The FCC said it goofed on Starlink's subscriber count - and by a lot.
The Federal Communications Commission issued a correction retracting its earlier claim that Starlink had "over 7 million American subscribers." The regulator pulled the figure after it started raising eyebrows for being abnormally high given what's publicly known about the satellite broadband service's reach. No replacement number has been offered yet, and the FCC hasn't explained how the inflated figure made it into an official record in the first place.
Subscriber counts are the main yardstick regulators and rivals use to judge how much of the broadband market Starlink controls, and that math feeds into decisions on spectrum allocation and rural-broadband subsidies. A regulator citing a number that turns out to be wrong undercuts the credibility of the very data those policy calls are supposed to rest on.
Self-reported growth numbers in the satellite-broadband business have always been hard to verify independently, and this correction is a reminder that even the government's own figures deserve a second look before anyone builds a policy - or a headline - around them.