Winning the 6G Race

In December, the White House issued a short Presidential Memorandum titled “Winning the 6G Race”. The document states that 6G technology will be “foundational to the national security, foreign policy, and economic prosperity of the United States. 6G will play a “pivotal role in the development and adoption of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and implantable technologies. 6G will also provide faster, more resilient, and more secure communication networks that can be utilized for national security and public safety purposes.”

The report begins with an interesting statement, “It is the policy of the United States to lead the world in 6G development.” This memorandum suggests that the path for the U.S. to achieve this goal is to play a significant role in the development of international standards and to identify a significant volume of spectrum that can be harmonized for 6G networks internationally.

The memorandum goes on to direct several federal agencies to make sure the U.S. gets involved in the development of standards. This is something that U.S. scientists and engineers routinely participate in. Congress already ordered the FCC to begin looking for 800 MHz of midrange spectrum to put to auction. This is the sweet spot for cellular traffic, and it seems likely that cellular companies will buy most of any such spectrum that hits an auction.

What I find most interesting about the memorandum is the use of the phrase ‘6G Race’. This brings back memories of the same rhetoric being used to tout the introduction of 5G. In looking back, I see that the term 5G race entered the vernacular in 2018. It was a phrase introduced by the big cellular carriers as part of a massive lobbying campaign to get the FCC to hold auctions for cellular spectrum. The 5G race was supposedly between the U.S. and China to become the leader in 5G technology.

The lobbying effort was intense, and you couldn’t go to any sizable industry event without being bombarded by discussions about the U.S. winning the 5G race. I wrote several blogs on the topic at the time, and there were articles in the industry press about the 5G race on a weekly basis. This reached such a fever pitch that by 2020, there was talk of the U.S. government buying either Nokia or Ericsson so that the U.S. would own a 5G company.

What’s funny is that there was no 5G race then, and there is no 6G race now. That’s not how technology advances. For both 5G and 6G, scientists and engineers from around the world first create the standards for a new technology. Once those standards are published, vendors begin seriously developing marketable technologies to sell.

Every vendor strives to make technology that meets the standards so that it can be used worldwide. Vendors like Huawei from China and Nokia from Finland want the cellular technology they develop to be able to communicate with cellphones manufactured around the world. While there are differences between vendors, the differences are fairly minor, and over time, any development touted by any one vendor will be picked up by the other vendors. The whole purpose of standards is to make sure that a new technology is compatible around the world.

What’s particularly funny is that the U.S. is a minor player in the development of cellular technologies. The vendors ultimately decide which features of a new technology get stressed and developed first. If there were a 5G or 6G race, it would be between China and Europe – but I’ve never seen competition between the vendors referred to as a race.

I think the term 6G race is just more rhetoric from the marketing folks at the big U.S. cellular carriers. While they already won half of the battle by getting Congress to require that the FCC find more cellular spectrum, the lobbying effort is to make sure that happens in a timely manner before Congress or the FCC has a change of heart.

So, in case you are late to the game, welcome to the 6G race. It’s a drama-free race, and there is no finish line. But if the cellular companies get what they are asking for, the phrase will disappear as quickly as it appeared.

California Competition Study

The Public Advocates Office, which is part of the California Public Service Commission, undertook a a deep analysis of broadband pricing in the state, correlated with the level of competition. The study was conducted from August through October of 2025.

The study looked at four large markets in the state: San Mateo, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego. By choosing these markets, the study encompasses the four largest ISPs in the state – AT&T, Comcast, Charter, and Cox. The study gathered information on available broadband plans by location, advertised speed tiers, and promotional prices. The study also overlaid household incomes from the Census across the data it gathered to explore if household income played a role in prices offered by the big ISPs. The markets are interesting because they not only vary by ISP, but each market has some neighborhoods where the only gigabit provider is the cable company, and other neighborhoods where there is also one or more fiber competitor.

The overall conclusion of the study won’t surprise anybody who follows the big ISPs – broadband prices vary by the level of competition. In aggregate, the study showed that the price for broadband in competitive neighborhoods across the four markets was around $51 per month, while prices in non-competitive markets were $15 to $40 higher per month for comparable services.

