Retiring AT&T Copper in California

Regulatory fights between state and federal regulators sometimes get messy, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything as messy as AT&T’s attempt to retire and walk away from copper facilities in California.

AT&T asked the California Public Service Commission (CPUC) for the ability to start retiring copper telephone networks in March 2023. It wasn’t an unusual request since AT&T is in the process of retiring copper in every other state where it owns last-mile copper networks. The CPUC finally ruled on that petition in June 2024 and unanimously rejected AT&T’s request. The state said that AT&T couldn’t retire copper unless the company had a functional equivalent product available for every customer who loses a copper connection.

That’s something AT&T can’t promise. The only two possible replacements for copper are fiber or FWA broadband delivered using cellular spectrum. AT&T has an alternative for customers in most urban and suburban markets. The company has built a lot of fiber and announced in May 2026 that it was planning to invest $19 billion more on fiber construction in the state. Most urban customers should also be able to use FWA cellular broadband if they lose copper, with the caveat that too many customers on FWA in a neighborhood could overwhelm the cellular network.

AT&T’s big problem comes in rural areas, where there are large areas where AT&T doesn’t have enough cellular coverage to reach homes with cellular broadband. It’s not unusual in most rural counties for a cellular carrier to serve only half of the area in a county, or less. There have been reports all around the country about customers who have been stranded after losing copper with no affordable voice option. AT&T has argued at the FCC that they can walk away from copper as long as customers can buy voice from somebody else. It feels extreme to have to replace an AT&T telephone line, that range from $25 to $63 per month with Starlink satellite broadband priced at $130 per month.

In May of this year, AT&T tried again. The company sued California and asked the federal courts to allow it to ignore the CPUC ruling. At the same time, AT&T asked the FCC to allow the company to walk away from carrier of last resort obligations (COLR) in California. The COLR request is a slightly different question than asking to be able to tear down copper. COLR are rules that require AT&T to still connect copper to new customers, even if that means building new copper facilities.

AT&T also filed a separate petition with the FCC asking for permission to discontinue 60% of its wire centers in California, or about 360 wire centers. AT&T argued that these wire centers were not compliant with the FCC’s rules requiring AT&T to support Phone-Advanced, which is a digital home phone service that runs on AT&T’s cellular network and broadband internet instead of traditional copper landline wires. Phone-Advanced lets customers keep their home number and connect up to six devices—including standard phones, fax machines, and medical monitors.

This is where it starts to become a messy jurisdictional battle. As was expected, the CPUC and California Attorney General Rob Bonta quickly challenged and asked the courts to dismiss AT&T’s federal lawsuit, while also asking the FCC to override rulings from the CPUC. In June, the FCC approved AT&T’s petition to close 360 wire centers and to cut copper to roughly 184,000 residential and 15,000 business locations across the state, but it seems like that should be ineffective while the State is saying the opposite and the issues are in court.

It’s getting hard to understand who has the final say about retiring copper in California, and it’s starting to feel probable that there might be conflicting rulings between the CPUC and the FCC. This doesn’t seem like something that is going to easily resolve, which could mean that copper will stay alive in California longer than anywhere else.

Change for Railroad Rights-of-way?

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals made a recent ruling that could end up eliminating one of the biggest rights-of-way issues that slow down fiber construction projects. In the case of CSX Transportation v. Zayo Group, LLC, the court ruled that the easement that CSX owns for its railroad tracks only applies to the surface of the Earth and that the railroad right-of-way does not extend either above or below the tracks.

The court said specifically that the installation of underground fiber lines or overhead fiber lines that are tall enough not to interfere with trains does not constitute “continuous trespass”. This ruling means that Zayo is free to place the fiber without the railroad company’s permission and that Zayo doesn’t have to pay any one-time or ongoing fees for the rights-of-way.

