Doug Dawson
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AI Impact on Power and Broadband
AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. The big question that nobody seems to be able to answer is if AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer. Corporate AI centers will use lots of energy, data, and broadband. The impact on home broadband is harder to predict.
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Transmission Lines and Fiber
There is an unprecedented boom of construction for electric transmission lines. These are the giant towers that are used to carry electricity for long distances. The boom was kick-started in the last few years as transmission lines have been built to support solar farms, wind farms, and some new nuclear power plants. But the boom went into overdrive by the sudden explosion of new data centers being created to support AI. The International Energy Agency predicts that in the U.S.
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Broadband and Left-Behind Counties
An interesting article by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) documents an economic rebound in left-behind counties. Economists, researchers, and politicians have used the term left-behind counties to denote the parts of the country that have experienced economic stagnation or decline compared to the national average.
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What’s Your Broadband Price?
I read an interesting article in The Lever titled, Everybody Has a Price – And Corporations Know Yours. The article discusses how the massive data collection of our personal shopping and browsing habits, along with machine learning algorithms, has allowed marketing firms to paint an individual profile of everybody.
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Can Cellphones Capture the Broadband Market?
Linda Hardesty asked, “What if, in ten years, young people don’t subscribe to fixed broadband at all?” Her story is based on a U.K. research group that predicts that within ten years there will be a lot of young people who will never have subscribed to a landline broadband product. Hardesty asks if the same might be true for the U.S. It’s not an obvious answer.
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Colorado Opens MDU Access
The State of Colorado has entered the fray by providing better access to broadband for those living in multi-dwelling units (MDUs). Colorado enacted HB 24-1334 which takes an aggressive position on granting internet service providers (ISPs) access to MDUs. The law says that an MDU building owner can’t deny access to an ISP that wants to install broadband infrastructure. I call this an aggressive law because it gives a building owner 60 days to respond to a request by an ISP to build broadband infrastructure.
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The 2024 AT&T Outage
On February 22 AT&T had a massive cellular outage. Ookla’s service Downtector said it recorded over 1.8 million reports of customer problems during the outage event, making this the most widespread outage since a big T-Mobile outage in June 2020. The biggest immediate concern is always 911 and emergency services. Many local 911 centers issued an alert about the problem and warned people to use alternate ways to reach 911.
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Urban Digital Divide Efforts
NATOA, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) recently made Community Broadband and Digital Equity Awards to three communities and recognized the strides the cities have made in tackling the digital divide.
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Bottlenecks for BEAD Construction
It’s now clear that State Broadband Offices are going to put a lot of pressure on Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) winners to spend grant awards and build networks as quickly as possible. Internet service providers (ISP) generally have the same goal, because getting customers quickly is the best way to make sure an ISP can pay for the network. However, there are numerous reasons why BEAD fiber construction might be delayed:
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Regulatory Costs of Fiber Construction
There are a lot of regulations other than the ones created by or enforced by the Federal Communications Council. Anybody who builds fiber networks can describe the litany of state and local regulations involved in constructing fiber. Following are some of the primary kinds of such regulations—and there are others in some places: