Joan Engebretson

The state of New York awarded nearly $212 million in funding to bring broadband to parts of the state where service is not available today or is only available at low speeds. The broadband funding awarded went to 26 companies, including cable companies, municipal networks, and cooperatives, as well as to traditional telecom companies including FairPoint Communications, Frontier Communications, and TDS Telecom.

Awards were made in phase two of the New NY Broadband Program. Funding recipients also must contribute some funding of their own, yielding total anticipated investment of more than $268 million. New NY Broadband is an ambitious program announced in 2015 that allocated $500 million to make broadband available throughout the state. Except in the most rural areas, operators are required to deploy service supporting speeds of at least 100 Mbps downstream. For the most rural areas, the minimum speed target is 25 Mbps downstream.

Some rural areas could be left without wireless service if the Federal Communications Commission approves the latest proposal for the Connect America Mobility Fund Phase II, cautions the Rural Wireless Association.

Some wireless carriers in high-cost rural areas currently receive funding through the traditional high-cost universal service fund, which also covers landline carriers, but moving forward the plan is to create separate funds for mobile and fixed service. RWA’s concerns come as the FCC gets set to vote soon on the mobility fund. The term “Phase II” has been applied to that fund to differentiate it from a previous one-time program that awarded funding to a relatively small number of wireless carriers through a reverse auction process to test the concept of using that type of auction to award funding. Mobility Fund Phase II is expected to direct Universal Service dollars to high-cost rural areas where no unsubsidized competitor offers service at speeds of at least 5 Mbps downstream/ 1 Mbps upstream, the RWA notes. Qualifying areas are expected to be included in a reverse auction that will award funding to the network operator that agrees to bring service at speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps for the lowest amount of support. One of RWA’s concerns is that it could take winning bidders a few years to build the new network and if the winner does not currently provide some type of service in the area, there is a danger that all current carriers could pull out before the new network is available.

Angie Communications, which calls itself the world’s largest telecom startup, has ambitious gigabit plans – including bringing Angie gigabit service to several markets that Google Fiber planned to serve but later halted and to 87 other markets. Angie has a unique business model that will use fiber that other network operators deployed to business buildings as the backhaul infrastructure for wireless gigabit services.

Back in December the company announced that it would offer service at speeds up to 10 Gbps to business customers in 10,000 buildings in 87 markets reached by fiber operators with whom Angie has business agreements. At that time, the company also noted that it has used that strategy in other parts of the world, where the fiber connectivity to the buildings also serves as backhaul infrastructure for gigabit wireless service.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Lifeline actions drew harsh responses from a range of stakeholders. For example, the Benton Foundation issued a press release with comments from one of its directors and from nine other organizations criticizing the decision. “The unexpected revocations will not only limit choices for Lifeline customers, but also have a chilling effect on participation of other potential broadband providers of Lifeline service,” said Amina Fazlullah, director of policy at the Benton Foundation. Organizations criticizing the decision in the press release included the Communications Workers of America, the Free Press, the NAACP, the National Consumer Law Center and others.

Despite increased interest in fixed 5G on the part of the nation’s largest carriers, it’s still not a great choice for rural areas, said Jeff Kohler, co-founder of rural broadband wireless network operator Rise Broadband.

In discussing fixed 5G vs. broadband wireless, Kohler said he sees the relatively short range of 5G wireless as a disadvantage in rural areas. “On the 5G front, what we’re seeing is a lot of high-frequency millimeter wave technology,” said Kohler. As Kohler noted, millimeter wave spectrum is “great for high capacity and high speed over very short distances.” In contrast, the broadband wireless technology that Rise is using can cover distances of up to five miles from a tower, Kohler said. “Using millimeter wave you would probably have to split [the signal] five to seven times using small antennas and repeaters to reach three to five miles,” he commented.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has established what he is calling the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) aimed at bridging the digital divide and accelerating the deployment of high-speed broadband services. One of the BDAC’s first tasks will be to draft a model code for broadband deployment that will address topics such as local franchising, zoning, permitting and rights-of-way regulations with the goal of eliminating or reducing red tape that can complicate deployments. If this sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because several other entities already have undertaken aspects of this task. These entities include but are not necessarily limited to:
Google Fiber
CTC Technology & Energy
Gig.U
Pew Center on the States
Next Century Cities

