Monthly Archives: May 2017

Is Internet Access a Right?

I just saw the results of an interesting survey conducted by AnchorFree, a digital privacy company. They asked 2,000 people a number of questions about Internet privacy and related issues.

The most interesting finding to me was that 32% of Americans now believe that access to broadband is a fundamental right. I’m sure you wouldn’t have to go back as recently as five years ago to find a time when nobody held that belief. I think this speaks loudly to the importance of broadband in people’s lives.

I also know a lot of people at the other end of the spectrum for that belief. Many people think that the primary purpose of the Internet is now to watch video. It’s not hard to understand this viewpoint since video traffic, due to the size of video files, dwarfs other internet traffic. But the Internet has continued to increase in importance in the average person’s life in ways that might not be catching the big headlines. One example is the way that the Internet has changed how many of us work. Just in my family of siblings I and a sister along now work at home. On the block where I live there are half a dozen people that work from home. While that phenomenon has been around for a while, the number of people working at home some or all of the time continues to climb rapidly- something that would not be possible without reliable broadband.

The Internet also has changed our lives in smaller, but important ways. I recently moved to Asheville, NC and live close to downtown. It turns out here that most of the households in my new neighborhood subscribe to a platform called Nextdoor. This delivers hyper-local news, something that was talked about a lot in the early days of the Internet, but which never quite materialized. This is a platform where you report a lost cat, warn about a tree branch that has fallen in the road or look for somebody local to mow your lawn. The platform can be set to just cover your immediate neighbors or for a wider area. At least in my new neighborhood this Internet platform has created a sense of connectivity and community, something that has disappeared in a lot of the country.

Most of us also use the cloud today, and I think many people don’t even realize the extent of the cloud in their lives. I use a back-up service to automatically store copies of every file on my computer. We use several software packages such as Microsoft Office365, Adobe PDF services and QuickBooks that are in the cloud. And like almost everybody our email is all done in the cloud. It seems like my broadband connection is always updating some app on my cellphone or computer.

The Internet has also become the tool for training and education. This school year my daughter was unable to take the math class she wanted due to a scheduling conflict but was able to take it instead online – something that benefited her, but which I also suspect saved money for the school system since one online teacher could handle more students than in a classroom. I know a lot of people who have completed online masters degrees that have led to better-paying jobs. What is probably most extraordinary about this is how ordinary online training has become compared to just a few years ago. It’s hard to pictures students without Internet access, which is one of the biggest sore spots in rural America that doesn’t have good broadband.

But back to the rest of the survey. Not surprisingly, 80% of respondents said that they are more concerned today about online privacy and security than they were a year ago. This high percentage is probably due to a few factors such as the recent news that the FCC ended privacy regulations for the big ISPs. There has also been a lot of headlines in the last year about security problems and I rarely go a day any more without hearing about some new virus, some new weakness in a software platform, or some new major hacking.

Just over 70% of respondents said that they are doing more today to protect themselves online. For most this meant changing their passwords more often and being more careful about opening emails. But there has also been an explosion in new subscribers to VPN services since the FCC ended ISP privacy protections. I also anecdotally have talked to quite a few people who have either pared back or stepped away from social media like Facebook.

Interestingly, 42% of all respondents thought that it is the responsibility of their ISP or somebody other than the government to make the web as safe as possible. That has me scratching my head, but that’s probably because I know a lot more about the big ISPs than most people. The good news is that subscribers to smaller ISPs operated by telcos, cooperatives and municipalities have an ISP who is looking out for them. But anybody trusting the big ISPs might be putting their faith in the very company that is the primary culprit in violating their privacy.

Death of the Smartphone?

Over the last few weeks I have seen several articles predicting the end of the smartphone. Those claims are a bit exaggerated since the authors admit that smartphones will probably be around for at least a few decades. But they make some valid points which demonstrate how quickly technologies come into and out of our lives these days.

The Apple iPhone was first sold in the summer of 2007. While there were phones with smart capabilities before that, most credit the iPhone release with the real birth of the smartphone industry. Since that time the smartphone technology has swept the entire world.

