Doug Dawson

What We’ve Learned About Upload Bandwidth

Until the pandemic hit, I rarely thought about upload bandwidth. I mostly used upload bandwidth to send files to people, and I rarely cared if they received the files immediately – I was happy as long as files got sent. But the pandemic changed everything for millions of people.

A Brief History of Rural Broadband

The poor state of rural broadband can be traced to the ways that the big telcos reacted to industry changes. Small telcos built rural networks, but large telcos gobbled them up over time. The big rural telcos then neglected rural properties in reaction to the changing economics from the deregulation of long-distance and local telephone service. Small telcos showed that it wasn’t necessary to abandon rural properties, but the big telcos stopped making investments in rural networks and for all practical purposes walked away from rural communities.

The Challenge of Accepting Rural Digital Opportunity Funds

I’ve been wondering lately if some of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction winners are having second thoughts about accepting the RDOF awards. It’s amazing how much the broadband world has changed since the end of that auction in December 2020. It's gotten more expensive to build fiber projects over the last year. The cost of labor is an even bigger concern. New grants and new requirements, that did not exist at the time of the auction, also complicate the situation.

Can Satellite Broadband be Affordable?

When we first heard of the possibility of broadband from low-orbit satellites, there was a lot of speculation that the technology could bring affordable broadband to the masses around the globe. The latest announcement from Starlink shows that affordable broadband is probably not coming in the immediate future. Starlink announced a premium tier of service with a $500 monthly fee for 150-500 Mbps. The receiver has a one-time cost of $2,500. The product offers faster speeds by doubling the size of the receiving area of the receiver.

Auditing Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Performance

The Federal Communications Commission just announced increased testing for internet service providers (ISPs) accepting funding from FCC High-Cost programs, which includes the Connect America Fund (CAF) II and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). The new rules include the following:

Video Continues to Drive Broadband Usage

Nielsen recently published some statistics about the way that we watch video that shows a continuing trend of migration from traditional video to watching video online. One of the most striking statistics is the total volume of online video. December 2021 saw an aggregate of 183 billion minutes of online video viewing, and even that number is likely small since there are many uses of video on the web that are not likely counted in the total.

Jitter – A Measure of Broadband Quality

Most people have heard of latency, which is a measure of the average delay of data packets on a network. There is another important measure of network quality that is rarely talked about. Jitter is the variance in the delays of signals being delivered through a broadband network connection. Jitter occurs when the latency increases or decreases over time. We have a tendency in the industry to oversimplify technical issues; we take a speed test and assume the answer that pops out is our speed.

The New Speed Battle

I’ve been thinking about the implications of having a new definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. That’s the threshold that has been set in several giant federal grants that allow grant funding to areas that have broadband slower than 100/20 Mbps. This is also the number that has been bandied about the industry as the likely new definition of broadband when the Federal Communications Commission seats a fifth Commissioner. The best thing about a higher definition of broadband is that it finally puts the DSL controversy to bed.

The Challenge of State Broadband Plans

One of the most interesting aspects of the upcoming Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants is that the money is going to flow through the states. In many of the states I’ve been following, it looks like the money will be distributed by passing the money through existing state broadband grant programs. Yet since the federal legislation that created the BEAD grants rules is so specific, there will be numerous ways that the BEAD grant will differ from a state grant program. The obvious solution is for states to adopt the federal rules.

Add Affordability to the Definition of Broadband

When we ask people why they don’t have home broadband, the primary response in every survey is the cost of broadband. So prices be part of the definition of broadband? There is a huge difference between a 100/20 Mbps connection that costs $55 and one that costs $85. As far as the public is concerned, these are not the same product—but we pretend that they are. Of course, there is nothing that scares the big cable companies more than talking about regulating broadband prices.

FCC Mapping Hinders Broadband Grants

Hopefully by now, most communities with poor broadband will have heard about the gigantic federal grants on the way to provide broadband solutions. The largest is the $42.5 Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that will be administered by states, with the funding and the rules established by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The federal grants give priority to locations that are unserved (broadband speeds under 25/3 Mbps) and can also be used to fund underserved locations (speeds between 25/3 and 100/20 Mbps).

Treasury Fund is Not Just for Rural Broadband

Federal Communications Commissioner Brandon Carr released an extraordinary statement worth reading. Carr is taking exception to the final rules from the Treasury Department concerning how communities can use the $350 billion in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The commissioner is asking states to somehow intervene in the way that cities, counties, and towns elect to use these funds.

Incumbent Internet Service Provider Challenges Hinder Broadband Grants

One of the most annoying aspects of the current federal broadband grants is the ability of incumbent internet service providers (ISPs) to challenge the validity of grant requests. In the typical challenge, the incumbents claim that they are offering fast broadband and that an applicant should not be able to overbuild them. The challenges put a burden on anybody filing for a grant since they must somehow prove that incumbent broadband speeds are slower than 25/3 Mbps.

