Doug Dawson

We’re finally starting to gain a picture of how the big telecommunication companies (telecos) are preparing to leverage the upcoming Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grants. Chiefly, large telecos all say they will be building rural fiber with grant funding – which is what rural America most desires. But a lot of rural folks blame the big telcos for the current miserable state of rural broadband. There are several big fears that I hear voiced about the big telcos winning the grant funding.

It seemed like a really big deal when the ReConnect program and the new Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants upped the amount of federal grants to 75% of funding. But, I still see a lot of situations where a 75% grant is not enough assistance to create a viable ongoing business plan. It is the interplay of many variables that determine the percentage of grant funding that is needed for any particular broadband provider in a given market.

In the first quarter of 2022, the big cable companies added 482,000 customers while telecommunications companies (telecos) added over 50,000 customers. In what is a surprise to the industry, that growth has disappeared in the second quarter, and all of the big broadband providers collectively lost almost 150,000 customers.

The recently enacted CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is providing a lot of funding to bring more chip manufacturing back to the US. This funding fills a big hole in the US supply chain. Specifically, the CHIPS legislation: Appropriates $1.5 billion for the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, to spur movement towards open-architecture, software-based wireless technologies, funding innovative, ‘leap-ahead’ technologies in the US mobile broadband market.

In the open-access network model, an entity owns a fiber network and allows other broadband providers to use the network to compete for customers.

When the Federal Communications Commission first adopted the new broadband data collection and mapping rules, the FCC had a requirement that broadband providers must get FCC mapping data certified by a professional engineer or by a corporate officer that meets specific qualifications to make the certification. The genesis of this ruling was fairly clear – the FCC has taken a lot of flak about broadband providers that have been submitting clearly inaccurate data about broadband coverage. To some degree, this was the FCC’s fault because the agency never reviewed what broadband providers submi

I think there are a lot of broadband providers that are not participating in the Federal Communications Commission's data collection effort that the industry refers to as the broadband maps. I often run across small regional wireless service providers (WISPs) and occasionally across fiber overbuilders that are not listed in the database. These broadband providers generally have a website that lists broadband rates and coverage areas – but for whatever reason, these broadband providers do not participate in the FCC mapping database. My guess in most cases is that these small broadband provid

I regularly run across articles that ask which major internet service provider (ISP) is the fastest. Most of these articles get their speed data from Ookla, which publishes comparative median broadband speeds for mobile and landline ISPs each quarter, like in this report for the second quarter of 2022. Americans love a horse race – we like to rank things, and articles that rank ISPs grab readers. But we have to take articles based upon the Ookla rankings with a grain of salt.

It’s big news that both Comcast and Charter lost broadband customers in the second quarter of 2022. Both companies have steadily gained customers every quarter over the last decade. Comcast blames the customer loss on two factors.

Recent Ookla analysis has revealed some interesting trends in mobile broadband usage that I think have implications for internet service providers (ISPs). The percentage of consumers who describe themselves as always online grew from 30 percent to 69 percent during the pandemic, and Ookla delves into some of the reasons why. By 2021, users who identified as always online were twice as likely to have reported an issue to customer service. About one-third of cellular customers are unhappy with customer service.