The study resulted in three major conclusions:

Gigabit Fiber Drives Lower Broadband Prices. The study demonstrated that price competition only kicked in for neighborhoods where there are multiple ISPs offering gigabit broadband. That means a cable company and at least one fiber provider. The study showed that when there is competition for gigabit broadband, the competition extends downward to slower speeds offered by the big ISPs.

The study demonstrates something that is probably obvious, in that pricing is trimmed even further when there are more than two gigabit providers in a neighborhood.

Sub-Gigabit Providers Do Not Reliably Constrain Price. This is an interesting finding. It says that when the only competition to a cable company is an FWA cellular provider or a fixed wireless ISP, the cable company does not engage in significant price competition to keep customers. The study showed that, in fact, some of the neighborhoods with this kind of competition see the highest prices from the big ISPs.

This doesn’t mean that cable companies never compete hard against 100 Mbps providers, but this finding makes a lot of sense. Customers are attracted to the low prices of the FWA providers, and both T-Mobile and Verizon have price options as low as $35 per month. Cable companies, at least in these four large markets, are not willing to drop prices to compete with those prices.

Income is Not a Primary Driver of Prices. This is a bit of a surprise, because there were previous studies that suggested that pricing was lower in neighborhoods with the highest household incomes. That may have been true five years ago, but the data now suggests that prices offered by the big ISPs are mostly related to the level of competition.

The study made some other interesting observations. One observation is that in competitive neighborhoods, promotional prices can vary by household, and somebody might be paying a significantly higher or lower price than their immediate neighbors.

The study is worth reading for anybody interested in how big ISPs compete. The study has a lot of detail about how big ISPs stratify addresses and pricing offers based on the presence of other gigabit providers, while not caring much about ISPs that compete with slower products.

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO). The Order was issued under the authority of section 224 of the Telecommunications Act, which gives the FCC the authority to “regulate the rate, terms, and conditions for pole attachments to provide that such rates, terms , and conditions are just and reasonable”. This order highlights the nuances of regulations that can make it a challenge to build new fiber. This particular case provides a cautionary tale that shows why it can be so hard to get on poles when working with an uncooperative pole owner.

Before discussing the FCC decision, let me review existing FCC pole attachment rules and processes that an ISP must follow to get onto a pole. Just starting the process of getting on a pole requires a well-defined step-by-step paperwork-heavy process that obligates both the pole owner and the attacher to take steps within specified time frames.

  • The ISP must formally request access to a pole. Every pole owner has a unique set of forms needed to make such a request. The request must be detailed and specifically describe the changes that are wanted, and the attacher often includes drawings showing the desired connection.
  • The pole owner then conducts a survey to determine if there are any issues involved in meeting the request. Some pole owners invite the attacher to participate in a physical survey.
  • If the pole owner accepts the request, it must provide an estimate of the ‘make-ready’ costs needed to accommodate the request.
  • If the attacher accepts the estimate, it must pay the make-ready costs upfront, and the make-ready work proceeds.
  • Finally, if the pole owner finds that the actual cost was higher than the estimate, the attacher can request a detailed invoice showing all of the costs.

The dispute in this Order arose over poles that APCO said needed to be replaced in order to accommodate Comcast. Comcast claims that many of the poles had preexisting violations of safety and engineering standards, and because of that, Comcast wanted to pay nothing for APCO to replace the poles. APCO wanted Comcast to pay the full cost of replacing the poles, which would mean that Comcast would be paying to fix problems caused in the past by other attachers.  As an aside, Comcast would be required to pay the full cost to replace a pole that didn’t have any safety violations, as long as the only reason for having to replace a pole is that there isn’t enough room to add the new fiber.

Comcast filed a formal complaint with the West Virginia Public Service Commission in May 2025. The Commission ruled in favor of Comcast and said that APCO unlawfully assigned costs to Comcast and also delayed the pole attachment process. Rather than comply with that decision, APCO appealed the case in July to the FCC’s new Rapid Broadband Assessment Team (RBAT). This was the first FCC case processed under the new RBAT appeal system. The parties entered into mediation, but failed to reach an agreement.

In September, APCO issued new rules across its pole network that require any attacher to pay 100% of the cost for a poles replacement, even when a pole has preexisting violations.  At the end of November, Comcast filed a complaint with the FCC that resulted in this Order. The FCC sided with Comcast and said that its rules had been clear for twenty years that an attacher is only responsible for the incremental cost of moving to a new pole when an existing pole is in violation of safety or engineering standards.

