CCG Consulting

There are many folks making the argument that the country doesn’t have enough carrier exchange points. An exchange point is a physical location where multiple carriers meet for purposes of exchanging traffic. I don’t know if this is an accurate statistic, but I’ve heard several people claim there are fourteen or fifteen states that don’t have a major exchange point. This might be true if you use the definition of an exchange point to be a place where everybody meets. There is a big downside to internet service providers (ISPs) that are not located close to an internet exchange point (IXP).

I’ve written a lot about the unprecedented success of fixed wireless access (FWA) being sold by cellular carriers. By the end of the first quarter of 2024, T-Mobile and Verizon had accumulated 8.6 million customers nationwide on FWA cellular home broadband. This is an amazing success for a product that was just launched in 2021. The big cable companies have been downplaying the success and capabilities of FWA. They commonly characterize FWA as too slow and inconsistent.

One of the biggest challenges for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant is for State Broadband Offices to make sure that every unserved location gets covered by the grants. My understanding of the process is that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will not approve the BEAD grants being made by a State until they can demonstrate that every unserved and underserved location will be covered by the grants.

A new broadband trend has quietly entered the market. Both Starlink and T-Mobile are advertising broadband that can be used practically anywhere and are aiming new products at campers, hikers, and others that go to remote locations. According to T-Mobile this is a huge market, with 15 million households that take RV trips each year and 59 people who go camping. T-Mobile says that 40% of these folks would like to be able to do some work while camping.

SAE International, a professional organization for wireless engineers,  sponsored a report at the end of 2023 that says that the U.S. is already facing a shortage of engineers, and that the problem is going to get worse. According to the report, the U.S. needs 400,000 new engineers every year, but one-third of engineering jobs go unfilled, a trend expected to last through 2030. The SAE report lists some of the reasons for the engineering shortfall.

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. The big question that nobody seems to be able to answer is if AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer. Corporate AI centers will use lots of energy, data, and broadband. The impact on home broadband is harder to predict.

There is an unprecedented boom of construction for electric transmission lines. These are the giant towers that are used to carry electricity for long distances. The boom was kick-started in the last few years as transmission lines have been built to support solar farms, wind farms, and some new nuclear power plants. But the boom went into overdrive by the sudden explosion of new data centers being created to support AI. The International Energy Agency predicts that in the U.S.

An interesting article by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) documents an economic rebound in left-behind counties. Economists, researchers, and politicians have used the term left-behind counties to denote the parts of the country that have experienced economic stagnation or decline compared to the national average.

I read an interesting article in The Lever titled, Everybody Has a Price – And Corporations Know Yours. The article discusses how the massive data collection of our personal shopping and browsing habits, along with machine learning algorithms, has allowed marketing firms to paint an individual profile of everybody.

Linda Hardesty asked, “What if, in ten years, young people don’t subscribe to fixed broadband at all?” Her story is based on a U.K. research group that predicts that within ten years there will be a lot of young people who will never have subscribed to a landline broadband product. Hardesty asks if the same might be true for the U.S. It’s not an obvious answer.