LoRa – The Quiet Radio Technology

LoRa is a radio technology in common use that most people have never hear about. The LoRa Alliance recently reported that there are 150 million global devices connected by LoRa technology. LoRa is shorthand for Long Range and is a radio technology that sends small bits of data over long distances using little battery power. In the U.S., the LoRa technology uses unlicensed spectrum between 902 and 928 MHz.

There is a good chance that you are close to a device using the technology. Here are some of the common uses for LoRa:

  • Smart metering for water, gas, and electric meters.
  • Smart parking to indicate if parking spots are empty or occupied.
  • Smart city applications like reading sensors for air quality, weather, gunshot detectors, or full trash cans.
  • Disaster warning such as flood water level sensors or air quality smoke sensors that indicate a fire.
  • Industrial monitoring for a wide variety of sensors to monitor things like machine vibrations, structural cracks, or changes in temperature
  • Tracking large assets like forklifts
  • The open-source app Meshtastic is being used to text locally without using the telco grid, which is particularly useful for hikers and others traveling where there is no cell service.
  • Panic buttons for health or safety alerts.

LoRa is a relatively new technology. The idea was developed in France by Nicolas Sornin and Olivier Seller, who were looking for a cheap way to read utility meters. They worked with partners and launched the French company Cycleo in 2010, aimed at reading wireless utility meters. The company was purchased by the semiconductor company Semtech in 2012, which provided the capital to scale the technology globally. In 2015, Semtech and other interested users of the technology formed the LoRa Alliance to create and maintain open standards, to promote interoperability, and to promote the technology worldwide.  The technology took off in 2017 as carriers began shutting down legacy 2G networks.

Even though this is a low-power technology, the typical LoRa transmission is reliable for nine or ten miles. Engineers have been able to transmit a signal as far as 132 miles terrestrially using only 25 mW of power. The record for satellite-to-earth transmission is 517 miles.

LoRa uses chirp spread spectrum (CSS). This is a radio modulation technique that has been used for many years in maritime sonar, aviation, and satellite communications. CSS uses a technique to sweep upward and downward within a set frequency range over time. Each chirp can only transmit a tiny amount of data, and the technology limits the amount of data that can be sent over a given time. This makes this a great technology for transmitting simple things like the usage readings from an electric meter, or whether there is a car in a parking space.

The LoRa Alliance now has more than 340 member organizations, with 45 joining so in 2026. The Alliance has certified around 700 devices. There are some interesting large users of the technology:

  • ZENNER Connect operates more than 11.6 million sensors and over 174,000 gateways across 15 countries.
  • Netmore reports 11.2 million active devices on its network.
  • The Things Industries reports 6 million devices.
  • Veolia currently has more than 4 million active smart meters in France.
  • CENTEGIX reports more than 800,000 people wearing its CrisisAlert wearable panic button badge daily.

Broadband for Rural Public Safety

Today’s blog talks about the problems encountered by first responders in rural areas related to poor broadband and cellular coverage. The blog was prompted by an excellent report, Beyond Connectivity Among Rural First Responders in Pennsylvania, authored by Christopher Ali, Abigail Simmerman, and DongWood Jeong of The Pennsylvania State University. The report was sponsored by the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, a legislative agency of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The findings are not going to surprise anybody who works with public safety in rural areas.

The report is based on the findings from focus groups and interviews with law enforcement officers, firefighters, EMTs, 911 center representatives, local officials, and other key stakeholders. The in-depth discussions identified multiple problems that hinder public safety work in rural areas:

  • The lack of rural cellular coverage means there are rural dead zones where first responders and the public can’t reliably communicate with each other. This means the public often has trouble connecting to 911. It means that first responders struggle with dropped calls and often can’t find the person who needs help. The report cites examples where first responders sometimes have to go door-to-door looking for somebody with a landline in order to communicate locally – which will be an increasing problem as copper networks are being torn down.
  • Many jurisdictions have public safety radio networks for first responders to communicate with their home hub. First responders in Pennsylvania complained that there is a major inconsistency between the types of networks being deployed, and that they often find themselves working in an area that uses different radios and frequencies than the radios they are equipped with. They also say that in the mountains that cover Pennsylvania, there are many places where those radio networks don’t reach.
  • There were complaints about the astronomical cost of devices. Both cellphones and public safety radios have gotten increasingly expensive. In rural areas, first responders might have to carry multiple cellphones to connect to different carriers.
  • There is an overall perception among first responders that they are underfunded and don’t have the resources needed to do a good job in rural areas.