The court said that the right-of-way still belongs to the actual landowner. That’s an important distinction, because most railroad lines were granted an easement to build the railroad lines, and were not given outright ownership of the land. The land under the tracks is still owned by a local government or a private landowner. Since most fiber crossings for railroads happen where the railroad tracks cross a public road, then the state, county, or city that maintains that road still owns the actual rights-of-way and can grant it to a fiber overbuilder just like they grant rights-of-way along all public roads.

CSX had argued that the property rights related to railroad tracks do not fall under the jurisdiction of the State of Indiana, but the court disagreed. The lawsuit was originally filed when CSX alleged that Zayo had illegally trespassed in ten different situations where the company had crossed railroad tracks with fiber without paying the railroad. The court ruled that CSX didn’t have legal standing to make assertions of criminal trespass. The court further said that CSX failed to demonstrate that its railroad easements were exclusive to only railroad use, and that even if it could be construed that the railroad had that right on the surface, it couldn’t make that same claim for the ground below the easement or the air above the easement. The court said that the Zayo fibers did not disturb the railroad’s business in any way.

It’s likely that this ruling will be appealed. But if this ruling stands, it will be a big deal for companies that build networks. We’ve heard a lot of talk over the last year about the FCC wanting to override local jurisdiction for providing rights-of-way along public roads. While there are some horror stories of local government rights-of-way along roads taking too long, most permits are handled pretty routinely and are not the giant mess being claimed by the FCC. The real rights-of-way problems come when trying to build networks to cross railroad tracks, bridges, interstate highway underpasses, or parklands. Each of these situations can add both time and cost to a fiber construction project.

Railroad crossings can be a particular problem, because a large fiber project in a rural county might need to pass railroad tracks at multiple locations. It’s often not easy to determine who owns a given stretch of track, and in many cases the tracks are owned by companies that bought the easements from a defunct railroad or abandoned line. There can be big fees to cross at a single location, and I’ve seen fees as high as $20,000 to cross a single set of tracks. The even bigger problem is the delays. It’s not unusual for the paperwork for a rail crossing to stretch to well over a year.

A few years ago, the Virginia legislature tried to solve this problem by putting a shot clock on the approval for a railroad crossing and by limiting the fees. Unfortunately, that law was eventually knocked down by a court. Perhaps this ruling, made at the Appeals Court level, will have some staying power.

The Need for Public WiFi

One of the most interesting positive things that came out of the COVID pandemic was that communities and organizations across the country deployed public WiFi hotspots. This was done at the time to support students and workers who were expected to find a way to work remotely. And this worked well in a lot of places, and I’ve talked to communities who said the public flocked to the free WiFi during the pandemic.

There was another benefit of the free hot spots – they created places where people who couldn’t afford broadband suddenly had a place to access the Internet. This number of people varies by community, but the nationwide numbers suggest that around 14% of homes don’t have a home broadband solution, and as many as 80% of those folks say they would buy a home broadband solution if they could afford it.

As I wrote about in a recent blog, the number of homes without broadband is unfortunately growing due to affordability issues related to the other increasing costs of daily life like rent, food, health care, and transportation. An increasing number of homes are finding it harder to maintain their broadband connection. Several ISPs have told me about a growing number of broadband customers that regularly disconnect and then reconnect broadband during the year depending on their ability to pay the bill.

I recently realized that a huge percentage of the pandemic-inspired hot spots are gone. In some cases, the WiFi radios installed in 2000 are wearing out, and there is no funding to replace them. Other communities have turned off public WiFi because nobody is paying for the underlying broadband connection. In other cases, there is nobody who wants the responsibility of maintaining and operating the WiFi network.

There are also social issues involved in the hot spot issue. I’ve talked to a few communities that disconnected public WiFi because they didn’t like that it continued to attract people to congregate near hotspots after the end of the pandemic. They didn’t want people congregating in business or tourist districts and sometimes worried about public safety when people were using free WiFi after dark.

A decade ago, there was also a national trend for restaurants and stores to offer free WiFi. That trend has reversed, and there are far fewer places today that offer free WiFi to the public. Many businesses just stopped offering the service. A lot more put the WiFi behind passwords so that it was only easily available to customers. Many have redirected the WiFi signal to serve indoors and not to the nearby sidewalks and parking lots.

