Joan Engebretson

5G wireless technology could be an important technology for mid-sized and rural markets, as news about US Cellular 5G testing illustrates.

The company said it had collaborated with Nokia to test 5G and demonstrate 5G in a fixed wireless configuration. US Cellular and Nokia plan additional collaborative work and are focusing on indoor and outdoor environments using spectrum in the 28 GHz band. The companies used the spectrum through an experimental license from the Federal Communications Commission. At least one other tier two broadband provider – C Spire – also has tested 5G in a fixed configuration. That testing also used Nokia equipment in the 28 GHz band. The 28 GHz band is one of several that the FCC hopes to make available for 5G use. And it is the band that the FCC has proposed auctioning on a county by county basis – a plan that could make it economically feasible for small carriers to acquire spectrum whenever a 5G auction is held.

AT&T revealed that it is trialing a 100 Mbps competitive fixed wireless broadband service to “multiple” apartment complexes in Minneapolis, a CenturyLink market. The AT&T broadband wireless offering is particularly noteworthy in that it is being offered outside the company’s traditional local service territory in competition with other providers for fixed broadband – and according to a press release, the company hopes to expand the offering to other out-of-footprint markets. The AT&T broadband wireless offering initially will support speeds up to 100 Mbps per customer using millimeter wave spectrum in a point-to-point configuration. But the company said it plans to make faster speeds available – “likely a speed tier of 500 Mbps” – in the trial properties. Additional out-of-footprint broadband wireless service plans will depend on the success of the Minneapolis trial, AT&T said. Other markets under consideration for possible expansion include but are not limited to Boston, Denver, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Seattle and Washington D.C.

AT&T asked the Federal Communications Commission to address what it called “nefarious” inter-carrier compensation (ICC) practices including unusually high tandem switching and transport access charges and non-competitive 800-number database dips.

AT&T noted that such practices are counter-productive to FCC efforts to phase out the traditional approach toward inter-carrier compensation in favor of a “bill-and-keep” approach in which carriers will pay few, if any, charges to one another for exchanging voice traffic. The unusually high tandem switching and transport access charges come into play for competitive local exchange carriers who terminate calls to companies engaged in access stimulation, also known as “traffic pumpers.” The traffic pumpers traditionally have included companies offering services such as free or low-cost conferencing and chat lines that receive a high volume of calls. Such companies traditionally have chosen local carriers that charge other carriers large fees for terminating calls. The benefit for the traffic pumpers is that they traditionally have received a portion of ICC revenues from their local carriers.

News of five new municipal gigabit networks is a reminder that the recent municipal appeals court decision will have little or no impact in some states or for certain municipal network operators.

A recent decision by the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals was bad news in states that had passed legislation limiting publicly-owned municipal broadband networks because it upheld the states’ authority to make such laws. Some pundits worried that the court ruling may slow down municipal broadband investment and launches, but specifics vary by state.

Five new municipal gigabit networks are now underway or operational in Colorado, Iowa, and Tennessee, according to an announcement from Calix, whose equipment will be used in all of the deployments:

1. A Rio Blanco County (CO) fiber network will use an open access model with multiple retail service providers. More rural areas will get service via a wireless solution.
2. Independence Light and Power, Telecommunications in Independence (IA) is upgrading an existing HFC network, which in addition to supporting voice, video and data services will also support managed Wi-Fi.
3. A Bellevue (IA) deployment will support high-speed broadband and video services.
4. In Osage (IA) Osage Municipal Utilities is replacing an HFC network with GPON to support high-speed broadband and voice.
5. Columbia Power and Water Systems in Columbia and Spring Hill (TN) is migrating from a DOCSIS network to a fiber network that will support triple-play services.

The appeals court decision likely upheld a Tennessee law saying municipal power companies could not expand beyond the territory they serve for power – something power company EPB wanted to do outside Chattanooga. But Columbia Power and Water Systems apparently is building in its municipal service footprint or may have been grandfathered in because of its legacy DOCSIS network.

The impact of the impending Federal Communications Commission business data services (BDS) decision could be critical for rural wireless carriers, argued Raul Katz, president of telecommunication policy consulting firm Telecom Advisory Services, LLC, at a Washington DC event. The BDS decision will impact carriers’ ability to provide sufficient network capacity and to deploy next-generation 5G wireless services, said Katz, who based his remarks on a Telecom Advisory Services study on the impact of rural wireless carrier backhaul costs on network investment.

The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to impose price controls on BDS providers in areas that the commission previously deemed to be competitive, but which BDS purchasers say are not competitive. BDS purchasers include business and government users of data services, including schools and libraries, as well as carriers and others. The FCC business data services decision could call for decreasing BDS pricing in markets where costs have increased since the markets were deregulated. Backhaul costs will become even more critical for 5G, which will use high-frequency spectrum that can support higher bandwidth but less range in comparison with today’s technology. In surveying rural wireless carriers for the Telecom Advisory Services study, Katz noted that “every carrier said 5G is nowhere near our short-term or long-term plans because backhaul is so expensive."

