Fierce

There’s a huge amount of energy in the fiber broadband ecosystem right now driven largely by the Broadband Equity, Access & Deployment (BEAD) program. But as someone who’s covered telecommunications for three decades, I suspect that we’re nearing the peak of the hype cycle for broadband.

On July 9, a House subcommittee held a hearing to get an update on how the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is addressing some of the most pressing broadband issues in the country. Here’s what the FCC had to say:

According to survey data from Recon Analytics, the net promoter scores of Verizon and T-Mobile for their fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband absolutely demolish the net promoter scores of Comcast and Charter for their hybrid fiber coax (HFC) broadband services. “FWA’s numbers are off the chart,” said Recon Analytics principal Roger Entner. However, he cautioned that there is a “selection bias” in the data because with FWA, people do their own installation, and if they aren’t happy with the service they can return the gear within three days. NPS scores are a big deal.

Hurricane Beryl, the first hurricane of the 2024 season to hit the U.S, spiraled 80 mile per hour winds through Houston, Texas, and is now heading northeast and beyond. More than 2 million people in Texas are without power. There are reports of outages on the AT&T and Verizon cellular networks in Texas in the wake of storm, as well as disruptions to Internet service providers such as Xfinity. Here’s what’s going on with the big three mobile operators:

There’s a lot of government funding going around for rural broadband, but it won’t mean much if those last mile networks aren’t connected to the rest of the network, says Bill Long, chief product and strategy officer at Zayo Group.

The prosecco corks were no doubt popping at Telecom Italia’s (TIM) headquarters in Rome after the operator’s relieved CEO was able to announce the completion of a long-gestated plan to sell off its fixed-line grid to the Optics BidCo consortium controlled by investment firm KKR. The sale of NetCo for up to €22 billion (U.S. $23.6 billion) also allows TIM to reduce its net financial debt by about $13.8 billion, from an adjusted net financial debt of €26.6 billion at March 31, 2024.

The digital divide is a global problem. NCTA – the Internet & Television Association released last week a documentary called “Every Last Mile,” which aims to illustrate the challenges ISPs face in building broadband in rural America, but we went a step further. We looked at which broadband and telecommunications startups are tackling connectivity on a global scale.