One of the trends that is a concern for ISPs is plans by State Broadband Offices to force BEAD winners to charge low rates for broadband. I understand some of the rationale behind these attempts. One argument for lowering rates is that the government is paying a big portion of the cost of building the broadband networks, and it ought to be able to extract concessions from the ISPs for taking the grant funding. That sounds like a reasonable argument until you take a harder look at the places where BEAD funding is going to be used. In most places, BEAD will be used for the most sparsely populate ..read more

The NTIA recently announced $811 million in funding for digital equity that is available for States and Territories. This round of funding is part of the $1.44 billion Digital Equity Capacity Grant program of money that will go to States to administer digital equity grant programs. $60 million of this fund was allocated to States in 2022 for planning purposes. The NTIA has taken so long to deploy these funds that these disbursements represent the grant funding allocated for the law for years 2022 through 2024. There will be a few more future years of grant funding. The total funding for digita ..read more

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel made it clear recently that the FCC is not willing to tackle funding for the ACP plan that is expiring in May. She estimated that the FCC would have to add something like $9 to every broadband bill in the country to fund the ACP plan. But there is another alternative. States could pick up the ACP funding just for their state. States will have the authority to do this after the FCC approves the reinstitution of Title II authority this month. That authority would give the FCC the authority to create the fee needed to fund the ACP through the FCC Universal Servi ..read more

Leichtman Research Group recently released the cable customer counts for the largest providers of traditional cable service at the end of 2023. LRG compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders, except for Cox and Mediacom – they now combine an estimate for both companies. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all traditional U.S. cable customers. I suspect there are regular blog readers who wonder why I post these statistics every quarter. There are several reasons. I find it fascinating to watch the slow train wreck of the implosion of the ca ..read more

A lot of folks have been pleading with the FCC to pick up the tab to continue the the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). Folks are assuming that the FCC has the ability to take on the ACP program inside the Universal Service Fund. To make that work, the FCC would have to apply a monthly assessment against all broadband users – something the FCC should have the authority to do if it votes to reinstate Title II authority over broadband at its April meeting. What might it look like for the FCC to absorb the dying ACP program? FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told Congress that rolling the A ..read more

The FCC will vote on reimposing Title II authority over broadband at its April 25 meeting this month. It seems likely that the proposal will pass since three Commissioners have already expressed support for the idea. The proposed order is 434 pages long and includes 2,921 footnotes. Hopefully this summary will suffice for anybody but full regulatory nerds like me. The press is largely going to label this as the FCC putting net neutrality back in place. However, net neutrality is only a small portion of the regulatory changes that accompany reimposing Title II authority over broadband. The nati ..read more

One of the steps in the BEAD grant program that isn’t being talked about is the contract that an ISP must sign with a broadband office before officially being awarded a grant. While the whole industry has been focused on creating a good grant application, the grant contract is the most important document in the grant process because it specifically defines what a grant winner must do to fulfill the grant and how they will be reimbursed. The grant contract is going to define a lot of important things: This is the document that will define the line of credit that must be provided. If an ISP has ..read more

The FCC’s Broadband Labels were implemented by ISPs with more than 100,000 customers on or before April 10. Not surprisingly, many ISPs waited until the last day. I think the FCC hoped that the labels would create “clear, easy-to-understand, and accurate information about the cost and performance of high-speed internet services.” I looked at a lot of the labels this past week. As you might expect, the actual labels often fall far short of the FCC’s goal. I’m not going to use this single blog to try to rate and rank the various labels but will highlight a few of the things I found. The first ob ..read more

The earlier blogs in this series looked at the growing demand for broadband speeds and broadband usage. I then went on to look at what the likely future demand might mean for last-mile and middle-mile networks. There were some interesting conclusions included in the four blogs: The demand for broadband speed grew at a rate of 21% per year since 1999 when the best broadband available to homes was 1 Mbps from DSL or cable modem. If that rate of growth holds up for the next 25 years, the definition of download broadband in 2049 will be 10-gigabits. That may sound outlandish, but 25 years is a lo ..read more

The earlier blogs in this week’s series looked at the increased demand over time for broadband speed and usage and concluded that the continued growth of broadband demand will ultimately put great stress on last-mile networks – to the point where, eventually, fiber becomes the only viable broadband technology. But what about middle-mile fiber routes? Middle-mile networks have gotten faster over time. In the 1990s, when the predominant last-mile technology was dial-up Internet, the predominant middle-mile technology was a DS3, which delivers 45 Mbps. As millions of people started using broadban ..read more