I think that one of the reasons for the decreasing interest in deploying public WiFi is a perception that everybody has a cellphone and doesn’t need public WiFi. I worked with the local social agencies in a large suburb of a major city last year, and I learned that a surprising number of people with cellphones don’t have a monthly cellular plan and only use their cellphone where they can find a public WiFi connection. But even people with expensive cellular plans have a skimpy data cap that means they must find WiFi to make it through the month.

There is one hopeful trend. I’ve seen a dozen communities that have deployed WiFi in public parks in recent years. The only downside of these deployments is that the WiFi would probably benefit the public more if it were near where people live. There are also some state programs that are supporting public WiFi, like a recent one in New Mexico. But unfortunately, for every new public hot spot being created, my guess is that a dozen are fading away. That number might be an exaggeration, but the trend is in that direction.

There was a lot of hope that BEAD nondeployment funds could be used to fund public WiFi. My guess is that, even if those funds are ever released, the funds will only be allowed to be use for specific uses that probably won’t include public WiFi. This is an issue that local and state governments can address. Of all of the broadband fixes available in the world, this is one of the lowest-cost ways to bring better broadband to communities. Unless we get a working permanent replacement for something like the ACP plan that subsidized home broadband, there are going to be a lot of homes where public WiFi is a necessity.

Who Should Regulate Space?

Earlier this year, two ranking members of the House Science Committee sent a letter to the FCC that reminded the agency that it didn’t have any clear authority from Congress to regulate space safety, space traffic management, or other non-communication space issues. This letter was sent when it became clear that the FCC was considering sweeping changes to the regulation of satellite constellations.

Those same two members, Republican Brian Babin and Democrat Zoe Lofgren, sent another letter in July, asking the FCC to delay a vote on new satellite regulations. The FCC Commissioners went ahead and approved the new satellite rules in its July meeting.

The FCC has been addressing space issues for years. I’ve read the applications that SpaceX filed when it originally asked the FCC for the authority to launch its current satellite constellation. Those filings are full of specifications and descriptions of how Starlink can direct satellites to avoid collisions, and how the company will deorbit satellites when they are no longer needed. The new FCC regulations cover these same issues.

The letter from Congress raises an interesting question. If the FCC doesn’t regulate these issues, then what federal agency does? The answer to that question is unclear, and it looks like various agencies have some role in regulating satellites:

  • The Department of Commerce has developed the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) that issues satellite collision warnings.
  • The Department of Defense and Space Command also tracks space objects.
  • The FAA coordinates with airplanes to avoid areas near rocket launches.
  • The FCC is clearly in charge of the spectrum issues used to communicate between satellites and Earth.

Congress hasn’t specifically given any agency the authority to regulate orbital debris mitigation and deorbiting rules. This is a relatively new issue due to the large number of satellites in orbit, and the much larger number of planned satellites coming over the next decade. When the FCC took on this role with early communication satellites, it didn’t have any Congressional mandate to do so, because Congress hadn’t given that specific authority to anybody. But nobody was very concerned about this issue a decade ago, when there were 4,200 objects in orbit, including only 1,400 operational satellites.

It appears that the FCC has taken on this role in the regulatory vacuum. The House Science Committee had sent letters to the FCC making the same points to Chairman Ajit Pai in 2020 and Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel in 2022. That means that Congress has had years to debate the issue and decide who should regulate space safety. There have been discussions in Congress about assigning this role to the Department of Commerce, but no votes have been taken to do so.

Clearly somebody needs to regulate space safety. Scientists and space experts have been warning about the disaster that would ensue if there are major collisions of satellites that result in a cloud of debris. The satellite industry is growing to be a significant piece of the economy, and a major collision event could quickly cripple communications satellites for years.

