Joan Engebretson

Charter President and CEO Chris Winfrey hopes to complete the company's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF)-funded rural broadband deployment ahead of time. Charter made broadband available to 200,000 new rural locations in 2022, according to Winfrey. The Charter rural take rate for “passings open at least six months” is “ahead of expectations at about 40%,” he said. Charter was one of the largest winners in the RDOF rural broadband program.

The Federal Communications Commission is encouraging state and local governments and broadband providers to file bulk challenges to the commission’s broadband serviceable location database by March 15, 2023.

AT&T expects to see Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding flow from the federal government to the states and expects the “more aggressive” states to award some of that funding to broadband projects before the end of 2023, said AT&T CEO John Stankey. Citing the 80/20 rule, Stankey said, “The bigger states that are going to have the bulk of the funding are pretty zoned in on this and are moving pretty aggressively to get the process underway." Smaller states, he said, may “take a little bit longer to get their act together” and may be waiting to see what the more agg

Engineering firm Dewberry Alaska—in collaboration with mapping company Ecopia AI, Rasmuson Foundation, and the State of Alaska—is working on a broadband map based on what Ecopia AI is calling “an accurate, up-to-date and complete map of every building, in both rural and urban areas, in the state.” Ecopia AI’s specialty is applying artificial intelligence (AI) to satellite imagery to identify buildings.

January 13, 2023 was the date set by National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for challenges to be made to the National Broadband Map, which will be used to determine how much money goes to each state in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband funding program.

Comcast is targeting “less than $200” per location to upgrade its network to support higher and more symmetrical broadband speeds, but Charter is only targeting $100 per location with the same goal, note financial analysts from MoffettNathanson. The analysts delved into the differences between what the two companies are planning and speculated about the difference in cost estimates. The number of locations targeted for the two companies are similar – 50 million for Comcast and 55 million for Charter. The key differences between the anticipated costs, according to MoffettNathanson:

More than 20 million businesses have a landline phone as their main business number. Three-quarters of people over the age of 75 rely on a landline phone. And one-third of US households have a landline phone.

JAB Broadband, also known as Rise Broadband, is a fixed wireless provider with a geographical footprint that reaches about 5.4% of the US population. JAB is one of just 11 US broadband providers that   cover 5% or more of the population. Its presence on the list underscores the importance of fixed wireless beyond the metro areas, which are the primary markets for Verizon and T-Mobile. Many of the nation's 2,201 fixed broadband providers are small fixed wireless providers, some serving just a handful of customers. But JAB/Rise has been acting as a consolidator in that market.

Frontier has received $440 million in government grants for broadband deployments, said the company’s Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Scott Beasley. Most of that money came from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). Frontier was one of the top 10 winning bidders in the RDOF auction, which awarded funding to the company that committed to deploying service to an area for the lowest level of support.

Comcast said that it successfully completed a trial of 10G and full duplex DOCSIS 4.0 technology delivering symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds on a live connection. The company said it will continue to trial the technology “over the next several months in preparation for offering 10G-enabled services to customers in the second half of 2023.” The cable industry uses the term “10G” for a range of technology advances aimed at enhancing internet connectivity. Full duplex DOCSIS 4.0 is one of those advances.