You might read this and view it as a victory for Comcast, but it’s really not. This process delayed Comcast by nine months, and this is one of the faster regulatory resolutions of a pole dispute I can remember. This case shows the challenge that any attacher faces when a pole owner elects not to follow existing pole attachment regulations. In this case, APCO wanted to charge Comcast incorrectly at the time of the application. APCO then ignored an order from the State PUC and took the issue to FCC arbitration, where it failed to come to a mediated agreement. Finally, Comcast had to appeal to the FCC for a resolution.

Most ISPs don’t have the budget or the legal resources to fight an issue like this through this maze of steps. A smaller attacher with a similar situation would likely either have to agree to meet the conditions of the pole owner, and pay far too much for the attachment, or it might instead elect to bury fiber to bypass the poles, also at an increased cost.

Most attachers also worry about getting into formal disputes with pole owners who can retaliate by making it more difficult or costly for other desired attachments. The FCC and States can pass as many rules and regulations as they want, but the pole owner still has the ultimate power to make life costly and miserable for an attacher. I don’t know if any amount of regulations can fix that.

The Telecom Act Turns 30

February 8 is the thirtieth anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The legislation brought sweeping changes to the industry and was the impetus for me to start my consulting company in 1997. This blog includes some of my thoughts about the impact of the Act.

The Act was both overdue and premature. It was overdue because market forces had been creating pressure for rule changes since the divestiture of AT&T into the Baby Bell companies in 1984. The divestiture brought long-distance competition, but it was clear that the public wanted broader competition for voice service instead of only being bombarded by companies offering cheaper long-distance rates. The Act held out the possibility of real competition for voice services to the majority of the country.

In my opinion, the Act never unleashed the competition for telephone services envisioned by the authors of the bill. The Act did create a giant flurry of competitive activity as CLECs immediately sprang into life to compete for voice services. Unfortunately, most of these new competitors ether resold telephone company products or relied on using unbundled network elements from telephone company networks to cobble together telephone services. I had an office near the DC Beltway, and in 1999, I probably had a dozen competitors visit my office trying to sell me an integrated T1 that combined voice and data that completely relied on the telco network. As might have been expected, the big telcos quickly adapted to the new rules and were highly successful in complicating the process for anybody trying to compete with them.

I say the Act was clearly premature because it did not anticipate the explosion of residential broadband that began only a few years after the ink was dry on the new law. The public interest in the Internet quickly swamped any public interest in voice competition. The bundled T1 product being sold to businesses became quickly obsolete when DSL and cable modems brought faster broadband for a much lower price. The introduction of cheap broadband was a major factor in the collapse of the giant voice CLECs, which crashed and burned in the big tech collapse that peaked in 2001.

Because the Act did not anticipate broadband, the launch of DSL and cable modems was almost totally unregulated because Congress didn’t have an appetite for tackling the complexities of an update to the Act so soon after the 1996 Act. The giant broadband providers quickly solidified behind the concept of light-touch regulation to stave off any attempt to regulate the new broadband industry.

The Act didn’t address two issues that still plague the telecom industry today. The first is market concentration. The Act hoped to create an environment that fostered widespread facility-based voice competition. The advent of broadband made the whole industry forget about voice competition. It became quickly clear that the largest telcos and cable companies were going to snag the vast majority of broadband customers in the country. Competition between telcos and cable companies started on an even footing in 2000, but as cable company technology advanced faster than DSL technology, the cable companies became virtual monopoly broadband providers in their markets, and used that strength to force customers to buy bundles of broadband, cable TV, and telephone. Only after several decades are we finally seeing fiber overbuilders and FWA cellular broadband bringing true competition to cable company monopolies.

The Act also did nothing to tackle the second issue that has plagued the broadband industry since the beginning – the uneven and inequitable distribution of broadband technology. Rural areas fell behind urban broadband almost immediately. We still haven’t brought broadband to a lot of low-income MDUs in cities. While the FCC was tasked by the Act to make sure that rural markets had the same opportunities as urban markets, the agency has never done more than pay lip service to that obligation.