The report goes on to address policy issues that might be addressed by the General Assembly if they want to improve public safety performance in rural areas.

  • The rural coverage issues can only be fully addressed with more towers. The report suggests this would be a good use for BEAD non-deployment funds, although it’s looking increasingly unlikely that funding will never be allocated to states.
  • The report suggests the legislature could create rules to address the multiple radio frequencies and technologies being used. They note that Pennsylvania has adopted the P25 radio standard to promote interoperability, but that many local jurisdictions have not adopted the standard.
  • The report also recommends a program to update and replace outdated radio technologies. Many local jurisdictions are sticking with older radio systems due to budget constraints on buying new ones.
  • The report suggests an overall budget increase to provide the money needed to keep up with the ever-increasing cost of radios.
  • The report suggests more funding to fully implement NextGen 911. It notes that the state only adopted this standard in 2025 and there has already been intermittent outages.
  • Finally, the report recommends creating more awareness among state leadership on the conditions encountered in rural public safety.

This is a long 75-page report that goes into a lot of detail, and that is a good read for anybody living in or concerned about rural America. The problems highlighted in Pennsylvania are not unique and are found in varying degrees in rural areas across the country.

Let’s Support Small Broadband Grants

When we think of federal infrastructure grants, it’s natural to think of the big-dollar grant programs. Those programs often make big awards to fund big infrastructure projects. The program with the biggest awards was RDOF. These weren’t technically grants, but a long-term subsidy for somebody promising to build broadband infrastructure, but most winners have treated RDOF as grant funding. Some of the RDOF awards are huge. LTD Broadband won $1.3 billion in the reverse auction, which was eventually voided. Charter won $1.2 billion, and Windstream won $522 million.

Other grant programs also have relatively big awards. USDA ReConnect 4 awarded $700 million in grants to 89 projects, meaning an average award of $7.9 million. BEAD has tentatively awarded $21 billion in grants to over 500 entities, with an average award of over $40 million. Many BEAD awards are a lot smaller than that, but there were also giant winners like Comcast, which won $1.7 billion across multiple states.

There are at least two federal agencies that have been awarding smaller grants that are broadband-related. The Delta Regional Authority (DRA) makes grants aimed at economic development in 255 counties and parishes in parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee. A similar agency is the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which plays a similar role across 423 counties in Appalachia across thirteen states. These agencies are required by law to make most of their awards in economically distressed counties.

Both agencies place most of their attention on projects such as water and sewer systems, transportation issues like roads and bridges, business development that promotes economic development, and workforce training. But both agencies have made grants that are clearly related to broadband. The awards at these agencies for broadband-related issues are generally small, ranging from $25,000 to $200,000.

At that size, these grants aren’t building big infrastructure projects. Instead, the grants are aimed at local needs that are too small to be funded by other programs. For example, the agencies funded outdoor WiFi during the pandemic when communities were struggling with a lack of broadband access. They fund feasibility studies, some of which have been used to attract funding from the bigger grant programs. The grants tackle projects like connecting libraries to fiber.

There are also state grant programs that make small awards, such as the program in some states that fund part of the construction cost to reach residents with long drops. In the last few years, there has also been a number of grant programs from non-profits that have made technical assistance grants related to broadband for communities.

I suspect that many of the people in the broadband industry aren’t even aware of these smaller grant programs. The point of this blog is to stress how important these small grants are. Communities that get these grants understand that there are usually no other sources of this type of funding. The small grant programs typically address a specific problem in a community that would be hard to fund in any other way.

I’ve noticed this year that a lot of the non-profit and state grants have either disappeared or are being funded at a much lower level. One has to wonder how long agencies like DRA and ARC will be allowed to make small broadband infrastructure grants since the FCC and NTIA seem poised to announce that the national broadband gap has been solved.

