New Mexico’s New Broadband Affordability Plan

The legislature in New Mexico approved a broadband affordability plan, which it labels as LITAP (Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program). This plan is intended as a direct replacement of the expired federal Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP).

Like the ACP plan, the New Mexico plan would provide a $30 monthly subsidy to qualified households, with up to $75 for those living on tribal lands. The total subsidy is capped at $10 million in the first year, and up to $45 million in future years.

The plan will be funded by the existing State Rural Universal Service Fund (SRUSF), which is administered by the Public Regulatory Commission. This program has historically been funded by surcharges on customer bills for telephone, VoIP, or cellular service. The SRUSF is currently being used to subsidize telephone bills, carrier support for access charges, and for broadband programs to help bring broadband to rural areas. The current surcharge on customers is $0.61 per month for 2026, down from $1.13 in 2024. It’s estimated that when the LITAP plan goes fully into effect, the surcharge might climb to $2 per month.

One feature of the legislation is that this new broadband subsidy will supersede the existing subsidies for telephone service. The legislation requires any ISP that uses the revised program to participate in the Lifeline program. The federal plan currently provides a $9.25 monthly subsidy for eligible households, and up to $34.25 on qualifying tribal lands.

Households will be eligible for the subsidy if they participate in two New Mexico plans for need-based health care assistance, or for “at-risk” students in the home. LITAP will also be available for any customer who is eligible for the federal Lifeline program. When fully funded at $45 million, the new fund will subsidize approximately 120,000 households.

The legislation was prompted by a recognition by legislators that affordability is the largest barrier to residents buying broadband. This makes sense in the state since New Mexico is ranked 46th in terms of household incomes. The state has also consistently been in the top three of states with the highest level of poverty.

This is the first state plan I’ve seen that largely mimics the now-defunct federal ACP subsidy. New York has a plan that requires larger ISPs to offer $15 rates to qualified low-income households. Hopefully the New Mexico plan will be welcomed by ISPs in the State, particularly those who are building grant-funded networks. This plan will make it far easier to achieve needed customer penetration rates.

It seems unlikely that the new plan can easily be challenged in court. The SRUSF was created in 1999 and has been providing subsidies for telephone bills since its inception.

Perhaps this will prompt other states to do something similar. There are a lot of other states that already have a Universal Service Fund for telecom that is based on surcharges to customers.

A Telehealth Success Story

I’ve been hearing for years about how good broadband can open access to telemedicine. It’s certainly something that is increasingly needed as rural hospitals and clinics are closing across the country. But telehealth is not just a rural issue, and a recent article by Sean Gonvales points out a successful telehealth program in San Francisco.

The SF Tech Council, a collaboration of government and nonprofit entities, undertook an effort to train patients on how to use patient medical portals. Patient portals are online systems that allow patients to communicate with doctors, manage appointments, check lab results, or ask for refills on prescriptions. I’ve been using a portal with my own family doctor, and it’s a great tool for handling things that used to require phone calls or even a doctor visit. A well-run portal makes life easier for patients and physicians.

What the group in San Fransico realized is that a lot of patients were unfamiliar with portals and didn’t understand how to establish a portal connection or use a portal. Using funding from a State digital inclusion grant, the group created a hands-on training effort to help patients learn how to navigate a portal. In San Francisco, the training has been aimed at low-income patients, those with low computer literacy skills, or the many people in the community who speak Chinese or Spanish.

I found this story to be intriguing because it demonstrates the need for hands-on digital skills training. Portals are being increasingly used because they allow the entities we communicate with online verify who they are talking with. In addition to medical portals, portals are used to communicate with an increasing number of federal, state, and local government agencies like FEMA and Social Security. Portals are being used by banks, credit card companies, mortgage companies, and student loan processors.

The folks in San Francisco realized that people were leaving a doctor visit with instructions to follow up through the portal, but then never made the digital connection. The grants funded the ability to establish a hands-on session with a digital navigator who walked people through using a portal in a 45-minute training session.

