Linda Hardesty

Dish Network has resolved its dispute with T-Mobile over the shut-down of T-Mobile’s 3G CDMA network. The parties have agreed that T-Mobile’s CDMA network will officially shut down on March 31—the same date that T-Mobile has been sticking to in the fight between the two carriers. The two carriers are working together to communicate to Boost customers who are still on the CDMA network and to help them obtain new handsets. In the short-term Dish expects some continued churn of Boost Mobile customers. 

Analysts at Evercore Research, led by Vijay Jayant, conducted proprietary research covering a random sample of 10,000 residential addresses across the US to determine the availability of Verizon’s and T-Mobile’s home internet services. They found that 39 percent of total households have T-Mobile Home Internet fixed wireless access (FWA) service available, while 15 percent of households have access to Verizon’s FWA product. The addresses in Evercore’s research were proportionately sampled by state and chosen to match US population distribution among urban, suburban and rural areas.

Both T-Mobile and Verizon have made quite a big deal about their new fixed wireless access (FWA) offerings. They’re tapping unused capacity on their nationwide wireless networks to offer FWA for home broadband. These offerings will help to provide broadband in underserved areas, and they also give T-Mobile and Verizon a means to steal share from wired telco and cable providers.

T-Mobile’s 2.5 GHz spectrum is not as locked down as most people might think it is. It turns out T-Mobile leases, but does not own, much of its 2.5 GHz spectrum. And at least one private investment firm is reaching out to the owners of the spectrum and making offers to buy it. T-Mobile is always bragging about its “layer-cake” spectrum position with a good combination of low-band, mid-band and high-band spectrum. It’s particularly prone to boast about its mid-band 2.5 GHz spectrum, which it inherited from Sprint.

As of October 2021, the majority of people in AT&T’s 21-state footprint were not aware of the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program. According to a survey conducted by Recon Analytics on behalf of AT&T, 55% of consumers were not aware of the EBB program. Recon Analytics used Qualtrics to conduct the online survey, which garnered more than 10,000 respondents. Only 12% of respondents were aware of the program and had applied for EBB benefits.

The City of Amarillo (TX) is working with Airspan to set up a $4 million fixed wireless access (FWA) network to help connect school kids to the internet. The 4G FWA network, which has achieved symmetrical speeds of 100 Mbps, is being deployed to the homes of children who do not have internet access. And of course, this will benefit others who live in those households as well. Based on the urgency of serving students, the goal is to have 50 square miles covered by the end of the 2021-2022 school year.

The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) and NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association plan to publish a playbook to assist state governments as they receive broadband funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The $42.5 billion that is dedicated to broadband will flow through a new program called Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD).

Fiber access provider Adtran is partnering with FiberRise and KGPCo to help electric cooperatives, investor-owned utilities and public power companies to build fiber broadband networks.

President and CEO of The Permitting Institute Alex Herrgott laid out a discouraging amount of challenges to the permitting process in order to lay fiber in unserved areas. Herrgott said organizations that embark on a fiber deployment project to unserved areas may have to interact with multiple federal, state and local agencies, none of whom coordinate together, and none of whom are at all concerned about the time-value-of-money for the company that has capital on the line.

Corning isn’t specifying how long its lead times are for its fiber products, but Mike Bell, senior vice president and general manager of Corning Optical Communications, stated, “Our normal lead time, what we would prefer our lead time to be, is a month. It’s much longer than that right now.” Bell said, “I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and I’ve never seen demand on the scale we’re seeing now.