I have to wonder if the FCC is the right place in the government to be tackling these issues today. Does the agency have enough space experts on staff to fully evaluate if satellite companies are taking the right precautions? Does any federal agency? There will be a lot of finger-pointing if a collision disaster happens, but it seems like the only place to point the finger would be Congress.

Slaughter and the FCC

Today’s blog muses a bit on the impact of the Supreme Court ruling in Trump vs Slaughter. The case arose when President Trump fired Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two Democratic Commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, soon after he took office. The Congressional legislation that established the FTC said that Commissioners serve seven-year terms, and that a president can only fire a Commissioner “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”. Slaughter sued, and won in District Court, and that ruling was upheld by a split decision at the Court of Appeals. However, when the split decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, the Court ruled that a president has the authority to fire regulators in independent agencies.

As soon as this was announced, there was press speculation that the President might also fire Commissioner Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic Commissioner at the FCC. It’s unlikely that the administration would currently fire Gomez. Firing Gomez would mean that the FCC wouldn’t have a quorum, which requires three Commissioners be present before the FCC can vote on any actions. The FCC currently only has three Commissioners – Chairman Carr, Republican Commissioner Olivia Trusty, and Commissioner Gomez. We know what it looks like to not have a quorum since this happened a number of times in the past. The most recent time was last year when Commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Nathan Simington both resigned from the FCC in June 2025. That left only Chairman Carr and Commissioner Gomez, and the FCC was unable to conduct business until Commissioner Trusty was approved by the Senate.

The FCC doesn’t shut down without a quorum. The agency continues with all of its normal functions, like reviewing and approving new communications devices or granting simple wireless licenses for things like microwave connections. But nothing can be done that requires a vote of the Commissioners, including starting new proceedings. The Congressional mandate that established the FCC also requires the composition of a full Commission must be bipartisan, with no more than two of the four Commissioners from a given party (not counting the party of the Chairman).

But the speculation about firing Commissioner Gomez ramped up last week when President Trump nominated a third Republican Commissioner. He chose Republican Danielle Thumann Severs, who is currently a senior counsel to Commission Carr, to fill one of the two open seats on the commission. The nomination was immediately sent to the Senate to start the confirmation process. If confirmed, she would serve the remaining three years on a seat with a 5-year term that began on July 1, 2024.

Thumann Severs currently advises Carr on matters before the Wireline Bureau, the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, and the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau. She had been an advisor to Carr’s office from March 2021 to July 2023 and worked at Crown Castle before rejoining the FCC in August 2024.

It will raise questions about the future of the FCC and other independent agencies if Commissioner Gomez is fired after Thumann Severs is seated. Will future Presidents immediately terminate Commissioners of the opposing party in all independent agencies upon taking office? I’ve been watching the FCC for decades. My observation has been that a new Commissioner to the FCC is rarely fully effective until they’ve been in the position for a year or two and get to know staff and get deep into the issues at the agency. Having a constantly revolving door in the future would not be efficient for getting anything done.

It’s also worth noting that FCC Commissioners have regularly reached bipartisan agreement on many issues. There is no policy reason to fire Commissioner Gomez, other than to eliminate her opposing opinions that are posted after votes. I suspect that if every new president routinely fires Commissioners of the opposing party, then every decision at future FCCs will become highly partisan. As much as the big ISPs love it when they get a Commission that sides with them on issues, they also put a high value on regulatory consistency, and the big players regulated by the FCC don’t want to see rules that yoyo with every change of administration.

Foreign Ownership of ISPs

I saw a recent announcement that the FCC’s Wireless Competition Bureau had approved the transfer of WideOpenWest to Japan’s Softbank Group. WideOpenWest is the eighth-largest cable company, which operates under the brand name of WOW! The proposed transaction has Softbank buying the DigitalBridge Group, which is WOW!’s majority owner. This deal was announced at the end of 2025, just a few days before DigitalBridge and Crestview Partners took WOW! private.