As a technology the smartphone is mature, which is what you would expect from a ten-year old technology. While phones might still get more powerful and faster, the design for smartphones is largely set and now each new generation touts new and improved features that most of us don’t use or care about. The discussion of new phones now centers around minor tweaks like curved screens and better cameras.

Almost the same ten-year path happened to other electronics like the laptop and the tablet. Once any technology reaches maturity it starts to become commoditized. I saw this week that a new company named Onyx Connect is introducing a $30 smartphone into Africa where it joins a similarly inexpensive line of phones from several Chinese manufacturers. These phones are as powerful as US phones of just a few years ago.

This spells trouble for Apple and Samsung, which both benefit tremendously by introducing a new phone every year. People are now hanging onto phones much longer, and soon there ought to be scads of reasonably-priced alternatives to the premier phones from these two companies.

The primary reason that the end of the smartphone is predicted is that we are starting to have alternatives. In the home the smart assistants like Amazon Echo are showing that it’s far easier to talk to a device rather than work through menus of apps. Anybody who has used a smartphone to control a thermostat or a burglar alarm quickly appreciates the ability to make the changes by talking to Alexa or Siri rather than fumbling through apps and worrying about passwords and such.

The same thing is quickly happening in cars and when your home and car are networked together using the same personal assistant the need to use a smartphone while driving gets entirely eliminated. The same thing will be happening in the office and soon that will mean there is a great alternative to the smartphone in the home, the car and the office – the places where most people spend the majority of their time. That’s going to cut back on reliance of the smart phone and drastically reduce the number of people who want to rush to buy a new expensive smartphone.

There are those predicting that some sort of wearable like glasses might offer another good alternative for some people. There are newer version of smartglasses like the $129 Snap Spectacles that are less obtrusive than the first generation Google Glass. Smartglasses still need to overcome the societal barrier where people are not comfortable being around somebody who can record everything that is said and done. But perhaps the younger generations will not find this to be as much of a barrier. There are also other potential kinds of wearables from smartwatches to smart clothes that could take over the non-video functions of the smartphone.

Like with any technology that is as widespread as smartphones today there will be people who stick with their smartphone for decades to come. I saw a guy on a plane last week with an early generation iPod, which was noticeable because I hadn’t seen one in a few years. But I think that most people will be glad to slip into a world without a smartphone if that’s made easy enough. Already today I ask Alexa to call people and I can do it all through any device such as my desktop without even having a smartphone in my office. And as somebody who mislays my phone a few times every day, I know that I won’t miss having to use a smartphone in the home or car.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe . . .

Yet one more of our older technologies is now a big target for hackers. Recently hackers have been able to use the SS7 (Signaling System 7) network to intercept text messages from banks using two-factor authentication and then cleaning out bank accounts.

This is not the first time that SS7 has been used for nefarious purposes. Industry experts started to warn about the dangers of SS7 back in 2008. In more recent years there have been numerous reports that the SS7 network has been used by governments and others to keep tabs on the locations of some cellphones. But the use of the SS7 network to intercept text messages creates a big danger for anybody using online banking that requires text-massage authentication. Once a hacker intercepts a text verification code they can be inside your bank account.

Once a hacker is inside the SS7 network they can use the protocol to redirect traffic. This was recently demonstrated on 60 Minutes when German hackers intercepted phone calls made to congressman Ted Lieu, with his permission. SS7 can be used to direct, block or perform numerous functions on any telephone number, making it a great tool for spying.

Telephone techs are familiar with SS7 and it’s been with us since 1975. It was developed by Bell Labs and was the technology that allowed the creation of what we’ve come to call telephone features. SS7 technology allowed for the telephone system to snag pieces of called or calling numbers and other network information and led to the creation of such features as caller ID, call blocking, call forwarding and numerous other features.

In the telecom world SS7 is carried on a separate network from the paths used to route telephone calls. Every telephone carrier on the network has separate SS7 trunks that all connect regionally to SS7 hubs, known as STPs. It is the ubiquitous nature of SS7 that makes it vulnerable. There is an SS7 connection to every telephone switch, but also to private switches like PBXs. If the SS7 network was a private network that only connected telco central offices it would be relatively safe. But the proliferation of other SS7 nodes makes it relatively easy for a hacker to gain access to the SS7 network, or even to buy a connection into the SS7 network.