The feedback was that nearly all participants in the training walked away knowing how to establish and navigate a portal. It’s likely that this training will also give folks more confidence in using the increasing number of other kinds of portals. The feedback was that once people knew how to use a portal, they saw the benefits and were eager to use it.

Every time I read about one of these success stories, I’m saddened that the federal government backed out of funding for digital skills training. This particular success story comes from a State grant, and States can certainly fill in some of the gap created by the cancelled federal funding. However, the federal grant funding for these kinds of training efforts was only going to last for a few years, so there was already going to be a need to establish ongoing programs for these kinds of training efforts.

One thing that the opportunity for federal funding for digital inclusion did was to get a lot of people interested in establishing local digital equity efforts. Hopefully, this momentum will mean these efforts will move forward without the federal funds. At the local level, there are a lot of government agencies and nonprofits that might offer basic skills training like this one. Perhaps a coalition of doctors and hospitals might take on the role to make sure that patients know how to use the needed digital tools. It would make sense if insurance companies would embrace this – they all acknowledge that preventive care saves money, and making sure that patients follow-up visits through a portal is part of the preventive care process.

Broadband Shorts February 2026

The following are a few interesting stories that don’t warrant a standalone blog, but that I found interesting.

Amazon One Delays. Amazon asked the FCC for a two-year delay in meeting its commitment to launch half of its promised constellation of 3,236 satellites. The deadline for having more than 1,600 satellites in orbit was July 30 of this year. As of the date of writing this blog, the company only has 212 satellites in orbit. Amazon says it has contracted for ten additional 10 SpaceX launches to speed up its process.

This is bad news for homes where Amazon One was the BEAD winner, like a number of counties where I live in Western North Carolina. If Amazon follows the historical path of Starlink, it will need at least 1,600 satellites in orbit to provide reasonable service, and more is better. With no additional delays, the service likely won’t be available until at least late summer 2028.

In related news, the FCC granted Amazon One the ability to add 4,500 satellites to its broadband constellation. This increase would result in the following: 3,232 Generation 1 satellites, 3,212 second-generation satellites, and 1,292 satellites in a polar orbit.

NTIA Opposes Relaxation of BEAD Compliance Requirements. Starlink sent a request to numerous states asking for relaxed BEAD implementation rules, which included a request that Starlink would not have to conduct speed tests for BEAD-funded customers. NTIA quickly added a new item to its Frequently Asked Questions that states that, “no BEAD statutory requirements or other program rules may be altered by a BEAD subgrant agreement”.

Charter Grows Cable Subscribers. Charter surprisingly grew cable customers in the fourth quarter of 2025 after losing customers every quarter for years. I laughed when I read that, because I know how they did this since I am one of their new cable subscribers. We called and asked about upgrading to gigabit broadband and were offered a lower price than what we pay today for 500 Mbps, but only if we agreed to take cable TV. I am now a phantom Charter cable customer who will never watch any of the content. Like many millions of households, I am no longer interested in linear TV that forces me to surf through channels I don’t want to watch.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. Twelve years ago, I was forced to take cable TV from Comcast in order to get broadband. The settop box went into the closet the first day and was never plugged in. I have to assume both Comcast and Charter paid programmers on my behalf, which is an odd and expensive financial choice.

Rural Backhaul. WISPA, the trade association for wireless ISPs, complained to the FCC that Charter is refusing to renew contracts to provide backhaul to many of its WISP members. WISPs are reliant on having at least some of the towers in a network connected by fiber, and if companies like Charter stop selling backhaul, some WISP networks will be degraded or could even go dark.

Buying rural backhaul has always been a challenge in many parts of the country due to the small number of companies with fiber that are willing to sell bandwidth to other ISPs. Many rural ISPs are forced to pay far more per gigabyte to buy rural backhaul from telcos and cable companies. It’s hard to speculate why Charter would do this. The company might want to focus its sales and marketing efforts elsewhere. But it could also be for a more sinister reason if Charter is doing this to eliminate or cripple rural competition.