Perhaps one of the biggest failures of the 1996 Act is that it implicitly assumed that specific services are closely linked to specific infrastructure. This led to the bizarre situation where voice over copper remained regulated while VoIP over other technologies was not. Cable TV over coax stayed regulated, while streaming video over other technologies was not.

You’ll probably be seeing a bunch of articles that look at different consequences of the 1996 Act. In my mind, the Act was a success in that it shook up the heavily regulated and staid incumbent telephone companies. But the Act was also a failure since it allowed telephone companies to easily do end runs around the rules create by the Act. Ultimately, the Act fell far short of the intent the goals for those who wrote it.

Who Uses the Internet?

Pew Research Center released the results of a major survey that asked how Americans use the Internet, about smartphone ownership, and about the digital divide. There were over 5,000 completed surveys conducted in the first half of 2025.

Home Broadband

About 78% of respondents live in a home that has a broadband subscription. That’s an interesting statistic since there have been past FCC reports that say that as many as 88% of homes have broadband. I wrote a blog once about the difficulty of counting homes in the US. It’s not obvious how to account for second homes and abandoned homes, as we’ve seen in the FCC fabric. But Pew’s results are based on the number of people and not homes. Some of the differences between Pew and FCC data would include large groups of people like the unhoused and members of the military who don’t live in a home.

The Pew survey shows that there is still a big difference in broadband penetration related to household incomes. 94% of those in households with an annual household income over $100,000 have a broadband subscription, while only 54% of those with household incomes under $30,000 have broadband. This highlights the essence of the still prevalent digital divide. There was a lot of hope that the federal ACP plan that provided a $30 monthly subsidy would help millions of households afford broadband, but the ACP experiment ended not long after it started.

There is also a difference depending on where people live. The broadband subscription rate is 84% in suburbs, 75% in urban areas, and 71% in rural areas.

There is also a difference by age. 87% of those between 30 and 49 have broadband, while only 70% of those over 65 have a subscription. Surprisingly, only 71% of those between 18 and 29 have broadband, which is down from 78% from a survey released in 2023, but about the same as a survey from 2021. It’s hard to know if this represents a trend such as a migration to cellphones, or if this is a group that changes a lot based on factors like jobs and the economy.

For those that love statistics, Pew has a separate report that trends these results over time.

Smartphone Usage

According to the Pew Survey, 16% of adults are “smartphone dependent”. Meaning they rely on a smartphone for broadband access and don’t subscribe to home broadband. When added to those with a home broadband subscription, 94% of adults subscribe to some form of broadband.

Smartphone usage also varies by income, in relationships that are the opposite of home broadband subscriptions. 27% of those living in homes with incomes under $30,000 reach the Internet only through a smartphone, while only 4% of those with household incomes over $100,000 rely completely on a smartphone.

The same relationship to home broadband applies when looking at age. 27% of those between 18 and 29 only reach the Internet through a smartphone, while only 11% of those between 30 and 39 do so.

Pew notes that the percentage of those who rely on a smartphone only to reach the Internet has doubled from 8% in 2013.

BEAD Non-deployment Complications

The NTIA should be getting close to approving all of the state BEAD initial grant proposals. Once that has been done, one of the last big steps will be for NTIA to announce how States can receive and use the BEAD non-deployment funds. When NTIA initiated the Benefit of the Bargain rules, the amounts of BEAD allocated to infrastructure plummeted, and the non-deployment funds mushroomed to over $20 billion, almost half of the original $42.45 billion BEAD funding.

NTIA will hold a listening session soon to hear ideas from State Broadband Office on how they would like to use the funding. Most States had specific proposals for using the funds, but States may not have specific plans for the increased amounts of non-deployment created by the Benefit of the Bargain changes.

The nondeployment process got complicated when the White House issued an executive order that said that NTIA “must provide that States with onerous AI laws … are ineligible for non-deployment funds, to the maximum extent allowed by Federal law.”

A number of State Attorneys General have expressed a willingness to sue NTIA should they be denied non-deployment in general, but also specifically if they are denied because they have state AI regulations. There is a great article, written by Lawfare, on the legal issues involved if this issue is taken to court. The article concludes that States have a great argument to question if NTIA or an executive order can overcome the intent of Congress when it passed the original BEAD rules.

