Reporting

Comcast and the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) launched a Digital Navigator program that will utilize trained students to get more Baltimore-area residents and CCBC students connected to the internet at home, while also teaching digital literacy skills and how to use devices. The program is supported by a $150,000 grant from Comcast that will be used to hire and train nearly a dozen CCBC students. The CCBC Digital Navigators will focus on addressing barriers households face to getting online, namely affordability, access to devices, and digital skills.

Frontier Communications CEO Nick Jeffery said the company's fiber securitization will give it funding through the end of its target year of 2025, and a “very clear path” to hit 10 million fiber passings. In August, Frontier closed its fiber securitization notes offering as part of a $2.1 billion financing, a significant jump from its initial goal of raising $1.05 billion.

Fallout continues from the Wall Street Journal’s investigative journalism exposé that showed telecommunications companies in the US have left behind a massive network of copper cables covered in toxic lead. AT&T CEO John Stankey said “there is no public health crisis” to worry about, citing the release of lead test results by AT&T, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state of New York.

Despite the cable mobile virtual network operators' (MVNO's) success with bundled offerings and heavily discounted wireless service plans, don’t expect Verizon to follow suit. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg dismissed the cable MVNO's strategy of offering free or discounted wireless service plans when bundled with broadband. “Lowballing and discounting won’t help us,” he said, adding that the company recently ended its $25/month discounted pricing for its 5G Home fixed wireless access offering.

Charter Communications CEO Chris Winfrey believes fixed wireless access (FWA) won't meet speed and bandwidth demands. In fact, Winfrey likens it to DSL – a product that had its moment but saw many customers flee to cable's higher-quality connections. The initial success of FWA "shows there's a nice, niche market for limited-bandwidth, limited-capacity, and limited-reliability product," Winfrey said.

T-Mobile won thousands of 2.5GHz spectrum licenses around the US in a Federal Communications Commission auction that ended in 2022. But the FCC would face "criminal penalties" if it gave T-Mobile its 2.5GHz license winnings. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained that the FCC's "auction authority" expired in March and so far has not been renewed by Congress, which means the agency no longer has the regulatory authority to issue spectrum licenses.

Winning funding in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband program will be “trickier than we were hoping for,” said Charter CEO Chris Winfrey. “We didn’t get all the guidelines and [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] instructions that we were hoping for,” Winfrey said. Instead, some of the guidelines that have been established are “unhelpful to private capital.” Although Winfrey didn’t elaborate, this may have been a reference to rules that favor public/private partnerships. 

The clock is ticking for state broadband offices to submit their initial proposals to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) describing how each state will carry out its competitive Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant process. The vast majority of states are still drafting their proposals and seeking stakeholder input, but that input works both ways.

Mobile operators are spending less on their 5G buildouts, but that doesn’t mean that the 5G deployment phase is over. Executives at the big-three tower companies —American Tower, Crown Castle, and SBA Communications — said that the tower leasing business is still thriving because mobile operators are still expanding their 5G networks, particularly in their mid-band spectrum, where much of the 5G traffic will be carried. Along with that mid-band expansion, operators are starting to densify their networks with small cells, particularly

Comcast is getting ready to activate Philadelphia (PA) as a trial market for cellular offload (i.e. using complementary network technologies for delivering data originally targeted for cellular networks).