The blog raises the question about foreign ownership of ISPs because the current administration has put a huge amount of emphasis on America First, which emphasizes, among other things, domestic ownership of corporations doing business in the country. There has been a statutory limit on foreign ownership in U.S. corporations that hold common carrier status or hold broadcast licenses that was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1934. However, the FCC has the ability to waive the 25% limit if it thinks the foreign ownership is in the public interest.

What prompted my question was that the FCC just announced a ban on foreign-made advanced robotic devices. This ban covers all mechanical devices, including autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots, and quadrupeds that are capable of locomotion, obstacle avoidance, navigation, or movement that operate at a distance from a human operator.

The FCC ban was done by adding foreign-made robots to the Covered List, which is a list the FCC maintains of electronics and devices that are banned from the U.S. At the same time the FCC banned robots, they also banned foreign-made power inverters. At least for now, this ban would even stop the sale of Roombas and other automated vacuums. The FCC knew this ban would be controversial and published a lengthy FAQ about the robot and power-inverter bans. You may recall that the FCC added WiFi modems to the covered list recently.

Assuming that the WOW! transaction will be completed, they won’t be the only foreign-owned ISP in the country. The biggest is T-Mobile, with a majority ownership by the German firm Deutsche Telekom. I wrote a blog recently talking about how Deutsche Telekom is trying to merge with T-Mobile to increase the ability of T-Mobile to expand and grow much larger. It seems likely that if Deutsche Telekom can pull off this merger, the combined company would pursue the acquisition of other large U.S. ISPs. Timotheus Höttges, the CEO of Deutsche Telekom, thinks T-Mobile should be competing on an equal footing with AT&T and Verizon.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Altice USA, which is owned by the French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, who holds the 74% of shares of stock and 98% of the voting rights of the company. Altice operates under the brand name Optimum and has almost 5 million customers in 21 states. I’ve written several blogs about Altice, which is currently facing a major debt crisis. The company has $21.8 billion in debt, with a payment of $6.2 billion due in 2027. Altice has sued two of its major creditors of the company, Blackrock and Apollo Asset Management, claiming they are blocking the company from refinancing the debt.

Another foreign-owned ISP is Zipley, which is owned by BCE Inc (Bell Canada Enterprises). BCE acquired Zipley for $5 billion in 2025 after receiving a foreign ownership waiver from the FCC.

I don’t have a strong opinion about foreign ownership of ISPs. But I do find it curious that most of the other bans, like robots and WiFi modems, are being done for national security reasons. I can’t think of many industries that we care about more than those that operate and control access to the Internet, and I find it curious that the FCC continues to make exceptions to the 25% foreign ownership cap without much public debate.

Broadband for Low-Income Housing

Connect Humanity the Alt Funding Field Guide that is intended to provide ideas for those who are working to solve the digital divide, like digital navigators. The purpose of the guide is to provide a range of ideas about the immediate future of the digital inclusion field and to provide ideas for practitioners on where to look for funding in an environment where federal grant funding has largely disappeared. I should disclose that I participated in writing one of the chapters.

One of the most interesting chapters was written by Catherine Crago Blanton, who worked with affordable housing in Austin, Texas. She describes the benefits of bringing broadband to low-income housing, both to residents and to landlords.

For those who aren’t familiar with low-income housing, one of the best reasons to read this chapter is to get a peek at the complexity of subsidized housing. The folks who operate low-income housing operate under a wide range of different regulatory rules and federal and state agencies. Most people probably think that most low-income housing is public housing operated by the government, but there is a lot of housing operated by a variety of different kinds of landlords.

This chapter discusses the importance of bringing broadband to low-income housing. We’ve had a slew of different federal and state grants that are putting a big dent in rural broadband access. But those grant programs largely ignored the big remaining population without good broadband, which are folks living in MDUs that don’t have good broadband. A decade ago, much of the entire MDU (multi-dwelling units) market lacked good broadband because neither the ISPs nor landlords wanted to sink the costs into wiring older MDUs. But starting a little over a decade ago, commercial ISPs figured out ways to more affordably wire buildings with fiber or Category 6 cable, and a large majority of MDUs now have decent broadband. In some, ISPs market directly to landlords, and on others, ISPs bring a big data pipe and the landlord builds broadband into the rent.