One interesting observation in that article is that the White House is relying on a claim that State AI regulations may harm the development and deployment of AI. The argument is that AI applications drive demand for the Internet, so any State regulations that threaten the use of AI also threaten the value of BEAD-funded infrastructure. If that line of reasoning is deemed to be valid, it would imply that NTIA could withhold funding related to any other web applications that uses a lot of broadband.

The AI issue got more interesting when 22 states and the District of Columbia filed comments with the FCC in December that ask that the agency to not preempt any State AI regulations. While many of the States in the filing are blue, the filing included Arizona, Tennessee, and Utah.

The final interesting aspect of the issue is legislation introduced by two republican Senators, Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), titled the SUCCESS for BEAD Act. The legislation is viewed as a way to negate the Executive Order and would require States to receive full funding and to distribute non-deployment funds through a competitive subgrant process. This would require grantees to provide a 25% match. The non-deployment funds could be used for six purposes: infrastructure improvement in rural areas, the enhancement of public safety and/or national security, network resiliency and cybersecurity protections, federal or military facilities, improving network latency, and the advancement of AI and related technologies.

Meanwhile, NTIA is still referring to non-deployment funds as savings, although there has been an acknowledgement that some of the funds should be distributed to States. I suspect that if NTIA does anything less than full distribution of all of the funds, we’ll see some combination of legislation and lawsuits to gain access to the funds.

AI Needs Quality Upload Speeds

The pandemic exposed a huge weakness in cable company networks when it became clear that their networks did not have enough upload capacity to support people working and schooling from home. That period when people struggled to work from home might have been the trigger to convince millions of people that fiber was superior to cable technology. The cable companies reacted quickly and goosed upload speeds to the range of 30-40 Mbps. Since then, they have slowly been upgrading to much faster upload speeds using mid-splits and DOCSIS 4.0.

A recent article from Ookla suggests that the same need for faster upload speeds might be coming for cellular networks due to the way that people are starting to use AI in daily life. The article provides some examples of ways we might use AI in the near future. A person might scan a menu in a restaurant, and AI can provide real-time feedback to estimate the calories in each dish or highlight foods that might trigger an allergic reaction. This would require quickly uploading a picture of the menu to provide quick feedback. That’s not a data-intensive transaction, but consider instead using AI to provide real-time feedback to somebody walking around in a foreign city. AI could translate signs and describe the nature of stores or shops as they come into view.

 

U.S. cellular companies have allocated the smallest percentage of bandwidth to upload compared to the major cell providers around the world. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have allocated between 6.6% and 7.1% of total bandwidth capacity to upload. In contrast, China Telecom and China Unicom have allocated over 16% of bandwidth to upload.

In writing this blog, I took a speed test on AT&T and got a speed of 381/11 Mbps on my cellphone. I note this is the fastest download speed I’ve ever received on AT&T, by a lot, and shows the impact of the AT&T’s recent introduction of the spectrum acquired from EchoStar. I took several other tests with similar results, and at my house, the upload speeds are only about 3% of total bandwidth.

American cellular carriers seem to be in a race to claim the fastest network for bragging rights, and this has led them to maximize download speeds to an extreme degree. I doubt that many people are complaining except for folks who are trying to stream video from their phone. When I swap my phone over to WiFi, the upload speed in my Charter connection is more than 10 times faster than the AT&T cellular upload connection.

The article points out that carriers have options to boost upload speeds. The one that is discussed the most in the article is to convert cellular networks to dynamic TDD (time division duplexing), which would allow the phone to assign bandwidth available to the phone to either download or upload, according to the immediate need.

But that fix alone wouldn’t solve the problem, because a carrier would need to beef up the entire network in the upload direction to handle larger volumes of uploaded data. There are other interesting limitations. For example, if a carrier uses shared spectrum like CBRS for uploading, then setting a faster upload would have to be coordinated with the other major users of the spectrum to synchronize the network clocks.

The Ookla article also demonstrates that handsets can be a limitation by showing the upload speeds that can be achieved on different generations of Samsung Galaxy phones. with lower upload capability on older phones.

The slow upload speed on my tests might be an anomaly, but before AT&T introduced the new spectrum, my upload speeds were rarely faster than 5 Mbps. Ookla says that median upload speeds in the second half of 2025 were 18 Mbps for AT&T, 21 Mbps for Verizon, and 27 Mbps for T-Mobile – all slow in comparison to fiber and upgraded cable technologies.

