Financial Limitations on Growth

I’ve worked with rural counties across the country, and one of most common recurring themes is a hope from elected officials that local ISPs will step up and build fiber and solve the broadband gaps in the area. County officials often beg local ISPs to pursue grant funding. Far too many times, local ISPs are unable to expand to provide what they are being asked to do.

Only rarely have I ever heard a small ISP admit to local leaders the real reason it can’t solve the broadband gaps. The primary reason that ISPs can’t expand at will is the natural limits on financing for growth. I can’t recall ever hearing an ISP tell a County government that they are unable to borrow the needed funding. I think this is because they think it will diminish them in the eyes of the local officials and make them sound like a small business.

The market reality is that every ISP has a ceiling on the amount of money it can borrow. This limit is not set by the ISP – it’s set by lenders. I’ve often been asked by ISPs to quantify their borrowing limit, but it’s never an easy question to answer. When banks make loans, they look at obvious things like the ability of cash flow to cover debt payments, and at the ratio of debt and equity at a given business. There are also a lot more subtle issues involved in the decision for a bank to make loan, like the bank’s own overall equity and cash holdings, the national trend of interest rates, and the lender’s mix of different types of loans. Just like an ISP doesn’t want to publicly disclose its ability to borrow, banks rarely tell an ISP the real reasons they don’t qualify for a loan.

County officials often assume that it’s easier to find the needed funding if part of a project is funded by a grant. If anything, grant funding can make it harder to borrow, because the borrower has to satisfy the future requirements of the grant agency as well as the requirements of the bank.

This problem is not unique to ISPs, and every kind of business has a natural borrowing limit, just like every family has a limit on the amount of money they can borrow to buy a new home. We tend to think that broadband expansion projects are different because they are loans to build long-term infrastructure, but building a broadband network is not a lot different than building a new factory or a new retail location.

One unique category of ISP is startups. These are new ISPs, or ones that have only a few customers. With rare exceptions, new ISPs are unable to get loans until they have somehow self-funded enough to reach a size and a balance sheet that a bank will even consider.

Having a natural borrowing limit is not unique to small ISPs. Altice, which recently rebranded to Optimum, is in financial hot water because it looks like it is facing a huge challenge to refinance its outstanding debt that is coming due in a large balloon payment. One of the factors that convinced EchoStar to abandon the facility-based cellular business was the challenge of borrowing more to meet its existing debt payments.

The only realistic alternative to borrowing for most ISPs is to accept equity funding. Small ISP owners are generally reluctant to accept equity because it means giving up control of the business. One of the biggest benefits of being a small ISP is that the owners can carve their own path and do things their own way. That freedom quickly ceases when an ISP accepts any significant equity funding.

I guess the bottom line of this discussion is that communities have to have a realistic expectation for small ISPs in the area. These companies would probably love to expand and serve everybody, and if they are not doing so, there is a good chance that they can’t raise the funding needed to expand. Very few ISPs are going to say this in public, but don’t read the fact that they won’t expand to mean they wouldn’t love to.

FCC Robocall Filing Due for All Voice Providers

The FCC adopted new rules for voice providers that are part of the FCC’s effort to curtail robocalls. The new rules apply to every voice provider that sells a retail voice product to end-user customers, along with other categories of providers like voice wholesalers and international providers. The new rules were effective on February 5.  The key new rules include the following:

  • Every voice service provider (VSP) has to register in the Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) by March 1. Any VSP that is already in that database must update its information by that date.
  • The FCC issued a stern warning to any VSP that doesn’t register as required. There are fines of as much as $10,000 for not registering or for submitting false or inaccurate information to the RMD. The FCC also established a $1,000 fine for any late registrations or updates.
  • VSPs will also now need to renew the registration annually.
  • Finally, VSPs must update the FCC within 10 business days any time they make a change that affects their information in the FCC’s CORES database.

The mechanics of the new rules are that every VSP must have a unique token that gets associated with the call records that identifies the VSP. In past filings, a lot of VSPs simply reported that they rely on the tokens from another upstream provider. The new rules make it clear that every company that sells voice needs to have its own token.

These new rules are going to catch a lot of ISPs and CLECs off guard. It’s likely that most companies that still operate a voice switch knew about these rules in the past – and if they didn’t, the FCC plans to hunt down non-compliant carriers through the databases.

But the big change is that this applies to ISPs that buy wholesale VoIP and repackage it to their customers. These VSPs must comply with the new rules.

The FCC plans to implement an annual $100 filing fee to accompany the annual certification. However, that hasn’t been implemented yet, and VSPs can file for free right now.

The CCG team can help with any aspect of these filings, so contact me at blackbean2@ccgcomm.com if you need help.

A Three Nines World?

FierceNetwork recently published a thought-provoking article by Steve Saunders that asks, “is four nines the new five nines?”  That’s a question that only network engineers will understand, but it is a shorthand way to talk about the reliability of our networks.

The phrase five nines refers to having a goal for a network to be in service 99.999% of the time. That’s an incredible level of uptime, and a five nines network is expected to not be out of service more than five minutes in a year. A four nines network would have the goal of not being out of service more than 53 minutes per year, and three nines would lower the goal to 526 minutes, or just under nine hours per year.

I have a lot of clients who have signed contracts with large data customers to meet four or five nines of reliability. The only way to make that guarantee is to have a lot of redundancy. That would mean physically redundant fiber routes to protect against fiber cuts. It would mean self-healing electronics that quickly adapt to fiber outages or the loss of a key set of electronics. It means having software that can quickly be reset as needed.

In the last few years, we’ve seen network outages of major proportions. The latest outage by Verizon knocked a lot of customers out for half a day. There have been multiple regional and national outages due to problems in the Amazon AWS data centers. The breadth and magnitude of these regional outages is making it hard for any ISP to guarantee that networks will be reliable due to problems cause upstream by larger industry players.

As Saunders points out, the culprit of most of the big outages is software. The software that controls the Internet has grown increasingly complex. Sanders says the communications networks have grown as complex as the systems that operate a nuclear submarine.

The article points to the complexity associated with the recent big Verizon outage. The problem was something that affected the standalone 5G core network. Verizon’s core network includes electronics and software from five vendors  – Case Systems, Ericsson, Nokia, Oracle, and Red Hat / OpenShift. – along with Verizon’s own software.

Saunders says the issue is structural. While Verizon network engineers are elite, they are expected to operate networks that have grown to a level of complexity that is beyond the ability of technicians to fully understand everything. I’m sure Verizon still has an internal goal of five nines, but the company can no longer realistically understand the complexity of its network and the interplay of the many diverse components.

The problems and the outages are likely to grow worse as we continue to convert to software-defined networks, and as big companies consolidate network operations and eliminate technicians as a cost savings. We are also increasingly using AI to write complex software, which is reducing our ability to fully understand and debug problems during a crisis.

Saunders points to another issue, which is the erosion of the separation between LAN and WAN. For decades, businesses have been secure behind firewalls since they ran different software inside the company than what was used to communicate outside the company. But that distinction has become blurred as a lot of software now reaches across that barrier.

The article’s conclusion is that we are probably going to have to learn to live with big outages. The day of expecting to be connected to super-safe networks is gone. The Verizon outage shows that we might already be living in a three nines world, something that makes every network engineer cringe.

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.