Telecommunication

The last two years have been pivotal ones for the future of high-speed internet access in Minnesota. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and exacerbated the lack of broadband in many parts of the state as people shifted to remote work and school. Congress poured unprecedented amounts of money into subsidizing construction of new infrastructure like fiber-optic cables in Minnesota and across the country.

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.

The federal government is slated to pump a record amount of funding into projects to expand Internet access and affordability.

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?

Infrastructure is a hot topic these days as Congress considers ways to make multi-trillion dollar investments in areas of disrepair or to fund new projects. A critical infrastructure component has been excluded from the discussion: Telephone poles. These poles, along with rights-of-way, are essential to bringing high-speed broadband to unserved Americans and offering new choices. Yet, current federal, state, and local policies are not enough to prod greater access to poles and rights-of-way by providers building broadband in unserved communities.

Cherokee County (SC) and Charter Communications have announced a public-private partnership that over the next two years is set to expand high-speed internet access countywide. More significantly this could be a model for expanding rural broadband access across the United States. Initial dollars for the ambitious project will come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), a $20.4 billion fund established by the Federal Communications Commission to bring high speed fixed broadband service to rural homes and small businesses that lack it.

Internet service providers (ISPs) are telling the Federal Communications Commission not to require ISPs to allow broadband subsidy recipients to apply those subsidies to grandfathered plans, arguing that it would be burdensome and confusing, though they also said they should be free to apply the subsidies to select grandfathered plans.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocates $65 billion to support various broadband initiatives. Keller & Heckman previously examined the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (“BEAD”) Program and the $1 Billion Middle Mile Grant Program, each of which focuses on deploying broadband networks to unserved and underserved areas.

The slowdown in cable broadband subscriber additions may be even slower than anticipated after executives at two of the top three publicly traded cable companies -- Comcast and Altice USA -- hinted that customer growth is trending at an even more decelerated pace than expected. Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson said he expected to end 2021 with 1.3 million additional broadband subscribers.