Fierce

The most rural parts of Mississippi are home to expansive agricultural lands with low residential density and until recent years, little incentive for broadband providers to build broadband infrastructure. Homes in the Mississippi Delta—the state’s most untenanted area—have typically used satellite service to make do, according to Sally Doty, a former state senator who was appointed as Director of the new Broadband Expansion and Accessibility of Mississippi (BEAM) office in 2022. As the federal government’s Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding nears deployment, the BEAM of

Private equity (PE) money has been flooding into the broadband market over the past two years. Everywhere you look, someone has a PE partner of some kind.

AT&T CEO John Stankey specified the main factors that AT&T considers for a fiber build. For about three years, AT&T has been clearly communicating its two main focuses—5G and fiber. In terms of fiber, it set a goal to pass 30 million locations with fiber by 2025. It closed 2022 with a total of 24 million passings. Stankey said the fiber build and the consumer response to it have been going well.

The prospect of billions of dollars flowing to states from the Broadband Equity Access & Deployment (BEAD) program is causing private equity companies to also flood the market with investment funds for fiber. On a panel at the recent Connect(X) conference in New Orleans (LA), panelists were asked if private equity companies will compete for BEAD funds or if they will add to the overall investment in fiber.

Viasat will likely be able to move forward with its acquisition of Inmarsat after the Federal Communications Commission signed off on the deal. The transaction was first agreed upon by California-based Viasat and London-based Inmarsat more than 18 months ago, but has been deferred by review processes in both the U.S. and U.K.

The federal government has been trumpeting its efforts to expand access to high-speed internet service for underserved areas across the US, namely through $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding. But in BEAD’s shadow stands another obstacle to closing the digital divide: a massive shortage of fiber technicians. Flume Internet CEO Prashanth Vijay put a salient reason for that shortage simply enough. “There's just not much enthusiasm to go and like… dig a trench,” he told Fierce Telecom.

In the first quarter of 2023 subscribers on usage-based broadband (UBB) plans for the first time reached and marginally surpassed consumption parity with flat-rate broadband (FRB) plan consumers, according to an OpenVault Broadband Insights (OVBI) report. Operators have long pushed for this to happen, but now they must face the network health and congestion challenges that come hand-in-hand with UBB consumption growth. The OVBI report said that significantly higher rates of usage growth among UBB subscribers resulted in average (562.7 GB) and median (382.0 GB) monthly consumption — slightly