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Most communities, even those that might have fiber to most residents, still have parts of the market that have been left behind by fiber overbuilders or the big grant programs. Many smaller towns and villages that have not attracted fiber have a long list of needs. I hope that small broadband grants will continue to be funded, because I see the need for such grants everywhere. Grants don’t have to be gigantic and complicated to be effective.

Why Some ISPs Fail

I saw several articles that described the collapse of Maverix Broadband in Colorado. It’s been reported that the company has received over $9 million in the past from Capital Project Fund grants, along with three awards from the State High Cost Support program. The company was poised to receive $103 million in BEAD grants. The state was alerted about financial irregularities by a whistleblower, but by the time the state could react, the company filed for bankruptcy. I know absolutely nothing about Maverix, and the article isn’t about their failure, other than an observation that the company seems to have been deep in a hole well before the collapse. We’ll eventually find out if their problems were operational or something more nefarious.

The blog today talks about why ISPs fail or get into early trouble and struggle. I’ve seen a number of ISPs that have underperformed in their early years, or even failed like Maverix. This blog talks about some of the common mistakes I’ve seen that have led to big problems for ISPs.

Biting Off More than Can be Chewed. One of the biggest causes of problems is ISPs that try to grow too big too fast. It’s difficult to launch one or two markets for a new ISP and do it well. It starts becoming impossible for a new ISP to tackle a dozen markets at the same time. This is an issue that can even plague hundred-year-old telcos. While they are good at their business, what they are not good at is the nimbleness needed to grow fast.

Takes Longer to Get to Market than Expected. I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a business plan for a new ISP that wasn’t too optimistic about the time it takes to launch a new market. I’ve seen ISPs who plan to have their first customers within six months of the start of construction. That’s achievable if you’re adding a neighborhood to an existing ISP but is usually unrealistic in an entirely new market. There are always issues that take longer than expected, and it’s not always the same issues. In some markets it might be permitting. It might be pole attachment or getting fiber located. It could be supply chain issues. It might be waiting for software vendors to have a time slot to configure the OSS/BSS. A common problem is not being able to hire the needed people and getting them up to speed.

Miss Important Steps. This is related to the previous problem. I’ve helped many ISPs launch or open new markets in my career, and one of the best tools for getting through a launch is a Gantt chart, which is a detailed interactive list of all of the tasks that have to be completed to launch. The typical Gantt chart for launching a new fiber market might have 1,500 to 2,000 tasks. What a Gantt chart demonstrates is that failing to do some of the smallest tasks on time can slip the date for everything that is dependent on that task. Some of the big time slippages I’ve seen come from missing what sound like small routine tasks. I recall a project that had a big delay when nobody took the action item to find a contractor to build the concrete pads for huts. By the time this was realized, they couldn’t find a contractor, and the entire project was set back two months from this one oversight. My point is that even small details can get you.

Everything Costs More than Anticipated. I would guess that at least half of new market launches end up costing more than anticipated, sometimes a lot more. This could be a factor of lousy estimating, or of not anticipating the impact of delays. But when projects start running short on cash, they start making other mistakes by taking shortcuts.

Sales Slower Than Anticipated. I have seen numerous market projections for new ISPs that assume they will reach full market penetration in two years, with half of those new customers coming in the first year. Unless the ISP has fully pre-sold the market, the rate of customer acquisition is usually considerably longer than they hoped, adding more pressure on finances.

Early Outages. I’ve seen several ISPs struggle because they had major network outages soon after they launched. This is often due to not taking the time to thoroughly test the new network to make sure everything is working right. I know a few ISPs that got a quick reputation for being unreliable in a market and struggled for years. Today’s world of social media can be brutal.

Keep the Public on Your Side. The industry is full of stories of ISPs that antagonized the public through shoddy construction processes, and particularly for not doing remediation to fix public problems as soon as they arise. A community can turn quickly on an ISP that doesn’t make quality an important issue.

SpaceX Wants to End Rural Subsidies

SpaceX has now told the FCC multiple times that the agency should begin the process of phasing down and eliminating all rural high-cost subsidies from the Universal Service Fund. The company filed comments asking for the end of subsidies in FCC Docket 26-96, which is looking at reforming the High-cost fund for an all IP Future, and in Docket 10-90 that was looking at Universal Service Fund reform. In both filings, SpaceX says that its proliferation of low-orbit satellites means that rural subsidies are obsolete and are no longer needed. The company characterizes anybody who disagrees with it as a “subsidy-dependent incumbent”. SpaceX goes on to argue that the money currently spent on rural subsidies should be redirected to programs that lower the cost of broadband for low-income families.

It’s an interesting policy question that raises more questions about satellite broadband than it does about the rural companies that are receiving broadband subsidies. For example, the CAF II subsidy is being provided by a number of rural ISPs who use the subsidy to justify building and maintaining rural fiber, similar to what was done with the FCC RDOF.

I think the SpaceX request raises multiple policy questions. First, is satellite really providing broadband? Earlier this decade the FCC declared that Starlink was not providing broadband when the agency canceled the $885 million award Starlink had won in the RDOF reverse auction. At the beginning of this year, Ookla said that only 45% of Starlink customers were meeting the FCC’s definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. But Starlink’s speeds have been slowly improving, and will be boosted over the next five years as the company replaces the current V2 satellites with the new V3 satellites that provide 10 times more download capacity and 22 times more upload capacity.

As I have argued many times, the FCC’s 100/20 Mbps standard is no longer a reasonable definition of broadband. Recent data from OpenVault showed 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 Mbps is still an adequate definition of a good download speed. However, the real issue for satellite broadband is the upload speed. A large percentage of the homes cited by Ookla as having fast download also get far faster upload speeds than 20 Mbps. Fiber overbuilders are mostly providing symmetrical data speeds, meaning gigabit upload speeds. Cable companies across the country are upgrading the upload path and are delivering speeds of 50-100 Mbps at a minimum, and in some networks, gigabit upload speeds. The whole country learned during the pandemic that 20 Mbps upload is not adequate to support more than one user at a time – something the FCC has steadily ignored.

Another issue raised by the SpaceX request is whether Starlink provides a good substitute for voice service. Much of rural America lives in areas with little or no cellular service. The companies that receive high-cost subsidies all must pledge to offer voice service so that rural residents have access to 911. SpaceX argues that anybody with a satellite broadband connection can buy VoIP. That’s a true statement, but it raises two more policy questions of availability and affordability.

The companies receiving high-cost funding agree to service every home and business in their footprint. It’s pretty clear that Starlink can’t make that claim. While the company won’t disclose the number of homes it can serve in any given geography, there are examples, like last year’s Burning Man, where Starlink got overwhelmed by too many customers in a rural area.

I think the most important factor is affordability. Starlink’s price of $130 per month is a lot higher than other rural broadband options. Companies that receive high-cost support sell broadband for a lot less than $130, but more importantly, will sell voice-only to customers who don’t want broadband. It’s not reasonable that a rural household that can only afford voice and not broadband should have to spend $130 per month for satellite service.

In my mind, Starlink has to offer a different set of products if they want to declare that they can match the benefits that companies that receive high-cost funding bring to customers.

  • Starlink needs faster upload speeds, which it probably will eventually get as it phases in the V3 satellites.
  • Starlink would have to be able to serve everybody in a geographic area if it wants to see the subsidies end in a given area. I can envision a regulatory test similar to the one that cable companies have used to get regulators to declare a market to be competitive. High-cost subsidies should only stop in an area where every customer in the area could be served by a satellite instead.
  • Finally, Starlink would have to be a lot cheaper. If SpaceX wants to see the rural high-cost subsidies ended, it should offer lower broadband prices in those markets, including a really low-cost connection for voice only.

Growth of Mobile-Dependent Households

Roberto Gallardo, an Associate professor at Purdue University, has released an interesting policy paper, An Evolving Digital Divide: Measuring and Understanding Mobile-Dependent Households (MDH). The paper summarizes Gallardo’s research, using U.S. Census data, to compare households that rely on cellular for broadband connectivity in homes before and after the pandemic.

The paper cites several interesting statistics. Data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS) shows that the percentage of homes with no Internet access decreased from 17.6% in 2017 to 6.5% in 2025, meaning that 12.5 million homes gained broadband over that period. However, over the same period, the percentage of homes that only access the Internet with a smartphone increased from 7.5% in 2017 to 11.5% in 2024, an increase of six million households. The study also looked at device ownership. The percentage of homes that only have mobile devices (no laptops or desktops) in 2017 was 9% of 2017 and increased to 15.2% by 2024, an increase of 9 million homes. These statistics show that, while home broadband usage has increased dramatically by 12.5 million homes from 2017 to 2024, a lot of that gain was from the growth of mobile-dependent homes.

Over the years, I recall seeing articles in the popular press that speculated about these trends and concluded that people are increasingly happy with mobile broadband and don’t need a big-screen broadband option. Gallardo cites other studies that come to a different conclusion. He cites a study by Napoli and Obar in 2014 that coined the term “mobile Internet underclass” to describe the inferior nature of broadband access through a cellphone using the small screen and data plans with small data caps. That study concluded that treating mobile access as equivalent to fixed broadband risks rendering the growing mobile-only population invisible. He also cites a study by Quaglione, Matteucci, Furia, Marra, and Pozzi in 2020 that says that mobile broadband is a good complement to having home broadband, but is not a substitute for home broadband.

Gallardo goes on to undertake a deep data dive into the Census data for 2019 and 2024. He looked to see if he could discern any differences in mobile-dependent households that are related to metrics like metropolitan versus rural, race, those between 18 and 34, those over 65, households employed in blue-collar occupations, household incomes, home ownership, and homes with no Internet access available.

Some of the most interesting findings from the data related to mobile-only households include:

  • Metropolitan areas saw a significant increase in the percentage of MDH households.
  • There was no statistical change for those between 18 and 34.
  • There was a decrease in the percentage of MDH households over 65
  • There was an increase in the percentage of MDH for homes with no broadband availability.
  • There was a drop in the percentage of MDH in blue-collar households.
  • There was a higher percentage of MDH in low-income households.

Gallardo’s research didn’t look at the causes of the shifts, but it’s not hard to speculate about the reason behind some of the statistics. The increase in mobile-dependent homes in urban areas and in low-income homes is likely mostly linked to affordability. The decrease in mobile-dependent homes in those over 65 and blue-collar workers might be due to increased home broadband availability,

Gallardo reaches some interesting conclusions based upon the statistics. First, infrastructure alone does not solve the digital divide issues that push homes to use mobile broadband instead of home broadband. He concludes that if the goal is to improve access to broadband, then infrastructure construction should be paired with demand-side intervention programs like providing devices, digital literacy training, and affordability programs. At least for now, much of the digital equity funding is in limbo, and we saw Congress allow the ACP program to die on the vine. Gallardo says, “Without affordability support, the path of least resistance for many households is a mobile plan.”

Fending Off the End of the World

By now, everybody’s seen the recent announcement that there is a possibility that AI could lead to the end of mankind. While it’s likely that this announcement is mostly hype, there are some worrisome characteristics of AI that have to be taken seriously. For example, the hack of Hugging Face showed us that AI agents can be used to break through firewalls and hack into sophisticated networks. Many security experts have been bracing themselves for the pending introduction of hacking using quantum computers, but it looks like an equally terrible threat might already be here.

It’s worth pointing out that AI agents are not anywhere close to being self-aware and are not going to run around on their own hacking networks. Somewhere behind every hacking effort is a person who set the AI agents loose. Unfortunately, whether the origin of the hacking is a malicious foreign government or an overambitious teenager, the results can be the same. While the headlines are about the possible end of the world, the real immediate threat is the ability of AI agents to disable the many trusted computer networks that are in the background of our lives.

If we have problems with AI hacking, it’s not going to look like Skynet from The Terminator. Instead, it’s going to look more like Live Free or Die Hard, where commercial networks, banking systems, and traffic lights stop working reliably. That’s going to feel a bit like the end of the world, because the things we rely on every day are at risk of being broken. Anybody who has been through a major natural disaster knows what that feels like. I’ve had first-hand experience with two catastrophic hurricanes, and it’s daunting when power, water, cellular, and broadband all die, because losing those things kills other important functions like public safety and the food supply chain. Let’s face it – we are totally dependent on cloud systems. Look at the panic that ensues when cloud programs go out of service for a few hours.

I want to examine the possibility of AI hacking by looking at the example of hacking the least-connected network we all rely on – the water system. Water systems use SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) software that lets water system operators collect real-time data from field sensors and lets operators adjust flow rates, tank levels, and water pressure. Wells and pump stations use PLCs and RTUs , which are computers and software that automatically react to local sensor data. Water processing and sewerage plants have become increasingly automated.

If you go back just thirty years, practically nothing in a water system was computer-assisted outside of some customer billing. But we’ve been busy over the last several decades introducing software that increased efficiency and reduced the need for people. It’s ironic that, faced with the possibility of AI hacking, the improvements we’ve implemented in recent decades might now become the biggest vulnerability. We’re all vulnerable if our water network is disabled.

The obvious fix for AI hacking is to isolate a network from outside interference. We’ve been trying to do that for the last decade by placing networks behind firewalls and using a range of cybersecurity measures to fend off hackers. The scary scenario we’re suddenly facing is that those cybersecurity measures might be worthless if the hacker is a series of AI agents. I think the announcement by AI executives that AI could indeed go amok is really an admission that AI can likely overcome existing cybersecurity measures and break through firewalls.

If we can’t rely on existing firewalls and other cybersecurity measures, there are two alternatives. The old school way would be to go retrograde and return to the practices of thirty years ago when there were no computers and software anywhere in a water network. That’s pretty extreme, and I suspect that most water operators wouldn’t know how to go about disassembling computer controls without crashing the water system.

The other fix is to completely air-gap a water network, which means completely eliminating all outside connections to the system. That’s also a drastic step. It would mean cutting broadband lines and disabling the ability of smartphones or tablets to interface with the network. It means eliminating all cloud-based software and loading all software needed to operate the network locally. It probably means building a small data center to control the network locally. It means cutting off electronic links to neighboring water networks. It means more manual effort to accomplish tasks that have been automated.

If I operated a water or electric utility, I’d be having this conversation soon. The warning that AI could bring my current network down might means that all my current cybersecurity measures might be inadequate. The recent announcements of rogue AI agents, even if mostly hype, change everything related to network security.

A New Type of Churn

I think every ISP I’ve talked with this year is seeing higher churn. For those not familiar with the term, churn is the measure of how many customers an ISP loses. Churn is inevitable. It’s churn when a customer moves and drops service. It’s churn when a customer changes to another ISP. It’s churn when a customer doesn’t pay their bill, and the ISP cuts off service.

The industry churn rate varies widely by the size of the ISP and by markets. The biggest national ISPs have a churn rate in recent years between 1% and 1.5% monthly. The three large cell carriers have churn just under 1% monthly. These large businesses know that a lot of their churn comes from competition. When customers have multiple choices for satisfactory broadband or cell service, they are more open to changing providers to react to special pricing.

Smaller ISPs typically have far smaller churn rates. I know a number of small fiber ISPs with historic churn rates between 4% and 6% annually. Many of these fiber ISPs don’t face competition across their entire footprint, although almost everybody has some competition these days. Every ISP has customers that move away or die. There are always exceptions to the rule, and I know ISPs operating in college towns and near military bases that have always experienced much higher churn than average.

Many ISPs have programs to try to reduce churn. They might have a win-back program to try to talk customers out of changing to a competitor.

The headline for the blog is a new definition of churn. Some ISPs who have been trying to understand higher churn have dug deeper into the data. What they are telling me is that most of the increased churn is due to household economics and customers who can’t afford to pay the monthly broadband bill. Nonpayment has always been a big component of churn, but it is now moving to the top of the list.

Most households want to keep the broadband connection, but in tough economic times they are going to value keeping food on the table more than broadband. We can’t forget that dropping broadband can be a significant savings for a household, particular when it also means dropping streaming services, which might cost as much or more than the broadband bill. Most people who drop broadband have some partial alternatives like using cellphones or computers at the office.

When ISPs dig deeper into economic churn, they are finding something new. They are finding that people who drop broadband because they can’t afford it want to come back. They might pay for broadband for six months and drop it for three or four months. When they are flush again, they come back. That’s a new category of churn that we haven’t seen much of in the past. These are households that value the broadband connection, but who just can’t afford it. If I had to coin a name for this new class of churn, it might be something like occasional customers.

If you look around the world, there are models for selling to occasional customers. ISPs in places like Nigeria sell broadband by the day, week, or month because they understand that many households cannot commit to a steady subscription. ISPs there understand that getting some revenue out of a connection over the course of a year is far better than getting nothing. If an ISP drops a customer permanently, they strand the cost of the drop.

There are a number of ISPs in the U.S. who recognize this phenomenon to some small degree. For example, some ISPs offer seasonal rates for snowbirds or college students who are only in the market for part of each year. But I haven’t heard of any ISP that makes it easy for customers to come and go when they can afford to connect. In fact, many ISPs make it hard for customers to come back.

One of the good things about the way that most ISPs sell broadband is that they make customers prepay for the coming month. One way to deal with occasional customers would be to sell clearly-labeled pre-paid broadband that automatically expires at the end of the billing period if the next monthly bill hasn’t been pre-paid. Customers with this plan could come and go as they can afford to pay.

While there have always been occasional customers, what’s new today is the large number of customers who are struggling to pay their broadband bill. There are a lot of smart marketing people in the industry, and I’m sure some of them will find clever solutions to the problem. Rather than shun customers who have trouble paying, ISPs should provide a way for them to pre-pay when they can afford it. That’s way smarter than just losing the customers to permanent churn and stranding network costs.

Satellite Shorts September 2026

AST SpaceMobile is making progress with offering satellite cellular service. The  company launched three massive satellites in August, bringing the fleet to 13 satellites. These are much larger than ASTs original satellites or ones being used by other carriers. They are essentially floating central offices. The FCC also gave the company the go-ahead in August to begin testing its satellite-to-smartphone service. AT&T and Verizon have both inked deals with the company to be their satellite partner for cellular.

More Countries Entering the Satellite Race. STC Group has partnered with Astranis to deploy a dedicated satellite to serve Saudi Arabia. The country wants to strengthen its communications capabilities independently of the other big satellite fleets. This has become a priority for Saudi Arabia, as a complement to its major investment in terrestrial fiber networks.

The Vietnamese aerospace company VinSpace has signed a contract with SpaceX to launch its first satellite into orbit. The country hopes to develop a space industry and deploy multiple satellites in the future.

Deorbit-as-a-Service. The U.S. Space Development Agency recently chose designs to consider from three companies that have business plans to launch satellites that will capture and deorbit dead satellites left in orbit. This is a nascent industry with challenges, because nobody has ever been able to snag a dead satellite. Some people in the industry describe most existing satellites as “ungrabbable”.

More Spectrum for Satellites. The FCC is scheduled to vote at the end of September on providing more than 1,000 MHz of spectrum in the 12 GHz and 42 GHz bands for high-speed satellite broadband. The spectrum could be used for home broadband, airplane and ship connectivity, and traffic-routing between satellites and earthstations. The FCC seems to be approving new spectrum for satellite uses at a much faster pace than it ever considered for other uses of spectrum.

Next-gen Starlink Satellites. In July, SpaceX launched twenty of the next-generation V3 satellites as a test of the satellites’ solar arrays and antennae. The satellites were allowed to deorbit soon after the test. The company currently has scheduled a launch on September 28 of the first operational V3 satellites. The launch has been delayed from the original goal of the first quarter of 2026. The satellites are much larger than the V2 satellites and require the Starship rocket to launch. Starlink says the new V3 provides 1 terabit of download and 160 gigabits of upload speeds, a huge improvement over the V2 satellites. The use of the Starship rocket will also increase launch capacity. In the past, the maximum number of V2 satellites per launch was 29, but with Starship, up to 60 V3 satellites can be launched at a time.

Europe Moves Forward with IRIS2. Europe is collectively launching hundreds of independent LEO and MEO satellites to create a European sovereign satellite network. All vendors for the project are European, with  Airbus, Aerospacelab, Thales Alenia Space, and OHB building the satellite constellation, and Eutelsat, SES, and Hispasat handling ground functions. IRIS2 is not intended as a competitor to Starlink for home broadband, but will be used to provide secure satellite connections for government, defense, and emergency purposes. This seems to be part of the larger movement for Europe to wean itself from American tech companies.

Connected Vehicles. Toyota and Iridium have done a demo, in conjunction with Deutsch Telekom IoT, to send voice messages to and from cars using the Iridium satellite network. This was the first test of the technology the company wants to use to provide connectivity for automotive, logistics, remote utilities, smart agriculture, emergency response and other IoT applications in areas that are out of the reach of cellular networks.

Danger of Space Collisions. Darren McKnight, a space debris expert at LeoLabs in California, said recently that we are already ripe for a major collision event in space. He says the biggest danger comes from the orbiting derelict rocket bodies that are still in orbit. These mostly sit at altitudes a little higher than LEO satellites, and a collision of rocket remains would rain debris down on all satellites below.

Fixing the Broadband Maps

There is a lot of talk about improving the FCC broadband maps. I published a blog a few weeks ago that described a bill passed by the Senate that would require a new review of the FCC broadband maps. The bill is labeled the Modernization, Accountability, and Planning (MAP) for Broadband Funding Act.

I’m all for changes that would create an accurate broadband map. But I’m fairly certain that the FCC is not going to consider making the changes that would actually improve the maps. The biggest problem with the current maps is that speeds claimed by ISPs are sometimes far different than what is being delivered. Fixing that would require the FCC to actually look at what’s in the maps and challenge ISPs that exaggerate speeds. I can’t imagine the agency adopting new rules that would saddle itself with that responsibility.

There is an existing tool that could be used  to compare claimed speeds to actual speeds. Ookla records millions of speed tests across the country for all ISPs. The FCC could buy the Ookla speed test records to compare against ISP claims. With AI and other new analytic tools, it wouldn’t be hard to compare Ookla speeds to FCC claimed speeds.

If speed tests were considered, ISPs would instantly yell that speed tests aren’t accurate enough to use to judge them. In many ways, they would be right. People often take speed tests when their broadband isn’t performing right. There are lots of homes where speeds are slower due to WiFi issues. A computer sitting close to the WiFi router will show faster speeds than a computer at the other end of a home. Many customers subscribe to lower speed tiers, which, by definition, don’t show the capability of the ISP.

But when large numbers of speed tests are used correctly, they are a valuable tool for understanding an ISP’s real performance. I’ve been lucky enough to work with counties that have purchased the full Ookla speed data set. Those tests provided them with enough data to do meaningful comparisons.

One of the things I learned in working with speed test datasets is that you must concentrate on the fastest speeds rather than average speeds. Doing so eliminates most of the concerns I discussed above. If an ISP claims data speeds of 100/20 Mbps to the FCC, but there are no speed tests over the course of a year that hit that speed, the ISP is exaggerating speeds. This kind of analysis can be used to ferret out exaggerated speed claims. This also worked in both directions – I’ve often seen faster speeds than the speeds claimed to the FCC, which means the ISP is underreporting speeds.

Speed tests can also be used to test broadband coverage claims. I was working with one county where a WISP was claiming coverage over more than half of the geography of the county. The Ookla speed test data for that ISP showed only a single speed test over the course of a year. It was clear that the WISP’s coverage claims were aspirational, not actual, and the County was able to use the Ookla results to challenge the broadband maps in the first BEAD map challenge. Without the Ookla tests, the County could not have made a map challenge, because the NTIA challenge rules wanted the County to find customers using the ISP in question and convince them to take speed tests. It’s obviously impossible to test an ISP that is not actually present.

Speed tests show all sorts of other interesting facts about ISP coverage. I’ve written several times in the past about how the speed for FWA cellular wireless quickly diminishes with distance from the tower. An FWA carrier might be delivering 300 Mbps to a customer within a short distance of a tower, but after a mile, speed drops to 100 Mbps. By two miles speed drops to 50-75 Mbps, and at three miles drop to the range of 25 Mbps. Most FWA speed claims in the FCC map will show 100 Mbps across the entire area around a tower, and much of that speed claim is overstated.

The FCC already spends a lot of money annually trying to get the mapping fabric right. But it’s pretty clear that the FCC doesn’t look at the speed data claimed by ISPs. The only time the FCC uses this data is when it published its annual report to Congress about the state of broadband. The FCC benefits by overstated maps since they tell a better story than what’s really available in rural America. If the FCC really wants to get serious about broadband mapping, why not buy the Ookla data twice per year to compare to claimed speeds?