s spotty cell service and “overtaxed” Wi-Fi infrastructure.

Huh. Giving Leavitt the benefit of the doubt, I’ll grant that you can connect to Starlink terminals, like the Starlink Mini we reviewed last year, directly over Wi-Fi. But that’s apparently not what’s happening here, despite the efforts of a SpaceX security engineer named Chris Stanley, who the Times says “went to the roof of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in the White House complex to explore installing Starlink there,” only to trip a Secret Service alarm. Instead, the outlet writes that the White House is having its Starlink service piped from a government data center miles from the compound.

Let’s set aside the obvious conflict of interest and ethics questions at play here — Elon Musk, who owns Starlink parent company SpaceX, has seemed to have his hand on the Executive Branch’s till a lot since Trump took over as President. We can even skip over the security implications pointed out by a cybersecurity expert in the Times piece. As a practical matter alone, there’s no obvious reason to add another ISP in order to improve Wi-Fi coverage, especially one that the FCC said less than two years ago didn’t “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” required for rural broadband funding. The much simpler solution would be running some new ethernet cable or adding a few extra Wi-Fi access points, like routers.

White House officials said Starlink has “donated” the service, the Times writes. Okay, free is free, hard to knock that. If we want to be really generous, maybe the White House is getting The Good Starlink that the rest of us don’t have access to. You know, like that “state-of-the-art Super TiVo” the first Trump White House claimed to have in 2018.

Even then, this is a connection that’s beamed from space, through ever-changing atmospheric conditions, with all the stability implications that brings. Piping it in over fiber from a distant data center doesn’t change that. Starlink is good for what it is — the best, even! It just doesn’t stack up against a solid, hardwired internet connection.