It has now become dangerous to use two-factor authentication for anything. While access to bank accounts is an obvious target, this kind of hacking could also gain access to social networks, entry into corporate WANs or any software platform using two-factor authentication. Some banks have already announced that they are going to abandon this kind of customer authentication, but many of the larger ones have yet to act. You have to think most of them are looking into alternatives, but it’s not particularly easy for a giant bank to change their customer interfaces.

There is a replacement for SS7 on the way. It’s an IP-based protocol called Diameter. This protocol can replace SS7 but also has a much wider goal of being the protocol to authenticate connections to the Internet of Things as well as VoIP communications from cell phones using WiFi.

Banks and others could change to the Diameter protocol and send encrypted authentication messages through email or a messaging system. But this would not be an easy change for the telephone industry to implement. The SS7 network is used today to support major switching functions like the routing of 800 calls and the many telephone features like caller ID. Changing the way those functions are done would be a major change for the industry. It’s one of the many items being looked at by the industry as part of the digital transition of the telephone network. But if it was decided tomorrow to start implementing this change it would require years to make sure that all existing switches keep working and that all of the SS7-enabled functions keep working as they should.

SS7 was implemented long before there was anything resembling a hacker. For the most part the SS7 network has been working quietly behind the scenes to do routing and other functions that have increased the efficiency of the telephone network. But like with most older electronic technologies the SS7 network has numerous flaws that can be exploited by malicious hacking. So it probably won’t be too many years until the SS7 networks are turned off.

Another Reversal of the FilmOn X Decision

In the continuing saga of looking for alternate ways to get programming to the home, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed an earlier ruling that said that FilmOn X had a right to retransmit over-the-air television signals.

FilmOn is a global provider of internet-based programming. They carry over 600 channels of broadcast TV from around the world. They also carry a big library of movies and offer a few of their own theme-based channels (such as Shockmasters that specialize in Alfred Hitchcock movies and television shows).

I won’t go through the history of the company and its attempts to carry the major US networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. The company was granted the right to carry this content several times in various courts and then had those decisions reversed by other courts. This case marks the third time that the company has been told it doesn’t have the right to retransmit these networks.

The company has tried several ways of delivering these networks to customers. They originally just grabbed the signals out of the air and put them on the internet. When told this wasn’t allowed by the courts they then set up satellite farms to wirelessly send individual signals to customers in a manner similar to Aereo.

This latest ruling said specifically that FilmOn is not eligible to call itself a cable company and to demand that local stations sell them content. That ruling hinged upon testimony provided by the US Patent office that said that such authority for internet-based retransmission was not clear. This differed from an earlier US Supreme Court ruling in the Aereo case that said that internet retransmission was equivalent to cable retransmission.

What’s really at the heart of this case is the definition of who is eligible to retransmit signals from the major over-the-air networks. Congress, through various laws, has given the right (and usually also the obligation) for landline-based cable companies to carry the major networks. Cable companies are obligated to carry those stations that are within certain distances from their customer base.

But over the years those that have been allowed to carry local programming has grown. Within the last decade the satellite cable companies began carrying local stations in many markets. I lived in the Caribbean for many years and some of the cable providers in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands somehow obtained the rights to carry some New York City local stations. Today there are a number of OTT providers like Sling TV and Playstation Vue that are carrying local network stations.

But the current rules draw a firm distinction between those that must carry local programming and everybody else. And this gives the flexibility to local stations to decide if they will sell their signal to those without the automatic rights. The big networks have decided to provide programming to Sling TV, but not to FilmOn or Aereo.

Originally both FilmOn and Aereo captured the broadcast signals from the air and put them onto their own networks. That obviously angered the big networks and they got that ruling reversed. But then these providers refused to sell their signal to these two companies. One has to think that was partly done to punish these companies for challenging them, and perhaps partly due to the cable companies who lobbied against competition.

This ruling could really stifle new OTT providers. It seems one part of the OTT appeal is the ability to deliver local network programming as part of their packages. This ruling gives local stations the ability to choose who can or cannot buy their signal, and to thus pick winners and losers in the competitive OTT battlefield.

It’s hard to think that this makes any sense. But Congress or the FCC could clarify this issue if they cared to tackle it. Just over two years ago the FCC put out a Notice for Proposed Rulemaking asking about this exact topic. The FCC wanted to clarify the rights for internet-based programmers to buy content, and in that docket the FCC had suggested that anybody ought to be allowed to buy programming if they agree to pay the market rates for it. But the FCC has never acted in that docket which has led to today’s situation where some providers are given programming and others not. The have-nots aren’t just companies like FilmOn and Aereo, and it’s been reported for years that Apple has been unable to get programming rights.

At some point this needs to be clarified. The last companies we want deciding who can or cannot offer programming services are the major networks, especially since some of them are owned by cable companies. I have no idea if the FCC will address this, but they need to.

The Future of OTT

Level3 Just released their third annual report titled OTT Video Services, where they asked a wide array of industry experts about the future of OTT. The report posed a variety of questions about the OTT industry to 486 ‘media industry professionals,’ who were 70% from the US with the rest scattered in the rest of the world. These kind of exercises are not surveys and you can’t attach any statistical significance to the results. But since the respondents are in the industry I don’t know if there is any better way to understand where the industry thinks OTT is headed.

The most interesting finding (and the one that spawned a few headlines) is that 70% of the respondents think that OTT viewership will bypass traditional television viewership no later than 2022. That is an amazing prediction considering the huge difference today between TV and OTT viewing. While this year it’s expected that about two-thirds of US homes will watch at least one OTT broadcast per month, total OTT usage this year is expected to deliver only about 20% of the total hours spent by adults watching video content.

I can understand why Level3 would sponsor this report each year. The bandwidth required to support an OTT industry that grows from 20% of all of the hours spent watching video up to 50% is going to stress networks everywhere. About a quarter of respondents thought that OTT content would grow year-over-year as much as 25%, with almost half of the respondents thinking that growth rate would be between 30% and 50% per year.

This growth represents huge bandwidth growth on the backbone networks that Level3 operates as well as on all of the local networks that ISPs use to support residential customers. If you think your broadband slows down now in the evening, wait just a few years where there will be a lot more video on your local network.

The experts did foresee some major challenges for the OTT industry. Their biggest concern was the ability of local ISP networks to deliver a high-quality signal to customers. This concern was partially due to a concern that customers would not have enough bandwidth, but also represented concerns about the backbone networks and the interface between OTT providers and ISPs. It was disagreements between OTT players and the ISPs that prompted the last FCC to get serious about network neutrality. And since it looks like network neutrality will be scrapped that concern is back on the burner.

They are also concerned that the OTT industry might try to follow the path of traditional TV and begin inserting too many ads. The experts see ads as one of the major factors today driving people from traditional programming to OTT programming.

Another concern of the OTT industry is the ability of OTT companies to acquire desired programming. There are still some popular cable networks that none of the OTT providers have been able to purchase. There is particular concern about the ability to acquire regional sports networks, something that is a major draw for a significant proportion of customers. And there is concern about acquiring local network feeds and today the few OTT providers largely show content from a few major urban markets.

In looking towards the future, there are a number of OTT providers keeping an eye on acquiring virtual reality content, although none of the OTT services carries such content yet today. Of a higher priority to most OTT providers was the ability to beef up their networks in order to support both higher frame rates (HFR) and high-dynamic ranges (HDR) and most providers are working towards supporting both options. These technologies can improve delivery of sports content today and will situate OTT providers to offer VR content in the future.

There is also a lot of interest in OTT providers to be able to carry more live events other than sports content. They know that there is high customer demand for watching live events like the Emmys and other award shows, live concerts and other live content.

There is also a lot of interest from OTT providers that carry live network feeds (traditional cable channels shown linearly) to also be able to offer a library of video-on-demand content, in the same manner as Netflix. I’ve been a subscriber to Sling TV for a while and some of their network now offers a lot of VOD content on the service.

