August 2021

This paper describes the challenge of four rural broadband providers operating fiber to the home networks to recover the middle mile network costs of streaming video entertainment and quantifies the amount of the current and future shortfall. It describes the components of the rural broadband networks, policy background for their evolution, an overview of providers, and the financial calculations of cost recovery. The preliminary results show that current broadband prices are approximately $50 per month per subscriber.

TDS Telecom’s leadership said that the company believes that there is a “sense of urgency” around its fiber strategy and it plans to increase its fiber build within its existing wireline footprint and also in expansion markets outside its footprint. In fact, the company feels such a sense of urgency that it is not naming the markets or the number of markets and addresses where it plans to expand its fiber footprint because of the growing competition in the 1-Gig space.

The Federal Communications Commission published its brand-new map showing mobile coverage and availability data in the US from the country’s largest wireless providers. This is the first public map showing updated mobile coverage released by the FCC and represents a significant improvement over other data previously published by the agency.