The one group that has not seen the big burst of ISP activity is low-income MDUs. This market segment thought we had a solution for affordable broadband with the ACP plan that provided a $30 monthly subsidy. That was enough revenue to justify wiring MDUs and building broadband into the rent. But it’s a real challenge to bring broadband to low-income housing without some kind of subsidy. It doesn’t help that HUID rules don’t consider broadband as a necessity and allow it to be covered like other utilities.

This chapter talks about real-life benefits of bringing broadband, and the related digital inclusion efforts of providing computers and computer training into low-income housing. The article discusses examples of how broadband gives tenants a chance to engage with education and workforce training. There is a real-life example of a tenant who had to repeatedly miss work, and the vital income that generated, to take children to doctor visits. There are studies that show that home broadband has a huge positive impact on school children who complete homework in the home environment.

Broadband is increasingly valuable to the older tenants who comprise a lot of subsidized housing. Telehealth brings medical care without the need to arrange for expensive transportation. Home monitoring of health issues results in significantly lower costs and better health for tenants. Overall, broadband can support aging in place, keeping elderly tenants from having to enter the incredibly expensive managed care system.

Landlords have also come to love the benefits of broadband. The folks who manage low-income housing are facing a funding crisis and have to manage properties with fewer resources. When tenants have broadband, they can communicate more effectively with the landlord for issues like repair and maintenance work orders and rent payments. Landlords have come to understand that tenants with broadband are able to respond better and on time to crisis events that result in evictions. Evictions and replacing tenants are a huge cost and effort for landlords.

The Broadband Affordability Crisis

A year ago, John Horrigan wrote an article for the Benton Foundation that predicted that as many as 5.6 million households would drop their home broadband connection due to the impact of the One Big Beautiful Bill. He based that assessment on the changes that the OBBB will make to federal programs that benefit low-income families.

The federal programs that Horrigan thought would hurt broadband subscriptions for low-income households included:

  • The Center on Budget Policy and Priorities estimated that four million people would lose SNAP benefits (food stamps for those not familiar with the acronym) between July 2025 and March 2026. The actual number turned out to be 4.3 million.
  • Horrigan predicted that millions would lose a federal healthcare subsidy from ACA, or the various state programs that are part of the ACA. So far, enrollees in ACA programs have dropped from 22.1 million in 2025 to 19.2 million – a drop of 2.9 million.
  • There was a prediction that insurance premiums would increase for everybody due to the drop in ACA enrollments. The 19.2 million people that stayed in the ACA health system saw an average monthly premiums increase of $122 per month. The average health insurance premium for the country as a whole increased by $178, while the full out-of-pocket costs increased even more due to increases in deductibles and copayments.

Now that we are halfway through 2026, there are also cost increases hitting households that Horrigan didn’t anticipate. The nationwide average cost of a gallon of gas was $2.81 at the end of 2025 and is now over $4.00. There are a number of estimates showing that the monthly cost of groceries for a family has increased by $30 to $45. The real big upcoming kicker is that health insurance rates, both for ACA participants and everybody else, are expected to be significantly higher in 2027 than they were this year. It seems there will also be a big cut in federal support for Medicare prescriptions.

What does all of this have to do with broadband subscriptions? There are currently over 26 million homes in the U.S. in the lowest quintile that have household incomes below $33,000 per year. For these households, increases in expenses for any of the above reasons mean they have to cut expenditures elsewhere. Somebody who loses SNAP or who pays more for gas or insurance has to make up by cutting elsewhere.

Horrigan’s prediction of 5.6 million homes that will lose broadband started with a universe of homes that already have broadband. When a household has an income under $33,000 per year and is buying broadband, they think it’s important.