Comcast Class-Action Settlement. Comcast settled a class-action lawsuit and agreed to pay $117.5 million as a result of a data breach that released sensitive customer data. That may sound like a lot, but the settlement covers 31.7 million customers and works out to a settlement of $3.70 per customer before subtracting out the amount that will go to lawyers. This settlement doesn’t place much value on customer privacy and data.

Broadband Grant Deadlines

The industry and the press have been laser-focused on BEAD grants for the last few years. It’s easy to forget that there are a lot of federal broadband grants that have been issued under other grant programs, many of which are facing completion deadlines. This includes grants from programs like CAF II, RDOF, ReConnect, the Capital Projects Fund, ARPA grants funded through SLFRF, NTIA middle-mile grants, and the NTIA Tribal Grants.

A lot of projects under these grants have a deadline to be completed this year or in 2027. Today’s blog looks at the consequences of not finishing a grant project by the legislative deadline.

The grants that face the most immediate deadlines at the end of 2026 include State grants that were funded by the Capital Projects Fund or through SLFRF. These grants would have been awarded through individual State broadband grant programs, but the underlying money came from federal legislation. ARPA grants might have also come from counties or cities. These grants have a hard completion deadline of December 31 of this year.

I’ve been hearing from State Broadband managers that the Federal government has no appetite for any extensions of this funding. This is not news, and they’ve been saying the same thing for the last year, but lately, they have been reminding states of this.

It’s been routine in the past for ISPs to get extensions for grant construction as long as they had a good story of why they needed the extra time. In today’s environment, there are a lot of reasons why construction might be delayed. It could be due to challenges in getting permits, rights-of-way, or easements. It might mean having problems getting onto poles because of recalcitrant pole owners. It might be due to supply chain problems in receiving needed materials. It might come from labor shortages that slow construction vendors. If the federal agencies behind the grants enforce the legislative deadlines, none of these excuses will matter.

Grant recipients need to do everything in their power to finish construction this year. With no extensions, any work done after the deadline will not be reimbursed. I’ve been hearing rumors that failure to complete a federal grant program on time might also make an ISP ineligible for any future federal broadband funding.

If hard deadlines are enforced, this could also be coupled with a hard deadline for submitting grant paperwork quickly. Most grant programs in the past have allowed grantees some leniency after construction is completed to submit invoices. Hard deadlines might result in rejection of invoices sent after the deadline. Most grants also require some kind of close-out reporting to document that the project construction is completed, and ISPs need to get any such report completed quickly.

Anybody working with a State Broadband Office needs to understand their specific requirements. For example, there might be states that want paperwork submitted and completed by the legislative deadline, meaning construction has to be completed even earlier than the end of the year. ISPs also need to push vendors to invoice for the grant-funded projects quickly to provide proof of the spending.

I am positive that some ISPs will be surprised if they don’t get reimbursed for work they have completed. Grant offices have sent out deadline warnings for years, but have often given routine exceptions for lateness. It sounds like, starting this year, that deadlines are firm with little or no room for exceptions.

Cellular Backup for Broadband

Amazon announced a new device that offers broadband backup for broadband outages. The new device is the eero Signal, which is an add-on to Amazon’s eero WiFi system that will automatically connect a customer to cellular broadband any time the primary broadband connection fails.

For now, the device works with 4G and retails for $99.99. For the purchase price, a customer gets the device plus six months of backup service. After that, there is an annual $99.99 subscription. A 5G version of the products is coming soon that will have a $199.99 annual subscription fee. In both cases, the customer also has to have an eero subscription, which can cost as much as $9.99 per month or $99.99 for a year.

The Signal device will connect with the strongest carrier signal in your area, meaning that Amazon has made arrangements with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. There are usage limitations, and the cellular connection can’t be used as a primary broadband connection. I’m curious how long the device will function for somebody who has a multiday outage. One of the other caveats of the device is a warning that customers can’t connect to 911 through the device.

