Broadband Resiliency

It’s almost impossible to talk about broadband at the community level without talking about resiliency and redundancy. It’s hard to find rural communities that haven’t experienced a broadband outage due to a fiber being cut somewhere. It’s something that regulators talk about a lot, but there are no national or state plans for broadband resiliency. There are no specific standards related to resiliency for large networks. There are no national, state, or regional standards for broadband resiliency. The long-haul fiber grid is comprised of fiber routes built by numerous fiber builders like Lumen (Level 3), Zayo, AT&T, Verizon, large cable companies, and many other regional fiber providers. There is no nationwide planning or coordination for the placement of long-haul fiber. Companies build fiber routes in places and along routes where they think they can make money. There are no easy solutions for creating the resiliency needed to prevent widespread broadband outages. I fear that the advent of AI could make things worse before it might make things better since it is going to encourage even more consolidation of network operation and monitoring.