Horrigan’s prediction may not fully come to pass because there is a middle-ground to abandoning broadband. Earlier this year, I worked with two ISPs that serve areas that are primarily low-income. Both ISPs told me that they are experiencing a big increase in a new kind of churn – customers that temporarily drop broadband because they can’t afford it, but who then resubscribe a few months later when they’ve scraped together enough money to buy broadband again.

The other thing that a cost squeeze does is to drive homes to look for broadband alternatives. I think that people in this category are the ones dropping cable companies and going to FWA broadband and other less expensive options. Unfortunately for families in this position, lower monthly rates typically mean slower speeds and less reliable broadband performance. A lot of low-income families have stayed with DSL for years because it was the least costly option in cities. However, in recent years, the big telcos have increased the cost of DSL to be the same price as fiber to get people off the copper network – but these higher prices are often too high for too many homes with low incomes.

There is a nationwide consensus that we are all better off when most families have broadband and can partake in the many benefits broadband brings to a household. If we don’t somehow change the current path we are on, I think Horrigan’s estimate of 5.6 million households that drop broadband will be far too low.

Is Satellite Cellular a Competitive Threat?

It seems that one of the hottest topics in the industry is Direct-to-Device (D2D) cellular service that can bypass terrestrial cell towers and connect cellphones directly to satellites. I’ve already seen claims being made that D2D technology will solve the rural cellular issue since everybody will have cell coverage. Today’s blog looks at some of the reality behind these claims.

There are a lot of players suddenly in this space. Not surprisingly, SpaceX / Starlink already has hundreds of satellites in orbit and plans for 15,000. AST SpaceMobile is partnering with AT&T and Verizon. Globalstar originally pioneered Apple’s SOS emergency test service and was recently acquired by Amazon, which recently applied for licenses for 5,105 satellites for D2D. Lynk Global has partnered with more than 45 cellular companies worldwide. EchoStar and Viasat have also announced plans to enter the market.

Basic Technology. The satellites will circle at heights between 200 and 550 miles above Earth and will be traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. At least for now, nobody has figured out how to hand off calls between a satellite and terrestrial cellular network. There are some limitations for D2D that are largely defined by physics.

  • Can’t Work Indoors. Your cellphone transmits at under 0.5 watts of power – the maximum power level set by the FCC. Cell signals lose from 50% to 90% of the signal strength when passing through a wall. While that usually is enough power to reach a cell tower located within 2-3 miles of your house, it’s not nearly enough power to reach a satellite.
  • Receiver Limits. Starlink has been achieving data speeds up to 300 Mbps download for home broadband. Expect speeds to be far less for a D2D due to the much smaller antenna surface area in a cellphone compared to a Starlink receiver dish. In general, the larger the size of the antenna, the more bits that can be gathered. Receivers for Starlink range from 11.75 X 15.7 inches for the Starlink Mini to 22.7 X 20.1 for the higher-performance receiver. The typical cellphone has a receiver of around 6.5 X 7 millimeters, meaning that even the Starlink Mini has 2,600 times more surface area for receiving a signal from the satellite than a typical cellphone.
  • Area Speed Coverage Limits. The planned coverage area for the next generation of D2D Starlink satellite is around 45 square miles. The newer satellites will be using massive adjustable antenna beams along with 40 to 65 MHz channels. This means that a single data stream from a satellite will have an overall data capacity between 40 and 150 Mbps download, depending on the spectrum being used. Starlink is planning on 16 simultaneous full-power beams from the next generation D2D satellites. The challenge is that this spectrum must be shared among all users inside a beam footprint. That means a maximum of 2.4 Gbps of bandwidth to share in a 45 square mile area – a minuscule amount of bandwidth compared to what can be delivered by cell towers serving the same area. This is compounded by a limitation on the simultaneous number of users that can be connected at the same time.

What does this all mean from a practical perspective? The D2D satellites will be able to connect to a large number of people who are outdoors, within the overall limitation of the number of simultaneous people that can be connected at one time. We won’t know until somebody shows us what this will mean for connecting a lot of people in a small area, like at a rural rock concert.