Amazon is clearly counting on folks willing to pay extra for instantaneous broadband backup. The service seems pricy to me. I have several broadband outages every month on my cable broadband connection, and most last for 15 minutes or less. If I’m working on my computer,  I can activate my cellular hotspot within a minute if I really need an Internet connection, but I often just wait for the outage to clear. But I’m not the target customer for the product since my quick fix is only for the computer I am using. I don’t operate any critical devices on WiFi, like a security system, fire alarms, or a health monitor. The biggest draw of the service for folks with those devices is that the eero Signal product will support WiFi for all of the devices in the home, including when the customer is away from home.

In December, AT&T also announced a new broadband backup service. This is a free product that offers cellular backup to customers who buy both AT&T broadband and cellular service. This backup also provides cellular broadband for the whole home, but only if the activated cellphone is within range of the home Internet gateway. The broadband gateway will instantly start using cellular broadband if the normal broadband connection is lost. One of the best features of this service is that it requires no new hardware or a subscription. But this wouldn’t provide backup for critical devices if the customer isn’t home or in range with the cellphone.

Both companies obviously think there is a need and a market for a backup service. AT&T is oddly acknowledging that its broadband has enough outages for this service to be an issue. I’m going to guess that Amazon isn’t going to be the only hardware company to offer this. The idea of creating a recurring revenue stream has to be attractive to folks who normally sell hardware.

Broadband Usage in 4Q 2025

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the fourth quarter of 2025. One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per household in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the third quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.The average U.S. broadband customer used 59 more downloaded gigabytes and 10 more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 8.3 billion more gigabytes of data cross the Internet than a year earlier.

As can be seen in the table above, upload usage has been growing at a faster pace than download usage. In a recent quarterly report, OpenVault credited the growth of upload usage to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses. To put the 10-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading an additional 7 standard definition movie files or 3 high definition movie files every month compared to a year earlier. I think the average household would be surprised by the volume of data they are uploading each month.

The report made an interesting comparison between HFC technology and fiber for an unnamed cable company. When comparing customers that subscribed to equivalent fast download speeds, the average customer using cable technology uploaded 58 gigabytes, while the average fiber customer uploaded 93 gigabytes. Clearly, the slow upload speeds on cable (an average of 17.3 Mbps) are restricting uploading compared to fiber customers with symmetrical data plans.

Another interesting statistic is the percentage of U.S. subscribers at different speed tiers. For the last several years, there has been a steady migration of subscribers from slower speed tiers to the fastest tiers, and there is continued erosion in customers subscribing to speeds under 100 Mbps. What’s most interesting about the two years is a big jump in subscribers in the 200-499 Mbps tier and a decrease in subscribers buying speeds faster than 500 Mbps. My best guess is that this is reflecting the continued migration of millions of homes to FWA wireless. Those households seem to be willing to accept slower speeds as a trade-off for the lower prices.

One thing this table demonstrates is the absurdity of the FCC’s current definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. At the end of 2025, 87.4% of U.S. broadband subscribers are buying a product with speeds of 200 Mbps download or faster.

OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • The annual average increase in usage is growing over time. In 2022, households used 50 gigabytes more than the previous year. That’s increased to 54 GB in 2023, 57 GB in 2024, and 69 GB in 2025.
  • Super Power Users (those that use more than 2 terabytes of data per month grew by 22.5% in 2025, to become 7.4% of all households.

Median usage grew from 461.2 GB in 2024 to 531.8 GB in 2025. The median is the number where 50% of customers use less and 50% use more. That’s an increase of 15.3%, which is a faster growth rate than for average usage (9.9%). OpenVault credits the faster increase in median speeds to faster growth than average for customers with smaller monthly usage.

Unintended Consequences

The industry news is always full of big events like mergers, bankruptcies, new regulations, or regulations killed. I’ve written many blogs about these kinds of issues, but I have rarely written about the unintended consequences of big industry changes. Today’s blog looks at two examples of unintended consequences.