Hopefully the BDAC will avoid re-inventing the wheel by reviewing these and other existing studies as part of the process of developing the model code. Also on tap for the BDAC will be addressing further reforms to the FCC’s pole attachment rules; identifying unreasonable regulatory barriers to broadband deployment and ways to encourage local governments to adopt deployment-friendly policies; and other reforms within the scope of the commission’s authority, according to a press release about the BDAC issued today.

TDS Telecom will be able to improve broadband service to a majority of the company’s wireline locations in the US thanks to a 10-year $75 million annual cash infusion from the Federal Communications Commission high-cost universal service program. TDS is one of about 200 rural rate-of-return carriers that have committed to building out broadband service at specific speeds to a specific number of locations in exchange for receiving the funding based on the alternative Connect America model (A-CAM). TDS A-CAM broadband support will enable the company to upgrade service to nearly 160,000 homes in 25 states.

The majority of rural rate of return carriers that initially opted to receive broadband support based on the Federal Communications Commission alternative Connect America model (A-CAM) have reconfirmed those plans based on revised A-CAM broadband support offers. Those offers were reduced when demand for the A-CAM program was greater than expected. Although the commission raised the budget for the program, the additional funding was not sufficient to cover a total funding gap of $1.6 billion over 10 years. A total of 182 carriers accepted a total of 217 revised A-CAM broadband support offers, the FCC said Jan 24.

The total number of carriers that received revised offers was 191, and the total number of offers that were revised was 228. (Some carriers received more than one offer because they operate in more than one state and offers were made on a state-by-state basis.) Forty-five initial A-CAM offers made to 35 carriers were for less money than the carriers would have received by staying on the traditional program and therefore were not revised. Instead those carriers will receive the total amount of A-CAM funding they initially were offered.

Broadband wireless provider Rise Broadband issued a press release today noting that it had expanded its network in 10 market areas in conjunction with the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund (CAF) program. Rise apparently is referring to new buildouts supported, at least in part, by the funding that the company received through the rural broadband experiment (RBE) program, part of the overall CAF program for broadband expansion in rural markets. RBE was a one-time $100 million element of the CAF program that was designed to bring broadband to unserved areas but also to gain market information to help in shaping the reverse auction planned for the CAF program. Rise won $16.9 million in this iteration of the CAF program for broadband expansion in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Texas — and apparently is using the funding to deploy broadband wireless service using long-term evolution (LTE) technology supporting speeds up to 50 Mbps.

With the 600 MHz auction results expected soon, it’s becoming increasingly clear that those results are likely to be disappointing. More and more industry observers are predicting that prices will be considerably lower than many initially expected — and lower they were in the 2015 AWS-3 auction, the most recent major spectrum auction. The Moffett Nathanson researchers pose several potential explanations for why the 600 MHz auction results appear poised to be considerably lower than the AWS-3 results. One idea relates to the value of lower-frequency vs. higher-frequency spectrum in today’s market. It wasn’t long ago that many industry observers were referring to lower-frequency spectrum as “lakefront property” because of its excellent propagation characteristics, which enable a carrier to cover a large area with a relatively small number of cellsites – albeit with capacity constraints. At the time 600 MHz auction results were first forecast, 5G appeared to be a more distant possibility than it has proven to be. Now that carriers are talking about beginning 5G deployments in 2017, I would expect to see much more intense competition for ultra-high-frequency spectrum best suited for 5G – including spectrum in the 28 GHz, 37 GHz, 39 GHz and possibly 12 GHz bands.