Doug Dawson

The Kansas legislature recently enacted HB 2061, which declared that broadband is critical infrastructure. Specifically, the new law says that it is a felony to trespass or damage aboveground and belowground lines, cables, and wires used for telecommunications or video services. When Governor Laura Kelly signed the bill, she said it was critical that all Kansans have access to reliable high-speed internet.

Anybody who was using computers before 2000 can describe a broadband journey of how they communicated over the years. That journey mostly describes the broadband choices we each had in our neighborhood. I've had a lot of broadband products over the years, but I think the 1 Mbps DSL modem from Verizon was my favorite. It was 30 times faster than dial-up and, for the first time, I felt freed from the limits of the connection technology. At the time, that was enough speed to do anything I wanted. I’m also still nostalgic about the beeps and boops of my first modem.

The Federal Communications Commission received an interesting petition in March from the owner of low-power TV stations. HC2, which owns 14 percent of the 1,800 low-power stations in the country, asked the FCC to allow the stations to cease the requirement to provide at least one free traditional broadcast signal. Instead, HC2 wants to repurpose the TV spectrum to use 5G technology to broadcast signals to 5G-enabled devices. TV delivered straight to cell phones would be an interesting product.

Most internet service providers that build aerial fiber run into situations where a lot of poles are in bad shape that must be replaced. This adds both cost and time to a fiber construction project since the pole replacement process can be expensive and slow. There are a lot of reasons why wooden poles go bad over time:

There was big news in the long-haul fiber business recently when Zayo announced it will be acquiring the fiber assets of Crown Castle and adding 90,000 miles of fiber to its network.  The acquisition will also Zayo’s access to major buildings to 70,000. And it looks like there may be other big news on the horizon. Some of what may be coming soon:

I saw several articles voicing concern about sabotage when two different undersea fiber operators, C-Lion and BCS East-West Interlink, reported breaks in fiber in the Baltic Sea in the same week. There was speculation that Russia was cutting fibers to try to disrupt European broadband. It was eventually reported that the cuts looked like accidents, but conspiracy theorists still like the sabotage story better.

The Federal Communications Commission voted in 2024 to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of the country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G.

Anybody who lives in an urban or suburban area know that cell coverage is not the same everywhere. There are neighborhoods with great cell coverage, neighborhoods with so-so  coverage, and neighborhood with little or no coverage. Nobody understands this better than first responders and city employees who work in all parts of a city. The good news is there is a way for cities to tackle the cellular coverage issue. My consulting firm recently helped a city in a major urban area that knew it had poor cell coverage.

I keep seeing articles or podcasts speculating on what the new administration and Congress might change in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment grant program. This all seems like speculation to me since only a few people really know what might happen, and I don’t think they are the ones talking. There is one thing that definitely has occurred. A large chunk of the industry that was expecting to participate in BEAD is largely on hold—and feeling the stress. That group includes the many internet service providers that have filed or plan to file BEAD applications.

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.