Starlink Flexing Its Market Power

In a short period of time, Starlink has taken three actions that demonstrates the company’s growing market power. The companies market power will be strengthened with the impending merger between SpaceX and Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI. Analysts have estimated the combined companies could garner a market value over $1 trillion.

The first move from Starlink came on January 15 when the company updated its user Privacy Policy. The revised terms say that, unless a customer opts out, Starlink can use user data “to train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models”, and that user data could be shared with third-party collaborators without providing more details to customers.

This should be disturbing to customers, because this doesn’t just mean sharing details of emails. In today’s broadband world, it could mean sharing video images, voice prints, and the giant amount of private information that an ISP can learn about its customers if it is looking.

Starlink’s second big move came when it sent a document to State Broadband Offices where Starlink is a tentative winner of BEAD grants. Starlink asked that LEO providers be excused from many of the BEAD obligations that will apply to other grant winners. The Starlink communication included a veiled threat that the company could pull out of BEAD if SBOs don’t meet its suggested terms.

Among the suggested changes, Starlink payments would not be linked to adding subscribers, and it would get 50% of BEAD funding up front and the rest over a specified schedule. Starlink would not have to provide financial reporting or provide any documentation about how it spends the grant funding. Starlink wants to be excused from speed test requirements since it can’t guarantee that subscribers have installed the satellite receiver properly. Starlink also wants to be excused from insurance and labor requirements.

On January 30, SpaceX asked the FCC for the ability to launch 1 million new satellites to create a giant orbital data center for AI. These satellites would be placed between 310 and 1,240 miles above Earth, in narrow 30-mile bands that would leave room to deconflict with other companies with similar goals. SpaceX says the giant satellite constellation is needed as the first step for humanity to become a Kardashev II-level civilization that fully harnesses the Sun’s power, while also providing enough AI capacity to serve billions of people. FYI, a Kardashev II-level civilization is one that fully harnesses the total energy output from its parent star. SpaceX says putting data centers in space is the most efficient way to meet the growing energy demands of AI data centers.

The constellation would use laser communications between satellites and would communicate back to Earth using Starlink’s current broadband constellation.  SpaceX says it could launch the data center satellites at a rapid pace using its new Starship launch vehicle.

Announcing these three things within a month shows a company that is feeling emboldened enough by market power to act as it wishes. If a terrestrial ISP openly said it will use customer data to train AI, it would risk being shunned in the market, but Starlink operates in many places where there are no other competitive options. I wonder how safe Starlink customers will feel about their data even if they opt out of sharing it with Starlink.

It’s going to be interesting to see how State Broadband Offices react to the Starlink demand for easier BEAD terms. Many of the SBOs didn’t want to make big awards to LEO satellite providers, and were coerced by  NTIA to do so with the Benefit of the Bargain rules. It’s not unimaginable that some States will outright reject Starlink’s request, which could lead to some interesting fights between States and NTIA.

The request to launch 1 million satellites could be a stunt to boost interest in the upcoming IPO and merger. Or it could be real. This FCC clearly favors satellite technology, but even for them, a request to launch 1 million satellites has to be an extreme request.

Broadband Shorts January 2026

This blog covers topics that I found interesting but which don’t warrant an entire blog.

Indoor CBRS. Federated Wireless announced a new product and a system that allows cellular carriers to use CBRS spectrum inside large buildings like hotels, malls, office buildings, and sports venues. The system places CBRS antennas throughout a building to provide the needed coverage. The concept behind the deployment is to let the carriers use free CBRS spectrum inside buildings to preserve licensed spectrum for outdoors. Currently, big crowds, like at a sporting event, can use licensed spectrum that reduces the coverage in the immediately surrounding areas. All except really old cellphones are capable of using CBRS spectrum.

Map of Data Centers by State. I found this map that shows the number of existing data centers in each state to be interesting.

Customer Interest in Satellite Cellular. A report published by GSMA Intelligence showed that 56% of the U.S. respondents to a survey said they would pay extra each month to be able to connect to satellite cellular. One of the interesting statistics from the survey is that 23% of cellular customers reported that they were unable to use basic texting at least 5 times per month. That’s not surprising to anybody who has studied rural cellular coverage, and who understands that the typical city has numerous dead zones for a given carrier.

