Doug Dawson

Pew recently published an article that cautioned that States Must Consider the Future of Broadband Offices. They note that some states have a sunset date embedded in the enabling legislation that will mean the end of State Broadband Offices if state legislatures don’t act. I’ve also been thinking about this lately.

The Federal Communications Commission issued a Public Notice with the longest title I can remember: Wireline Competition Bureau Reminds Reverse-preemption States of Obligation to Effectively Regulate Pole Attachments and Seeks Comment on Need for Changes to the Commission’s Certification Rules to Ensure Effective State Pole Attachment Regulation. States were given the right to regulate pole attachments in Section 224 of the 1934 Communications Act.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has released all but four states to begin signing Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment contracts with grant winners. NTIA has still not approved the grant proposals from California and Illinois. Now that the process of negotiating contracts for grant winners has started, news is seeping out of some grant winners backing out and refusing to accept the BEAD grant awards. The largest BEAD award being rejected is by Astound in Texas, which is walking away from $166 million in grants.

AT&T filed several petitions at the Federal Communications Commission asking the FCC to override regulations from the State of California. The State is forcing AT&T to maintain copper networks until such time that AT&T can offer the same services to customers using some alternate technology. The FCC reacted by issuing two requests for public comments related to the AT&T petitions.

The Federal Communications Commission recently asked for comments in Docket 26-78, which is the latest iteration of its biennial report to Congress that looks at the State of Competition in the Communications Marketplace. Various industry players provided input to the FCC on issues related to competition and pricing for broadband and cellular service, with fewer caring about voice and cable service. One of the issues widely discussed in this year’s filing is broadband prices. Some of the big ISPs continue to assert that broadband prices are dropping.

Maps of cellular internet coverage by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon show a typical rural story of cellular coverage in a rural county in Illinois. Cell carriers rarely share towers, and each carrier is on different towers and has different coverage. All three carriers have areas where they have no 5G coverage, and somebody subscribed to any one carrier in this county would find a lot of dead zones. All three carriers have little or no coverage in the northwest sector.

The Federal Communications Commission has opened a docket that periodically looks at ways to improve the FCC’s broadband and cellular maps. As part of that docket, Chairman Brendan Carr issued the following statement: "On the mobile side, 96.8 percent of locations have access to mobile 5G services of at least 7/1 Mbps." To put that into perspective, there are roughly 116.7 million total passings counted in the FCC maps, and the Chairman is saying that all except 3.7 million have good access to 5G.

SpaceX recently filed comments in the Federal Communications Commission’s open docket looking at the Universal Service Fund with a recommendation that the FCC should sunset the High-Cost Fund and eventually eliminate it. This is one of the four major components of USF, with an annual budget of $4.5 billion. SpaceX argues that Starlink has now solved rural broadband connectivity issues with ubiquitous broadband available throughout the country.

There is a glimmer of hope that internet service providers that won state grants that were funded from the Capital Project Fund can get an extension of six months to complete grant construction. The Capital Project Fund was created by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act and provided almost $10 billion to states and territories for making broadband-related grants. The program was administered by the Department of the Treasury, which gave block grants to States. Each State then made awards through State Broadband grant programs to ISPs.

I’m hearing an increasing number of stories from rural internet service providers and telephone companies about voice calls that are not completing to their customers. People place a call to customers on a rural network and give up when they don’t hear the phone ringing at the receiving end of the call in a reasonable amount of time. The industry term for this phenomenon is an abandoned call, which generally occurs when the caller assumes the call didn’t work.