Pushing Back Against Municipal Broadband

As a cautionary tale to any city that provides broadband, incumbent internet service providers (ISPs) are always going to push back on city initiatives. In 2021, the city of Tucson (AZ) launched a free wireless network to bring broadband to students in homes without broadband. Tucson recognized the need for the network when it got requests for over 7,000 wireless access points from students during the pandemic. The city then decided that the best long-term solution to the large numbers of unserved students was to create a private network using CBRS spectrum.

The Reasons Rural Residents and Businesses Struggle to Get Fiber Broadband

Many rural residents and businesses are furious that they can’t get fiber broadband even though there is fiber close to their home or business. They can’t understand why the uncaring company that owns the fiber can’t make the tiny investment needed to connect them to fiber that’s already tantalizingly close to them. The fiber that runs close to the home and business is likely middle-mile fiber. These middle-mile routes are often seen as too valuable by telecom companies to serve last-mile customers.

How Will Big Telecom Companies Handle Federal Grants?

Several large telecom companies have announced big plans to expand fiber coverage, and I assume that also means heavily participating in the infrastructure law's $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program that is aimed primarily at bringing better broadband to rural areas. It’s likely that companies want to benefit from the huge upcoming federal grants. The easiest way for them to take advantage of the federal grant is to plan to overlash fiber onto existing telco copper where the companies are already the incumbent.

Building Future-Proof Networks to Meet Increasing Demand

I assume that most people know the famous line from Field of Dreams where the disembodied voice promises, “Build it, and he will come.” For twenty years, I’ve been advising broadband clients against taking that advice. It doesn’t make any sense to invest a lot of money into building a broadband network without first having done enough market research to know that people will buy your services. Now, I want to talk about a similar-sounding idea – build it, and they will fill it. This is a shorthand way to describe the unbelievable growth in broadband demand.

The 25/3 Mbps Myth

There is no such thing as a 25/3 Mbps broadband connection, or a 100/20 Mbps broadband connection, or even a symmetrical gigabit broadband connection on fiber. For a long list of reasons, the broadband speeds that make it to customers vary widely by the day, the hour, and the minute. And yet, we’ve developed an entire regulatory system built around the concept that broadband connections can be neatly categorized by speed. What do regulators mean when they set a speed definition of 25/3 Mbps?

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act revamps broadband labels

There is one quiet provision of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that slipped under the radar. Congress is requiring that the Federal Communications Commission revamp broadband labels that describe the broadband product to customers, similar to the labels for food. The Act gives the FCC one year to create regulations to require the display of a broadband label similar to the ones created by the FCC in 2016. Internet service providers (ISPs) are going to hate this. It requires full disclosure of prices, including any special or gimmick pricing that will expire.

Do We Still Need the Universal Service Fund?

There is currently a policy debate circulating asking who should pay to fund the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. For decades the USF has collected fees from telephone carriers providing landline and cellular phones – and these fees have been passed on to consumers. As landline telephone usage has continued to fall, the fees charged to customers have increased. To fix this, there have been calls to spread fees more widely.

Technology Neutrality: A Policy Failure

Christopher Ali, a professor at the University of Virginia, says in his upcoming book Farm Fresh Broadband that technology neutrality is one of the biggest policy failures of our time. Technology neutrality is a code word for allowing all internet service providers (ISPs) and technologies to be eligible for grant funding. It has been argued, mostly by ISPs that use slower technologies, that the Federal Communications Commission should not be in the game of picking winners and losers.

Multiple Barriers Can Hinder Rural Broadband Deployment

Research indicates that people living in rural areas struggle to obtain broadband connections mainly because of the low density of housing. Fewer people living in a community, especially over large swaths of land, translates into higher costs to build and maintain the most common broadband technologies. This white paper on the rural broadband industry was researched and written by Doug Dawson, President of CCG Consulting, a telecommunications consulting firm that works with rural communities and providers.

Reporting the Broadband Floor

Recently, Deb Socia posted a brilliant suggestion online: “[Internet service providers] need to identify the floor instead of the potential ceiling. Instead of ‘up to’ speeds, how about we say ‘at least’”. ISPs must report the slowest speed they are likely to deliver. I want to be fair to ISPs and I suggest they report both the minimum “at least” speed and the maximum “up to” speed. Those two numbers will tell the right story to the public because together they provide the range of speeds being delivered in a given Census.

Changing the Definition of Broadband

A group of Senators recently sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission asking to raise the definition of broadband to 100/100 Mbps. This speed has been discussed for several years as the logical step forward from the current 25/3 Mbps speed set by the FCC in 2015. It’s clear to everyone in the industry that homes are using a lot more broadband than they did in 2015 – with the biggest change being simultaneous uses of multiple broadband streams in the typical home. The change in broadband definition would trigger the following: