Wooden versus Metal Poles

I recently saw a question on LinkedIn that asked why we don’t use more metal utility poles instead of wooden ones. It’s a good question, and there are a lot of issues to consider when choosing between the two.

One issue to consider is useful life. On paper, the useful life of a wooden pole is thirty to forty years. However, there are plenty of poles that have lasted fifty and even sixty years. The local conditions have a lot to do with pole life. Problems like rotting wood, constant moisture, fungi, and woodpeckers can lower the useful life of a wooden pole. Steel utility poles are expected to last fifty to sixty years and can last up to eighty years. The main problem that can shorten the life of metal poles is salt and high humidity in the environment.

Another important issue is cost. Wooden poles have gotten a lot more expensive in recent years. I see prices online today between $250 and $1,300 for a 40-foot pole, with the price varying by thickness and load-bearing ability. Steel poles are more expensive, with a typical price for a 40-foot pole between $2,000 and $3,000. It’s cheaper to ship wooden poles since they weigh less than steel poles of the same height. Installation costs are generally less for wooden poles. Construction contractors and utilities already have the equipment and experience to install them. In most applications, wooden poles can be directly buried in the ground. Steel poles routinely need a foundation, which adds time and cost to the installation process. From a pure cost/benefit perspective, when looking at the combination of the initial cost versus the life, wooden poles have a lower cost per year than steel poles.

But there are other factors to consider. For example, wooden poles need to be inspected more often during their lifetime. One interesting issue to consider is that many poles don’t make it to the end of their useful life. Some are destroyed by storms or by vehicle accidents. Poles sometimes have to be relocated during road moves. A lot of poles have been replaced in recent years when they didn’t have enough room to add fiber, requiring a change-out to a taller pole. The extra useful life of steel poles is negated for poles that have to be replaced, and in that case, the lower upfront costs favor wooden poles.

With that said, there are a lot of places where a metal pole makes sense. If you’ve never noticed, poles that carry significant loading from cables usually are supported by guy wires that go from the pole to the ground (shown in the picture above). The guy wires support the poles in times of heavy wind. It often makes sense to place a metal pole in places where there isn’t room for the guy wires. Metal poles are also often preferred when really tall poles are needed.

An interesting issue to consider is emergency repairs on poles. Linemen use strap-on tools like spikes, gaffs, or climbers that allow them to climb a wooden pole. Working on a metal pole requires a bucket truck. After an emergency that affects multiple poles, it’s far more efficient for making repairs for linemen to be able to climb poles without having to wait for an available bucket truck for each pole.

When considering all of the factors, it’s pretty obvious that utilities still prefer wooden poles over metal poles. But you generally don’t have to search very hard to find places in urban markets where metal poles were the right solution.

Is Optimum Imploding?

I noticed an article that said that Optimum (Altice USA) was in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. NYSE automatically issues a warning to any stock when the average share price over thirty days is below $1.00. This warning was given to Optimum on August 13, and the company has until February 13, 2027, to get the 30-day average stock price above $1.00 to remain listed on the exchange.

The company’s stock has  plummeted over the last year. A year ago, the stock was trading at $2.33 per share. Five years ago, the stock traded at more than $28 per share. As I wrote this blog, the share price was $0.89. The lowest price this year was $0.60 per share. Optimum stock is considered extremely volatile by analysts because the company had almost 50 days during the last year when the stock rose or fell by more than 5%. The changes aren’t always downward. In early June, the stock price rose more than 9% in one day on news that the company had grown to have 700,000 cellular customers.

On the surface, the stock price seems out of line for an ISP that had over four million customers at the end of the second quarter of this year. At the end of the second quarter of this year, the company had over four million broadband customers, but had lost 40,000 customers in the second quarter. The company is profitable. Second quarter EBITDA was $785.7 million, which was 2.2% lower than the previous quarter due to the customer losses. However, the company has trimmed operating expenses and capital expenditures to maximize cash flow. Unfortunately, those earnings are not enough for the company to get out of its current problems.

Optimum’s biggest problem is its debt load of $25.3 billion, with a debt payment of more than $6 billion coming due in 2027. The company is being prohibited from restructuring the debt due to a group of current Optimum lenders that have banded together and have an agreement among them that will not allow the company to restructure debt without supermajority approval from lenders. Optimum claims this is illegal price fixing and sued major investors including Ares Management, Apollo Global Management, and BlackRock. The suit, filed in New York federal court, accuses the companies of antitrust violations by creating an illegal cartel through the cooperative credit agreement.

The Dutch investment firm Next Alt S.à r.l, which is owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi, owns a majority interest in the company, with the remaining shares publicly traded. In June, Drahi tried to shake the bondholders loose from the consortium action by telling them that the company faced a $4 billion tax liability if it went to bankruptcy, a move that would greatly reduce any value to the bondholders in a bankruptcy process.

If the company is forced into bankruptcy, there is a growing circle of possible buyers for the company. At the end of the second quarter, the company had 3.1 million fiber passings out of 10.1 million total passings. The company has also convinced 9% of customers to bundle broadband with cellular service – the new convergence goal for ISPs.

But Patrick Drahi has been successful in the past in working his companies out of tight spots. But this seems like a situation that he probably can’t easily resolve.

Senate Passes Bill for Broadband Mapping

Before the Senate paused for recess, it passed a bill introduced by Senator Deb Fisher of Nebraska that would require the FCC to undertake a major review of its broadband mapping system. The bill is labeled the Modernization, Accountability, and Planning (MAP) for Broadband Funding Act.

It’s not hard to understand why there are folks who lobbied Congress to ask the FCC to pay more attention to the maps. Anybody who has ever used the current BDC broadband mapping can describe problems and errors in the map. However, I can’t be the only one who thinks that making this request to the FCC now, as States are in the process of awarding BEAD grants to ISPs, is too little, too late. I’m highly skeptical that the maps can ever be made anywhere close to perfect.

There are two separate parts of the broadband mapping system that work together to create the maps – the fabric, which is created by Cost Quest, which is supposed to show the location of every location that might be a broadband customer. The second big component is broadband coverage data as reported by ISPs, which shows the locations they can serve and the broadband speeds they can provide.

I have a lot of sympathy for Cost Quest for ever getting an accurate fabric. If nothing else, this is a dynamic country with houses constantly being built, torn down, burned out, or abandoned. Cost Quest is forced to rely on local housing data that is often inaccurate – counties don’t really care if a property is abandoned or unused as long as somebody pays the taxes on the property. Cost Quest also seems to use satellite data to spot locations. But satellite data misses buildings (and entire roads) that are under heavy tree cover. And satellite can’t tell the difference between a house, a shed, or a burned-out abandoned building.

About the only thing that could improve the fabric is local feedback on inaccuracies. There is zero motivation for local governments to spend time and money on this if they think their areas already have good broadband or are going to be covered by broadband grants. Many local governments are fed up with the FCC map challenge after they spend big efforts trying to fix the maps during the BEAD map challenges, only to see huge numbers of their suggested changes rejected. I really can’t think of any constituency that is ever going to be motivated to try to fix the fabric in the future. It’s going to be laughable if the FCC makes map challenges easier now that nobody is likely to bother with the process.

The part of the map with the biggest problems is completely due to FCC rules. ISPs are supposed to define where they can provide service within ten days of a customer request. Many ISPs are conscientious about this while others either file ridiculously exaggerated coverage areas, or else don’t bother to update changes in their networks. But the biggest area of mapping problems comes from ISPs being able to declare marketing speed capabilities instead of something close to what they can actually deliver. Even somebody who has never looked at a broadband map can imagine ways that ISPs can abuse this rule. Some ISPs exaggerate speeds and consider the FCC maps to be a cheap source of advertisement. Others claim 100/20 Mbps or faster to stop federal and state grants being used to compete with them.

The most important change that is not in the legislation is giving the public access to the data underlying the broadband maps. It’s outrageous that there are expensive licenses required to see data that belongs to the American people. If the FCC mapping data was open and free, then I can imagine a lot of folks who would work to fix the map in their neighborhood out of altruism.

I am worried that any changes to the map are going to rebound and hurt ISPs that have already won BEAD awards. NTIA has shown an eagerness to remove locations from the map as a way to reduce the amount of BEAD grant funding, while not being equally open to adding locations to grants that were missed by the FCC maps. The only saving grace is that nothing will happen quickly. This may not be passed in the House, and if it is, the House could pass a different version that would require reconciliation. Even if enacted, this would instruct the FCC to take a fresh look at the maps, and that process could take several years. As I said at the start of the blog, this is too little too late. This would have been a wonderful bill in 2021, and now it just seems like a way for Congress to say it is doing something about broadband without actually doing anything.

The 2026 FCC Broadband Report

The FCC released its annual Section 706 report on August 14 that describes the U.S. broadband industry as of June 30, 2025. This report is created to fulfill a mandate that the FCC should update Congress once a year on the state of broadband. As seems to be the norm for these reports, they seem to take over a year to compile and publish.  The data supporting this report comes from the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) process where ISPs  and carriers report speed and location data to the FCC twice each year.

One of the findings of the report is that broadband coverage is growing. That’s not hard to believe. I’ve been following and reading reports of broadband projects all over the country, much of the rural builds supported by various state and federal grants and urban builds being funded by carriers and venture capital money. I’m a bit dubious of the statement that 96.9% of Americans have access to a terrestrial ISP that can deliver speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps. I’ve written many times about the exaggerations and inaccuracies in ISP reporting in the data collection process. I still think there are ISPs reporting exactly 100/20 Mbps speed capability to the FCC while delivering something slower.

Another major finding is that the digital divide is rapidly shrinking in rural America. The report says that the number of rural locations without access to 100/20 Mbps shrank by 23% from 2024 to 2025. It adds that 100/20 Mbps satellite broadband is available to almost everybody. I take exception to this claim. This is really another way of reporting on broadband coverage. Looking at the digital divide means looking at who is buying broadband, not who has the opportunity to buy. The big question that the FCC constantly ducks is affordability. There was a recent hearing in the Pennsylvania House where witnesses told the legislators that the OBBB and affordability could mean a loss of 233,000 broadband customers in Pennsylvania in 2027 due to affordability issues.

Another big claim is that there is widely available 5G. The report claims that 95% of Americans are covered with 5G that can deliver speeds of 35/3 Mbps. It says that the number of households without 5G access decreased by 30% over a two-year period. To be fair to the FCC, it is only reporting what the carriers report to it, but these claims are hard to accept. Anybody who has spent time studying the cellular coverage maps will quickly see a lot of exaggerated coverage outside of cities. Another issue with looking at June 30, 2025 data is that there were a lot of locations in the FCC database where the only fast provider was EchoStar, which shut down the cellular business earlier this year.

The other major claim is that Americans have more competitive options than ever before. The report says that 77% of households have access to at least three ISPs that can deliver speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps when including satellite in that measurement. The problem with this is that Starlink is not able or willing to serve many folks in urban areas, so while this claim is probably true based on reporting, it’s not true in the real world. A more realistic statistic is that 43.4% of households have access to three or more ISPs that can deliver 100/10 Mbps. That would mean broadband from a fiber ISP, a cable company, a FWA provider, or a WISP. While I’m positive the number is a bit inflated, a lot of people in cities have access to three ISPs out of that list.

There were other topics reported to Congress in the report. For example, the report says that cellular data speeds are increasing. The report talks about the phase-out of copper technology. The FCC touted successes in the marketplace due to its spectrum policies.

There was an interesting change in the report. The FCC dropped the long-term goal that the country should be striving to reach a future speed of at least 1 gig upload and 500 Mbps download. That goal was adopted by the FCC under Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel. ISPs other than fiber providers hated that goal, although cable companies are on an upgrade path to largely meet that goal. But that goal was anathema to the satellite, cellular, and fixed wireless ISPs.

Starlink’s Interesting Approach to Cellular

There was an announcement on SpaceX’s first-ever earnings call that got the attention of the wireless industry. SpaceX said on the call that StarLink would enter the terrestrial cellular business by building a large number of cell sites provisioned with satellite backhaul. The company would leverage the power of its next-generation V3 satellites along with an increasingly larger fleet of satellites to provide the backhaul to feed cell sites.

It’s impossible to know if the company is serious about this. Elon Musk has always made exaggerated claims of what he will be doing in the future, and many of his claims never came to fruition. On the same call, Elon also said that the company plans to build factories on the moon.

There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of SpaceX pulling this off. First is the basic question of why anybody would wade into the U.S. cellular market that has become increasingly competitive. Starlink could probably only gain significant numbers of customers by lowering prices, and that brings into question how profitable this might be.

Cellular networks in cities have already boosted cellular data speeds to 300 Mbps or faster, so Starlink wouldn’t have any technological advantage. Perhaps the real goal of the company is not the U.S. market, but populous countries like Nigeria, which have inferior cellular networks and a population that relies on cellular much more than on landline broadband.

At least for now, Starlink doesn’t have enough spectrum to pull this off. They are acquiring 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar, which is not nearly enough to compete for terrestrial cellular service. However, after the recent IPO, the company is awash with cash and could buy more spectrum. In the OBBB, Congress mandated the FCC to find 800 MHz of midrange spectrum for auction, so there will be plenty of spectrum coming into play over the next decade.

Another big question for me is the overall bandwidth needed to feed a cellular network. Most cell sites today are fed with 5-10 Gigabit backbone connections. The new Starlink constellations will have a greatly increased amount of capacity, but the backhaul to hundreds of thousands of cell sites would have to eat into the overall capacity of the satellite constellation. SpaceX must be counting on being able to grow far past the current 15,000 satellites currently approved by the FCC, and in fact, they have requested to grow the constellation to 100,000 satellites. The increasing usage to support cellular would also mean the need for a lot more earth stations to feed the network.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle would be getting started. The three big carriers all have roaming agreements with each other, but they might decide not to make it easy for a new competitor to enter the market. Very few people would buy a cellular service that wouldn’t work when they travel to other parts of the country. There was speculation after SpaceX made this announcement that the real purpose was to pressure the big cellular companies into giving the company an MVNO deal (resold cellular) so it could combine terrestrial resold cellular with satellite cellular. That’s an interesting dilemma for the big cellular companies, because if SpaceX had an MVNO, it could then selectively build cell sites over time.

SpaceX will likely never stop surprising the market with big ideas that are outside of the box. While this one is certainly doable, it wouldn’t be easy unless one of the big cellular companies blinks and lets SpaceX into the cellular business through the backdoor of an MVNO. But you can never say that SpaceX wouldn’t do this even without that easy onramp.

Digital Equity Ecosystems

Today’s blog is about a new book, Digital Equity Ecosystems, written by Colin Rhinesmith. Colin is an Associate Professor of Information Sciences and the Director of the Digital Equity Action Research Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He uses the term ecosystem as a way to encompass the wide variety of organizations and people that are necessary to bring a digital equity solution for a community. This is an interesting read for anybody who is interested in creating a sustainable community coalition to address digital equity issues in a local community or region. The common definition for bringing digital equity to a community means tackling three key issues – getting people connected to broadband, making sure people have the computers and devices needed to use broadband, and training people how to use the technology and safely navigate the Internet.

A lot of communities have created a local coalition of people and organizations interested in tackling digital equity issues. Some of this work was prompted by the pandemic, but the process went into high gear when the federal government said it would be funding digital equity efforts. A lot  of local coalitions were formed to attract federal funding but quickly realized that a big benefit of a coalition is  introducing local practitioners to each other so they aren’t working at odds with each other.

The book looks in depth at five large digital equity coalitions formed in Baltimore, Chicago, Essex County, Massachusetts, LA County, and San Antonio. Colin looks at the history of the formation and operation of each coalition to see what they had in common, and to see what worked and didn’t work. Rhinehart condenses his findings into the factors needed to create and sustain a permanent and effective coalition. The book recognizes that digital equity work requires a permanent long-term effort since there will always be community members that need help with digital equity issues.

One of the most useful sections of the book discusses the many stresses that make it challenging to sustain a coalition. Rhinesmith’s research shows that successful coalitions need to have complete transparency and be willing to openly discuss and tackle the many concerns of members that can lead to what he calls advocacy fatigue, where members drop out of the coalition when the effort needed to support the coalition competes with external time constraints.

The book draws many specific conclusions. As somebody who has participated in several local coalitions, the book’s conclusions ring true. Here are just a few of the many conclusions reached by Rhinesmith:

  • Coalitions have a better chance at sustainability if they are created organically by community members or non-profits than if the effort is led by a local government.
  • A successful coalition needs some permanent funding to support a few core people who keep the coalition operating. A coalition needs a full-time core effort to be effective since it’s difficult to keep a coalition of all volunteers going for the long haul.
  • To keep coalition members engaged, a coalition needs to regularly meet goals and accomplish specific tasks so that members can see the value of sticking with the effort.

This is a scholarly work, meaning that it comes with added features you might not get from other books on the topic. For example, the fourteen pages of references to organizations and articles on digital equity topics are alone worth the price of the book.

I heartily recommend the book for anybody who is engaged in digital equity work. Even small communities where a coalition might consist of a handful of local organizations and people will find some useful ideas in the book about how to keep the effort going.

Updating the FCC Definition of Broadband

There has been a lot of talk about how AI is putting stress on broadband networks, and many analysts are claiming that we need faster broadband speeds to accommodate growing AI traffic. I was particularly struck by a comment from NTCA – the Rural Broadband Association in a filing at the FCC earlier this year in the FCC docket looking at USF reform. NTCA wrote, “The burgeoning growth of [artificial intelligence] demands modern networks with upload speeds much closer to symmetrical to support the applications and devices that it supports.” The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) told the FCC in 2025 that the 20 Mbps upstream standard is far too low and should be increased to 100 Mbps.

The FCC definition of broadband of 100/25 Mbps was adopted in March 2024. However, Commissioner Rosenworcel had been pushing for the increase to 100/20 Mbps for several years before that. It had been clear to everybody but the Ajit Pai FCC that the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband was obsolete when the FCC’s mapping in 2022 showed that 90% of homes already had access to 100 Mbps download speed.

All of this leads me to ask if the 100/20 Mbps definition is already obsolete. Recent data from OpenVault says that 43% of U.S. households now subscribe to speeds faster than 500 Mbps download and 70% of homes subscribe to speeds of 200 Mbps or faster. It’s hard to look at these statistics and think that 100/20 Mbps should be the standard.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones. A higher definition of broadband would declare that certain technologies are not really acceptable broadband. If we buy the arguments from NTCA and NRECA, then satellite broadband and FWA cellular would no longer be considered broadband. A huge percentage of cable company networks still have upload speeds far below 100 Mbps, even though there are numerous technology fixes for them to upgrade to faster, and even symmetrical speeds.

In a perfect world, the definition of broadband would be increased regularly to reflect that reality of the marketplace. But that’s not going to happen with this FCC, and in fact, in 2025, Commission Carr asked if the 100/20 Mbps definition is too high.

What is the right definition of broadband?. The easiest starting point for looking at download speeds is to look at the historical evolution of the definition of broadband from 4/1 Mbps, to 25/3 Mbps, to 100/20 Mbps. I’ve shown the following chart before that just trends forward that historic growth trend. If the definition of download speed continues on the same growth curve as from 1996 to 2022 (when the definition should have been 100 Mbps), the following definition of broadband is projected.This suggests the minimum definition of download broadband for 2027 would be 250 Mbps. That doesn’t seem at all out of line considering the OpenVault numbers that say that 70% of U.S. homes already subscribe to speeds faster than 200 Mbps.

Setting a definition for upload speeds is harder. The traditional definition of upload was low because there wasn’t really any use for it in most homes. But that has all changed in the last decade, particularly after the pandemic. People need upload bandwidth for a lot of uses. Most of us now work in the cloud all day. Video calls are the norm – I haven’t been on a voice conference call in ages. People game online and create content. We connect to portals for education that need significant and steady upload bandwidth.

The recent OpenVault report for the end of the second quarter of 2026 says that the average U.S. home uploaded 58 gigabytes of data per month, with upload usage growing at a rate of 20% per year. I always have to remind myself that the average means there are a lot of homes that upload a lot more than 58 gigabytes per month. That usage is two-and-a-half times the upload usage at the end of the pandemic and is way higher than usage a decade ago. I don’t know if the definition of upload should be 100 Mbps, as NRECA suggests, but I know it should be significantly higher than 20 Mbps, particularly if the AI folks are right.

In that same filing in the USF docket, NTCA also reminded the FCC that it is required to meet Section 254 of the Communications Act, which requires rural areas to have “reasonable comparability” to broadband service in urban areas. There are few urban and suburban areas where people can’t buy gigabit and faster download speeds, with an increasing percentage of homes that can buy gigabit upload. To be realistic, any definition of broadband that is set is strictly relevant only to rural areas, because urban speeds already far exceed any speed definition the FCC could ever consider.

Adoption of WiFi 7

Ookla recently published a research article that documents the implementation of WiFi 7 in the U.S. and around the world. WiFi 7 routers were introduced to the market in early 2024, and Ookla reports that deployment of WiFi 7 routers has already grown to 7.2% in the country. That’s a pretty big uptake in a year and a half, considering that broadband customers generally hang on to WiFi routers unless changing service providers.