Early trials have shown that D2D has some capacity for making a connection to a moving vehicle. This is never going to be as guaranteed as when standing outdoors, and it will likely depend on the type of vehicle and the speed being driven.

D2D is not going to work directly indoors. It’s possible that somebody will develop an outdoor receiver that can bounce a signal to go in through a window. It would make sense to do this in conjunction with something like a Starlink receiver.

It’s hard to envision D2D as a standalone cellular service other than possibly for the rare person who spends most of their time outdoors.

To be fair to the industry, at least for now, the big D2D providers aren’t touting it as a standalone cellular service. They are talking about this being an add-on to normal cellular plans. This doesn’t make much sense in urban areas where normal cell coverage is already ubiquitous and strong. But this could be an interesting additive to a cell plan for folks who either live or travel a lot in rural areas. It’s a cool technology, but a lot of the excitement could be empty hype, which seems to be the norm for most new technology products.

There is only one statistic that is really going to matter for D2D, which is the number of people willing to pony up a monthly fee to use it. The one thing going for the new technology is that there is a lot more serious demand for any kind of cellular coverage in the third world than there is in the rural U.S. Maybe that’s the real market they are shooting for.

Data Sovereignty

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot about data sovereignty. Indian Tribes want data sovereignty. Countries around the world and state and local governments in the U.S. are talking about data sovereignty. Corporations are talking about data sovereignty, even though they use different terms to describe it.

The concept behind data sovereignty is simple. It means keeping data internally and not sharing it with the outside world, which today means keeping it away from the AI companies that are training their models on every bit of data they can put their hands on.

Consider corporations. I’m positive that a huge amount of what happens inside corporations ends up in the AI cloud. It seems inevitable that employees in every company are relying on AI to help them compose emails, analyze budgets, and write memos. Employees use AI notetakers to capture every word said in meetings. Even if a company has a policy of not doing any of this kind of work using public AI, you know employees are doing so privately to make their jobs easier.

Entire countries are talking about data sovereignty, particularly in Europe. There is a quickly growing top-down movement on the continent to ban and replace large U.S. software tech vendors. We’ve recently seen the governments in France, Spain, Germany, the UK, and Switzerland begin the process to get rid of Palantir, a U.S. surveillance software vendor, and replace it with European software. Each country doesn’t only want to protect data from U.S. tech companies, but also from each other. There is a lot of discussion in Europe about replacing many other U.S. tech firms.

The data sovereignty effort in the U.S. is much more of a bottoms-up movement. Many city government CIOs are demanding to have local control of citizens’ data. This partly comes from a rash of cities and local governments that have been hacked by ransomware attacks in the last few years. But this is also in response to citizens demanding that local governments protect their data.

Of course, there is opposition to the data sovereignty idea. For example, there is a tech coalition that has been pushing the Administration to create “freedom cities” that are exempt from federal regulations and where tech companies would have free rein. An effort to do this in Toronto failed a few years ago when citizens rebelled against the idea of creating a high-tech surveillance community.

Indian Tribes might be ahead of everybody else on this issue, and there is a lot of discussion of keeping all tribal data sovereign from the rest of the world. Tribes have no interest in the federal government getting their local data and are even less interested in seeing tech companies profiting by selling the data to anybody willing to buy it.

The idea of data sovereignty runs completely counter to the idea of building huge data centers that amass all of the knowledge of mankind. Sovereignty is really about privacy and logically leads to an AI environment comprised of local AI servers for corporations, local governments, and Tribes that are not connected to the cloud or to the big AI data centers.

Interestingly, the data sovereignty movement is not anti-AI. It instead comes from those who are against having their data gobbled up by a handful of big tech companies that want to monetize their data with no care for what that means to the people, companies, and governments that generate the most useful data. It’s likely that most entities that shield themselves from big AI will use AI internally inside their own network. I think a whole lot of people have already seen the massive invasion of privacy that is an integral part of AI and are already looking for ways to opt out.