While this finding is clearly encouraging for the companies busy deploying satellites for cell service, the 60% finding is likely overstated for now and will probably decrease once the public understands the limits of satellite cellular. It doesn’t work well indoors and is a challenge from a moving vehicle. It seems likely that satellite cellular will be far less robust in terms of data capabilities. I suspect over time that the fledgling industry will tackle these shortcomings, and this could eventually become popular product for anybody who  lives or routinely works in areas with poor cell coverage.

Starlink Approved for More Satellites. The FCC recently authorized Starlink to operate an additional 7,500 next-generation satellites. This order doubles Starlink’s authorized next-generation satellites to 15,000, still only half of its request for 30,000 additional satellites. The FCC deferred any decision on the remaining 14,988 Starlink requests to use orbits above 600 kilometers. This order also allows Starlink to expand the use of spectrum in the Ku- and Ka-bands for links to customers, and the V-, E-, and W-bands for connections to earth station gateways.

CommScope Cancels Fiber Factory Expansion. On the day that CommScope was renamed as Vistance Networks, the company announced it is cancelling plans to expand its fiber manufacturing facility in Catawba, North Carolina. In doing so, the company will be foregoing a $2 million economic development grant that would have covered some of the $60 million expansion cost. The expansion was going to create 250 additional jobs.

One reason for the change is a recent transaction where CommScope spun off much of its manufacturing capacity to Amphenol.  The announcement also said part of the change was due to the smaller amount of fiber being constructed with BEAD grants. While there is a lot of current discussion about a short-term supply chain issue with obtaining fiber, it’s likely that the company also looked out at fiber demand five and ten years from now.

Who Lives in Rural America?

We’ve spent a lot of time and money in recent years to get better broadband for rural America. I thought it would be of interest to look at who lives in rural America. The statistics in this blog come from a recent blog published by FHFA, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau and is supplemented by data from the Census’s American Community Survey (ACS).

Rural Population. There are 81.7 million people living in rural areas, or 24.4% of the total population. The percentage of rural residents varies widely by state, with Massachusetts being the most urbanized state with 4.1% of people living in rural areas, and Vermont the most rural state with 80.9% of residents living in rural areas.

Ages of Residents. There is a higher percentage of senior residents over 65 in rural areas, at 19.2%, compared with urban areas of 15.7%. A lot of the reason for this is the lower percentage of residents between the ages of 18 and 64 in rural areas, at 44.6%, compared to 49.7% in urban areas. This highlights one of the biggest issues for rural America – working-age people leave rural areas to find employment. Both rural and urban areas have 22% of the population under 18 years of age, but 5% of rural people leave to join the workforce.

The age issue is a real concern for rural counties. According to Census estimates, almost half of U.S. counties have lost population since 2021. The fear is that an aging rural population will mean an acceleration of the population loss issue.

Incomes. Median household incomes are lower in rural America. 39.5% of rural households have a household income under $50,000, compared to 32.5% of urban households. Rural areas also have what FHFA calls income compression, meaning that there is not as much difference between the poorest and wealthiest in rural areas. For example, around 13.5% of rural households have annual incomes over $150,000, while that percentage in urban areas is over 22%.

Housing. As you might expect, the rest of the FHFA report focuses on housing statistics. One of the most interesting statistics looks at the percentage of homes purchased as second homes or for investment purposes. In rural areas, those categories represented 18% of homes in 2018 and 21% of homes in 2019. That dropped to 11% of home purchases in 2023. In urban areas, these categories totaled to 11% in 2018, down to 9% in 2023. I can only guess, but factors that would contribute to this change in rural areas might be related to the overall economy, but also to the fact that a lot of retiring baby boomers may have invested in second homes in the earlier time frame.

A really interesting statistic is the median household income of those who bought homes. In rural areas, that was around $87,000 in 2019 and grew to almost $90,000 in 2023. In urban areas, the median household income of home buyers was $95,000 in 2019 and grew to over 102,000 by 2023. These statistics point to two trends. First, homes in rural areas tend to cost less, meaning that borrowers can qualify for loans with a lower household income. But the high level of the median household incomes in both rural and urban areas highlights the difficulty that young households have in affording to buy a home.