The first is the decision  by EchoStar to abandon the facility-based cellular business. There were several factors that led to the company’s decision to abandon the business line, but the company says the primary reason was pressure from the FCC to use the spectrum it owned or return it to the FCC for auction. The FCC was also pressuring the company to build faster and to get more customers.

One of the unintended consequences of the FCC nudging EchoStar out of the cellular business is that the company decided in 2025 that its best option for maximizing value was to sell the spectrum it planned to use for cell towers. The company sold spectrum to Starlink that will support the company’s entry into the satellite cellular business. EchoStar also sold spectrum to AT&T, which was put to immediate use to boost bandwidth at 23,000 cell sites nationwide. Both of these consequences are positive for the industry and will benefit many millions of customers.

Another consequence of EchoStar abandoning cell towers is that the company walked away from a huge number of long-term leases for space on cell towers. A group of ten tower company executives met with the FCC recently and asked for help to recover the abandoned payments from EchoStar. The company says it had no choice but to walk away from the leases since it is no longer using towers, and they say this fits the “force majeure” clause in its contracts with tower owners that excuse payments in the case of an unforeseeable event. It’s going to be interesting to see if the FCC does anything, or even if they have any authority to intervene in a business contractual dispute. This same thing happens all of the time on a smaller scale when carriers and ISPs walk away from leases they no longer need, and the only real difference in the case is the magnitude of the issue. My bet is that the FCC will do nothing since this is now a commercial contract dispute, and it will probably tell tower owners to take their claims to court.

Another big piece of news is Verizon’s purchase of Frontier Communications. The purchase process started sixteen months before the deal finally closed, and much has changed in the industry since then. When the transaction was first announced, CEO Hans Vestberg touted the sale as moving Verizon forward in pursuing convergence. That’s the new industry phrase that replaces the old triple-play strategy and now refers to bundling broadband and cellphones.

Companies generally pursue mergers in an attempt to boost stock prices, and it will be interesting to see if that happens for Verizon. There are already industry analysts panning the merger, saying that it doesn’t really move the needle for Verizon. Pre-transaction, Verizon’s fiber covers 9.2% of the country, and Frontier brings another 4.3% coverage. This pales against the cable companies that lead in the convergence battle, with the biggest cable companies collectively passing 90% of households in the country.

There are also other consequences when companies merge. Verizon will claim it’s gaining efficiencies from the merger, but the real consequence is that a lot of folks at Frontier will lose jobs that would have been safe without the merger. Many of the vendors and suppliers that supported Frontier will suddenly find they have lost a giant customer. It’s likely that eventually the prices of the products at the two companies will be brought into synch, and since Verizon’s fiber prices are higher than Frontier’s, it probably means eventual price increases for Frontier customers.

AI Bots and Web Traffic

One of the fastest-growing uses of the Internet is coming from AI scrapers. These are companies that crawl the web and scrape content to sell to AI companies to train models or sell to others looking for specific kinds of content. The scraping is done by bots that visit a website and copy the content. This is all machine-to-machine traffic with no human involvement. This traffic doesn’t reach to homes or businesses but instead impacts the Internet by increasing the traffic between data centers on backbone fiber routes and at Internet hubs.

According to a report from Tollbit, at the beginning of 2025, there was one visit by an AI bot to a website for every 200 human visits. By the end of the year, that ratio dropped to one AI bot visit for every 31 human visits.

Scraping websites for content is a controversial activity since it often involves grabbing copyrighted materials from news sites and other sources. A lot of companies have tried to make it hard to scrape the content from their site, but even the most sophisticated tech companies are finding the practice difficult to stop or block. The scraping bots are often successfully snagging content that is behind paywalls.

The practice is playing havoc with the traditional web compensation model of paying for click-throughs to websites. The click-throughs generated to websites are dropping as people use AI sites to answer questions instead of visiting the raw source of information. As an increasing percentage of searches are done through AI, the traditional compensation model will become obsolete – which is bad news for content providers. This also spells long-term trouble for search engines like Google that make money by directing users to websites.

