Analysis

It’s been a year since Ookla first examined SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet, which launched its public beta in November 2020.

Annually, PC Magazine collects the data from a year’s worth of tests and crunch the numbers to see which internet service providers (ISPs) provide the throughput required to be called the fastest. With that data we can also see which cities, states, and countries have the fastest internet. Welcome to PC Magazine's national and regional results for 2022. The winners for 2022: Sonic and Verizon Fios. Sonic is no stranger to our winner's circle, having been here in 2019.

There are two interesting aspects of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that discuss how States might deal with parts of the country that have higher than average costs. The first provision says that in areas with high costs, a State should strongly consider using the lowest-cost technology that the NTIA has defined as capable of providing broadband speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps. The second goes further and says that a State can consider using a technology that is not considered capable of providing reliable broadband service.

How quickly has broadband deployment progressed? How fast have Census blocks moved from unserved to underserved (or served)? And is there any movement in the other direction? From served areas to underserved or unserved? For the whole United States, there were 6.76 million unserved housing units in the Dec 2019 Form 477 data. 950,000 of those housing units moved to underserved in the next update for June 2020. 402,000 became served.

The Federal Reserve recently raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percent, the biggest increase since 1994. The interest rate is still low by historical standards, with the fed rate now at 1.75 percent. But there is a lot of talk among economists that the fed rate will likely increase to as much as 3.5 percent in 2022 and possibly 4 percent in 2023.

The Federal Communications Commission is still considering using broadband labels that are supposed to explain broadband to customers. This sounds like a really good idea, but I wonder if it’s really going to be effective. Some of the items included on the FCC sample label are great. The most important fact is the price. It has become virtually impossible to find broadband prices for many internet service providers (ISPs). Many ISPs, including the largest ones, only show special pricing online that applies to new customers.

Broadband markets in the United States are by and large competitive today, and the trends indicate that competition is becoming more widespread. Federal Communications Commission data show that the share of US households that have access to multiple providers of fast broadband is already very large and is increasing rapidly.

Most of the published summaries of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant rules state that the BEAD program will provide 75 percent of funding, meaning a grant applicant must contribute 25 percent of the cost of the grant project. The reality is that the matching rules are more complicated than that simple rule. Matching funds can come directly from the grant applicant or can be provided by local and state governments using funding from the CARES or the ARPA programs.

The Arctic region has largely been left out of the broadband arena in the past due to the high cost of building last-mile broadband infrastructure. But this lack of broadband looks to be changing as multiple satellite companies are targeting the region as a good business opportunity. A number of satellite companies are also developing plans and partnerships around bringing their services to the Arctic region. Satellite broadband is an awesome solution for places where there are likely to be no alternatives.

I took part in a webinar last week for the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) that talked about the good, the bad, and the money issues with the upcoming Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants. At the end of the session, the last question asked, “How do you reconcile some of the impractical aspects of the BEAD grant processes with the reality of the market?” My response to the question was to get immediately get involved with your State broadband grant office.