Doug Dawson

AT&T and Verizon continue to aggressively eliminate staff. You have to wonder where the bottom will be in staffing levels. Both companies are currently actively striving to eliminate copper networks, with Verizon is much further along with this effort than AT&T. However, Verizon is slated to merge with Frontier sometime this year, which will bring new employees and a return of a lot of copper networks that Verizon had ditched to Frontier in the past.

The marketing arm of the broadband industry spends a lot of time convincing folks that the most important part of a broadband product is download speed. This makes sense if fiber of cable are competing in a market against slower technologies. But it seems like most advertising about speed is to convince existing customers to upgrade to faster speeds. While download speed is performance, the industry doesn’t spend much time talking about the other important aspects of broadband:

I know a number of counties and cities that have adopted dig once policies that require that every major road project includes burying empty conduit along new or reworked roads. A lot of them have found out that dig once is more complicated than they imagined. It’s a common misconception that dig once just means laying conduit in the ground while roads are dug up for repaving. It’s not that easy.

There is an interesting trend of internet service providers selling broadband products that are not always guaranteed to be at the same speed and quality as other customers. I've especially noticed this practice in recent years from big fixed wireless providers that sell home broadband using cellular spectrum. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all reserved the right to throttle customers any time that the network gets too busy. It’s easy to understand why cellular companies would throttle home broadband customer first—they are protecting their cellular customers.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) says he hopes to bring a resolution to the Senate to repeal the funding of Internet hot spots from the E-Rate Program, which is part of the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund. The original support for funding hot spots came from a July 2024 vote of the FCC under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel to allow the E-Rate program to pay for hot spots.

There is a new network tool that’s starting to be eased into networks that can significantly lower latency. The new standard L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput) was released in January 2023. Comcast has started to work L4S into their networks in some of its major markets. They report that the technology can cut load latency at least in half, in some cases bringing the latency under load to close to the ping latency. The real key to making this work is to have the largest content providers build L4S into their networks.

Small wireless carriers are asking the Federal Communications Commission to delay the implementation of the 5G Fund for Rural America. This new funding mechanism was approved by the FCC in August 2024 and is aimed at improving rural 5G coverage.

Some big internet service providers have big plans for more fiber expansion. AT&T, for example, plans to build 21 million fiber passings to meet a goal of 50 million passings by the end of 2029. I’ve followed AT&T’s expansion in various communities, and the company has built fiber over the last five years where the cost to do so was the lowest, so this expansion plan perplexes me. It seems to me that for AT&T to meet its target of 50 million passings it is now willing to spend more per passing than in the past.

The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will hear oral arguments on March 26 in the case of FCC v. Consumers’ Research regarding the constitutionality of the Universal Service Fund (USF). The Court will be reviewing a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that said that the USF is unconstitutional. That ruling conflicted with rulings from two other appeal courts that largely blessed the Federal Communications Commission and USF. The case that drove this to the Supreme Court was filed by Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit activist group.

The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund was the biggest attempt at the time to solve the rural broadband gap. The Federal Communications Commission had originally slated $20.4 billion to award to internet service providers in a reverse auction, meaning the ISP willing to take the smallest subsidy for a given area won the funding. Winners were to collect the funding over 10 years and had up to seven years to build the promised networks. The program ran into problems in several dramatic ways.