It’s not surprising that WiFi is being adopted. WiFi 7 brings a big improvement over WiFi 6 and earlier generations of WiFi. WiFi 7 can theoretically reach much faster speeds, and in practice delivers faster speeds and performance inside the customer premise. Some of the specific benefits include wider data channels inside the home, particularly for customers who have devices that can use 6 GHz spectrum, which is 1,200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 GHz and 7.125 GHz. WiFi 7 has better data throughput to devices by the use of 4K-QAM, has better performance from preamble puncturing that can bypass interference, and has faster speeds for specific applications due to multi-link operations that let the router combine multiple frequency bands when needed. WiFi 7 has also doubled the number of simultaneous devices that can be connected from eight to sixteen.

As might be expected, the growing WiFi 7 adoption is mostly coming from ISPs. Charter is currently the biggest user of WiFi 7 in the world. In the U.S., the new technology is being deployed by other large ISPs like Comcast, Frontier, and CenturyLink. It’s likely that the upgrades to WiFi 7 will continue. For years, ISPs have been frustrated by a large percentage of customer complaints about broadband that are actually due to poor customer-provided WiFi modems.

Interestingly, the U.S. is leading the world in WiFi 7 adoption. Part of the reason for this is that China is not stressing the use of WiFi 7 inside the country since the nation has decided to use 6 GHz spectrum for cellular traffic instead of for public WiFi.

The impact of the WiFi 7 routers is dramatic. Ookla cites speed test statistics for Comcast that show that upload speeds have more than doubled for some customers strictly due to the installation of a new WiFi 7 modem.

WiFi technology isn’t sitting still. The first prototypes of WiFi 8 modems should be produced later this year, with commercial production is about two years. WiFi 8 adds even more features that will help the customer experience. The most interesting new feature is Dynamic Sub-band Operations (DSO) that will allow the WiFi router to assign tiny bandwidth channels instead of a full channel when connecting to devices that don’t need much bandwidth. WiFi 8 also has the ability to coordinate with neighboring WiFi routers to cut down on interference. There will be a new technology called Distributed Resource Units and ELR that will improve the upload path to cut down on upload stutters from devices like security cameras and smartphones.

There is even more improvement coming with WiFi 9. The official specifications should be released in early 2027, with commercial adoption likely coming in the early to mid-2030s.

Satellite News August 2026

Starlink’s Capacity Growing. An analysis by MoffettNathanson estimated a huge increase in potential capacity based upon a migration to the new V3 rockets. The analysis said that the current capacity with the V2 satellites is between 8 and 16 customers per square mile, which limits the overall penetration to 2% – 3% of U.S. households, even when the current 15,000-satellite constellation is completed. The new V3 satellites should bring a lot of additional capacity, including the opportunity to sell broadband in denser population areas. MoffettNathanson estimates the overall capacity, assuming that two-thirds of satellites are upgraded to V3 by 2030, is between 24% – 35% of households, or the capacity to serve 35 million to 50 million potential subscribers. This increase is fully dependent on the company being able to regularly launch the new Starship rocket, which will only be able to carry 60 V3 satellites per launch. SpaceX successfully launched a Starship rocket on July 27 that carried twenty V3 rockets into space. This was a test, and the satellites were allowed to quickly deorbit.

Satellites Monitoring Wildfires. Satellites have been used to view the progress of wildfires, but to a limited degree of effectiveness. Existing satellites don’t notice fires until they have spread to several acres, and they typically only transmit a picture of a wildfire every twelve hours. The nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance has launched three satellites that are the beginning of a fifty-satellite constellation to detect and track wildfires in real time. The full constellation won’t be in place until 2030. The satellites are sensitive and will be able to see a fire as small as a 5-meter square. When fully deployed, the satellites will be able to give an update on a fire every twenty minutes.

A Big Drop in Satellite BEAD Locations. There is a significant drop in the number of eligible locations for the BEAD grant awards made to Starlink and Amazon Leo. The NTIA analysis compared the location of BEAD awards to the new FCC mapping fabric. The new mapping identified 50,578 BEAD locations that are no longer considered as mapping points, meaning they are probably buildings like barns and sheds. The analysis showed 262,053 locations that are now considered to be served by broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps. Finally, there are 61,512 locations that would be excluded if NTIA accepts broadband provided by unlicensed spectrum to qualify as served. Altogether, these reductions could reduce the amount awarded to Starlink and Amazon LEO by at least $354 million. Note that these same kinds of reductions are also being made to fiber and other technology awards as NTIA continues to nibble away at the total BEAD dollars being awarded.

 Texas Broadband Office Facing a BEAD Audit. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows called for an audit of the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO). The audit is coming from industry allegations that BDO too heavily favored satellite broadband over fiber and other technologies. The BDO recently put the entire BEAD grant program in the state on hold, seemingly due to this issue. Even if the accusations are proven to be true, it seems highly unlikely that NTIA would allow for higher dollar awards if the State wanted to re-award canceled satellite locations to a more expensive technology.

SpaceX Rocket Hit the Moon. The discarded upper portion of a rocket launched in January 2025 by SpaceX crashed into the moon on August 5 at a speed of 5,400 per hour, creating a 60-foot-wide crater. The original launch was to deliver a moon lander.

Data Centers in Space. Early this year, SpaceX announced plans to put one million satellites in space to create a huge AI data center. Since then, additional applications for AI satellites have been filed with the FCC, including 88,000 satellites by StarCloud, 51,600 satellites by Blue Origin, and 20,000 by Cowboy Space. These are just the U.S. companies, and there are discussions around the world of creating orbiting data centers.

SpaceConnect Association Launched. In an inevitable move, the companies in the space business created a trade association that will propose and lobby worldwide for regulations that will “enable innovation, investment, and expanded connectivity through next-generation satellite networks”. The inaugural Board consists of Chair, Ashleigh de la Torre, Vice President of Public Policy at Amazon; Secretary, Michael Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Corporate and Business at Telesat; and Treasurer, Barbee Ponder IV, General Counsel and Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Globalstar

Are Digital Equity Grants Back

There seems to be an increasing chance that the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program is back in play. In a status report filed by the Department of Commerce in the lawsuit where NDIA filed to reinstate the grant program, the government said it is targeting a December 2026 opening date for applications for the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program. Like everything associated with BEAD and the Digital Equity Grant programs, nothing is final until this is put in place. We’ve seen NTIA slow-roll the grant process at every turn.

As a reminder, the Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program will be administered and the grants awarded directly by NTIA. The budget for this grant program is $1.25 billion, which was set by legislation to be $250 million per year for the years 2022 through 2026. 5% of the total funding is reserved for Native Entities, and 1% is set aside for territories. The original IIJA legislation had also included $1.44 billion to go to the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program. The stated goal of this grant program is to promote the achievement of digital equity, support digital inclusion activities, and build capacity for efforts by States relating to the adoption of broadband.

NTIA had launched the Competitive Grant Program in 2024, with $750 million in grants. There were roughly 700 applicants to the program, and near the end of 2024 NTIA announced a number of award winners. This included a $7.7 million grant to Land of Sky Regional Council for my region of western North Carolina. The administration canceled both programs in May 2024. They said the grants were illegal since they included race as one of the categories to consider when using the grant funding.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance sued the administration over the cancellation, and there were negotiations between the two sides and the Court that led to this reinstatement of the Competitive Grant Program. The reconstituted grants will remove all reference to race as part of the use of the grants.

Assuming that NTIA meets the December date to open the grant window, it seems almost certain that every application to the grants will have to be refiled. But hopefully, the full $1.25 billion of funding would be open for applicants.

NTIA said it is currently preparing a new Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the coming rounds of grants. This is the document that defines the application process for the grants. If the experience of the big changes made to the BEAD grant program is any indication, there could be big changes. NTIA completely rewrote the BEAD grant program with the Benefit of the Bargain rules, and it won’t shock anybody if the rules for the Competitive Grant Program change as well.

There has been no word out of NTIA about releasing the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant funding to States. It would seem logical that as long as the same changes are made to remove reference to race, these grants could be released. But there has been nothing logical about the entire pile of funding that came from the IIJA.

There is still a big question about whether the funding for both programs is included in the 2027 federal budget? As is typical with Congress, budget bills are being punted down the road, and there is no telling when there will be an actual budget for Commerce. The Administration recommended killing this funding for 2027, and we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the budget process. It’s conceivable that the grants will be killed through the backdoor of the budget process, which would undo anything Commerce is agreeing to now.

At least half of this mess is due to the slowness of NTIA since 2020. The funding for these grants was supposed to start flowing in 2022, and the first grant applications were submitted in September 2024. Half of this money should have already been awarded and in use before the programs were canceled in 2025. I’ve never heard any good story why NTIA took so long to launch a fairly straightforward grant program.