Content providers claim that the AI bots are bypassing the robot.txt web protocol that provides a directory to web scrawlers to define the parts of a website that are open to scraping and areas that are copyrighted and off limits.

The AI bots are becoming increasingly able to mimic human users to avoid capthca and other tools used to frustrate bots. There is a technology battle being waged as content providers try new ways to frustrate bots and bots find new ways to bypass any blocking tools.

There are some well-known lawsuits from content providers to try to stop scrapers. In October 2025, Reddit sued Perplexity and related businesses. The Reddit suit claims that bots are illegally taking copyrighted materials. The Reddit suit also attacks the tactic of bots that mimic human users to grab content.

Google filed a suit in December 2025 against SerpApi for grabbing copyrighted materials, and also complains that the bot company uses illegal tactics such as armies of bots to overwhelm servers and fake and constantly changing user names to frustrate security measures.

There are a lot of consequences from this growing traffic for the companies that control the web. AI bot traffic is growing at a rate of over 25% annually while human visits to websites have started to decline. People don’t feel a need to visit websites when they can get questions answered by an AI search engine. The companies funding the basic Internet infrastructure are getting no compensation for the giant use of web resources.

There is no question that this is going to change the way that content providers get compensated. A lot of content providers sell access to articles behind paywalls, and that will fail as a revenue model if their content is made widely available through AI by scrapers.

The FCC 2024 Broadband Report

The FCC recently released its Internet Access Services report for December 31, 2024. The report is generated to provide a mandated update to Congress annually on the state of broadband. The data for the report mostly comes from broadband data that ISPs report to the FCC twice each year using the BDC reporting system, with some overlay with Census data.

I’ve always hoped this report would provide useful information, but it’s challenging to glean any truly valuable information from the report. There are a lot of reasons that combine to make most of the report unusable.

  • There is still a lot of inconsistency in the way the FCC broadband map defines serviceable locations. There are numerous examples where the FCC maps include locations that don’t exist while excluding valid locations. There is still no consensus on how to count vacant homes, vacation cabins, apartments built in basements and garages, etc. The FCC broadband map concentrates on ‘mass-market’ residential and business broadband locations. This leads to inconsistent counting of large businesses, while most anchor institutions are not included in the map.
  • ISPs report broadband coverage to the FCC, which is supposed to mean locations an ISP is connected to or that it can connect within 10 business days of a customer request for service. We’ve seen many cases where ISPs exaggerate claimed service areas.
  • The real issue with the claimed coverage is that ISPs also claim the maximum broadband speed available at each location. FCC rules allow ISPs to claim marketing speeds, which may be very different than actual speeds. For example, it’s very common for ISPs to claim 100/20 Mbps coverage but deliver something much slower for download or upload speeds. This means the FCC report is nothing more than a summary of the marketing speeds claimed by ISPs.
  • The FCC makes no attempt to layer on known changes to the data. For example, the FCC maintains maps of federal broadband grant awards that are supposed to be built in coming years. The report would be a lot more useful for measuring broadband improvements if there were tables summarizing these known changes.
  • Finally, I’m doubtful, in today’s dynamic market, of the usefulness of any data captured at a snap shot in time. The Fiber Broadband Association claims there were 11.1 million fiber passings constructed during 2025 that are not reflected in the report. There have also been a lot of technology upgrades from cable companies, WISPs, and FWA providers. These changes all mean that the broadband landscape is significantly different just one year after the date of this report.

The report is full of charts and tables that sound like they should be useful, until you look at each of them in light of the above issues. For example, every table that is based on broadband speed is highly questionable due to ISPs that self-report marketing speeds.

But even many of the tables and graphs that don’t refer to speeds are puzzling, or report nothing useful.