An Federal Communications Commission order denies petitions from three entities that were provisionally awarded funding in the FCC Rural Broadband Experiment program because the awardees were unable to obtain satisfactory letters of credit — a decision that does not bode well for other provisional awardees that have experienced difficulties obtaining letters of credit meeting the FCC’s strict requirements. T

he Rural Broadband Experiments program had a one-time budget of $100 million to cover some of the costs of bringing broadband to rural areas where broadband is not available today or is available only at low speeds. The program was crafted to gain information to help the FCC establish rules for the Connect America Fund reverse auction, which will award a considerably larger amount of funding to help cover the cost of bringing broadband to more unserved areas.

On August 11, the Federal Communications Commission released a preliminary list of census blocks eligible for the Connect America Fund auction. That auction will award funding to help cover the cost of bringing service to areas that cannot get broadband today or can only get low-speed broadband. The list also includes an estimate of the maximum amount of funding that will be available for each census block based on an FCC-developed cost model.

The Connect America Fund auction will use a competitive bidding process to award funding, with funding for a group of census blocks or census tracts going to the service provider that offers to provide service for the lowest level of support. The preliminary list is based on the most recent data collected from Form 477 as of June 30, 2015. All broadband service providers are required to file Form 477, which collects data about where service is available at various speeds. Service providers have until the end of this month to advise the commission if they have deployed broadband at speeds of 10 Mbps downstream/ 1 Mbps upstream in any of the target census blocks since the Form 477 data was collected. Based on this data, the FCC will eliminate some locations from the Connect America Fund auction target list. In order to be eliminated, the newly served locations also must have a minimum usage allowance of 150 gigabytes at a price meeting the commission’s current reasonable comparability benchmark and must have a latency not exceeding 100 ms.

CenturyLink has set a goal of bringing broadband service supporting speeds of at least 40 Mbps to 50% of its base by the end of 2018, said Tony Davis, head of investor relations for CenturyLink. Although CenturyLink has done some fiber-to-the-home deployments to support speeds as high as 1 Gbps, CenturyLink broadband plans will rely largely on upgrading existing copper loops using a mixture of bonding and vectoring, depending on a customer’s distance from a fiber connection. The company also expects to use G.fast technology to serve multi-dwelling units. Meeting its goals will require CenturyLink to spend a higher percentage of its budget on the network than in the past. To free up the funding, the company expects to take a “capital-light” approach toward investment in the cloud, IT services and managed hosting, Davis said. The company also is looking at selling some of its data centers – an increasingly common move among the larger telcos – but if it were to do so, it would lease space from the new owner to support its existing hosting business, according to Davis.

AT&T plans to deploy fixed wireless technology to meet Connect America Fund broadband deployment requirements, said AT&T President of Technology Operations Bill Smith.

The company will use the technology in areas where it is “uneconomical to build wireline” said Smith of AT&T fixed wireless plans in a question and answer session at Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum. The AT&T fixed wireless deployments apparently will use licensed spectrum, as Smith noted that the company typically buys spectrum covering geographic areas that include rural areas and that in rural areas, the spectrum is “somewhat underutilized.” Smith expects the AT&T fixed wireless service to support speeds of 10 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream. That’s the minimum speed that Connect America Fund dollars will support. There are “few applications that can’t be supported,” at those speeds, Smith said.

Although Verizon to date has declined to accept funding through the Connect America Fund (CAF) program to bring broadband to unserved parts of its local service territory, the company may be having a change of heart. Comments filed by Verizon with the Federal Communications Commission suggest the carrier may be interested in bidding in the CAF reverse auction, which will award funding for areas where an incumbent price cap carrier declined funding. Although the FCC is hoping to fund some CAF deployments at gigabit speeds, Verizon cites some sobering data suggesting that should be a relatively limited option. Verizon notes that as many as 750,000 locations could be eligible for the CAF reverse auction. Of those, about 450,000 are in high-cost areas of price cap territories where the incumbent declined funding. The other 300,000 are “extremely high cost” locations scattered across all price cap territories.

According to Verizon, the FCC cost model shows that subsidies of well over $600 million per year would be required to bring broadband to all 750,000 locations, but the budget for the CAF reverse auction is only $215 million annually. With this in mind, Verizon CAF auction ideas include prioritizing bids for baseline service above those for above-baseline and gigabit service in order to “maximize the number of homes and businesses that obtain at least the baseline level of broadband from the auction.” In some cases, high-latency options such as satellite broadband may be less costly to deliver than lower-latency terrestrial wired or wireless options. But Verizon stops short of asking the FCC to stretch funding by prioritizing high-latency services. Instead, the carrier argues that all terrestrial options should be prioritized over high-latency options. “End users in competitive bidding-supported areas should not be relegated to lesser services,” Verizon argues.