  • Figure 4 purports to show broadband customers at the end of 2024 by technology. It shows 57.3% on cable, 26.7% on fiber, 6.6% on DSL, 7.3 % on fixed wireless, and 2% on satellite. However, even this simple table is troublesome. The three big FWA cellular providers claimed 11.6 million customers at the end of 2024, and it looks like these customers are not included in any of the categories.
  • Figure 9 shows the locations in each state with various speeds. Are there really 9% of locations in West Virginia and 5% of locations in Mississippi that can’t get a broadband speed of at least 0.2 Mbps? There are a lot of tables that analyze speeds over and under 200 kbps (this really is kilobits, which is four times faster than dial-up), which must be an obsolete Congressional reporting category.
  • Figure 17 shows all fixed connections with speeds over 200 kbps. The table combines cellphones and broadband in the same table, which demonstrates that only 14% of broadband connections are from cable broadband.
  • Figures 20 through 31 show the trend over time of the number of connections at various speeds. Because of the use of marketing speeds, the quantities are likely far off, but the trends are interesting. These figures clearly ignore FWA cellular broadband.
  • There are a lot of charts and tables about cellular speeds, which are completely worthless since most cell companies report 5G speeds to the FCC maps of either 7/1 Mbps or 35/3 Mbps, in a world where actual speeds can be hundreds of Mbps.
  • Figure 41 is interesting and shows the number of ISPs that report the use of various technologies over time. The trends are interesting but have no context. For example, how much of the drop of the number of cable ISPs is due to companies that folded versus those that were absorbed into a larger cable provider?

Revamped Opportunity Zone Financing

Opportunity Zones were created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and provided an opportunity for equity investors to defer and reduce capital gains taxes when they reinvested profits from an existing project into qualified projects located in targeted and defined low-income Census Tracts. The Opportunity rules got a lot of play in some parts of the country for projects like urban renewal and renewable energy projects, but for various reasons, this never caught on for very many broadband projects.

Some of the shortfalls of the original rules have been modified by changes included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), These new rules are generically being referred to as OZ 2.0. The new rules will be effective on January 1, 2027, and States and Treasury are working to have the new rules and revised Opportunity Zones in place by then. These rules are a lot friendlier to investors and could be used as part of the funding stack for projects that include building fiber.

Following are the key changes in the OZ 2.0 rules:

  • Permanent Extension. The new rules are now permanent. The old rules expired at the end of 2026, meaning that in recent years, there was a diminished value in trying to take advantage of the benefits.
  • Rolling 5-Year Deferral. Investors can now defer capital gains for five full years from the date of an investment.
  • 10% Basis Step-Up. An investor who holds a Qualified Opportunity Fund (QOF) investment for 5 years receives a 10% step-up in basis, which means an increase in deferred gains.
  • 10-Year Gain Exclusion. If a QOF investment is held for at least 10 years, the investor gains a permanent exclusion from federal taxes for any new gains.
  • Extra Rural Benefit. Investments made through New Qualified Rural Opportunity Funds (QROFs) for projects in rural areas will earn a 30% basis step-up (instead of 10%) for a 5-year hold. Rural investment properties also face a lower substantial improvement threshold, reduced from 100% to 50% of the acquisition basis.
  • 30-Year Rule: Investments held for 30 years or longer are eligible for a basis step-up to fair market value without needing to dispose of the asset.

The new rules require redrawing the Opportunity Zone Map of eligible areas. Governors play a key role in the process, and communities that want to be included as Opportunity Zones should be lobbying their Governor to be included. An area can only be designated as an Opportunity Zone if median household incomes are less than 70% of the area-wide incomes (the old rules was 80%).

The new rules also come with increased reporting. Anybody using Opportunity Zone funding will have to file an annual report that describes the economic impact of the project as well as employment and investment data. There are defined penalties for non-compliance.

There is a lot of nonpartisan support for the new rules since they are aimed at attracting investments in both urban and rural low-income areas.

The original Opportunity Zone rules were commonly used as a way to get local investors to invest in local projects. Most large equity investors, like high-value individuals or family offices, who routinely experience capital gains from investments, and the Opportunity Zone rules allowed those gains to be deferred by investing in projects with local impact. It’s hopeful that the new rules will make it even easier to attract some equity investments into projects in low-income areas.