It’s going to be an interesting industry to watch. There are around 100 OTT services available in the US today, but only about half a dozen of them have any significant number of customers. I note that even though industry insiders foresee huge growth for the sector, that’s only going to happen if the OTT providers can find a way to offer what people want to watch.

Regulating Broadband

I’ve often hear it suggested that we ought to regulate broadband like a utility. The proponents of this idea say that this is the only way to make sure that everybody gets broadband and to make sure, over the long haul, that broadband stays affordable. But it’s never been entirely clear in hearing these arguments if people mean we should regulate the physical networks that carry broadband or the broadband products that ride on any network (or both).

Obviously in the current environment where the big ISPs have gained the favor of both the FCC and Congress regulation of this sort is not going to happen. But governments change, and so the time could come when such regulation is possible. But even if we had a pro-regulation government, I see all sorts of issues that would make such regulation hard to implement and still remain fair. Consider the following issues:

Size of ISP. Any regulation might only need to be applied to the biggest ISPs. A few companies like Comcast, AT&T, Charter (Spectrum), Verizon and CenturyLink together sell over 80% of the broadband connections in the country (and more if you count cellular data as broadband). Smaller ISPs have little market power, and some of them, like the smaller independent telephone companies, would tell you that they are already regulated to a large degree.

Incentive to Deploy New Technology. One of the reasons that historic telephone regulation worked so well was that the technology used to deliver traditional telephone service was expected to live out its full economic life, meaning that telcos could make an investment and know that they would recover the cost of doing so. But that is no longer the case. We now live in a world where there are dizzying new technologies developed all of the time that are faster, cheaper and better at delivering broadband. The large ISPs are not keeping up with technology improvements today in a fully deregulated environment where they can charge enough to recover their costs – it’s hard to imagine that regulations would do anything but slow down the rate of technology upgrades.

What gets Regulated? Today’s fiber networks are not as simple as older TDM networks. A lot of new fiber construction is being done for purposes other than serving residential customers. For example, Verizon just announced that they were ordering over $1 billion of fiber cable – but I think most of this fiber is going to be used to replace leased transport to cellular towners and is not going to be used to bring broadband to customers. It’s going to be hard in a complex network to define regulated and non-regulated assets.

What About Competition? Regulation works best with monopolies, which is why there is still regulation for electric and water companies. But the ISP world is a maze of differing levels of competition. There are cities – or neighborhoods of cities – that are competitive and areas where there are virtual monopolies – and this can differ block by block in larger cities. It’s hard to think of a regulatory scheme that somehow accounts for such differences.

Regulating Parts of Businesses. The big ISPs are no longer just ISPs, and in fact most of them make a most of their profits elsewhere. I just wrote a blog a week ago discussing how complex Comcast has become with their mix of cable networks and other businesses like television networks, sports teams, and soon cellular wireless. It’s incredibly challenging to regulate companies of this complexity because they have the ability to manipulate the books of the regulated entity to show any level of earnings they want. They could shift costs to make a regulated entity perform as well or as poorly as needed to satisfy regulators.

Realities of Wall Street. Rate regulation has always meant setting a reasonable return on investments for the regulated entity. The return for telephone companies that are still under rate regulation is being phased-down to just over 9%. To those of us who wish we had a bank account that could earn that much it might sound like a high rate of return. But the realities of Wall Street are that capital investments must earn more than that. If we put that kind of cap on new fiber investment for the big ISPS, I think the result would be a massive cut back in building new fiber. Wall Street would punish ISPs for investing capital at returns that low. And if the big companies stop building the rest of the industry including equipment vendors come to a screeching halt.

Challenges of Re-regulation. I’ve tried to work through the idea of how to take companies like Comcast and somehow regulating them. Putting the politics and the chances of this happening aside, I’m not sure how you can take assets that were built during a time of no regulation and somehow start regulating them. The court cases against that effort would probably stretch for a decade.

My conclusion from all of this is that it’s an interesting idea and thinking about it is a great mental exercise. But I can’t envision how you could somehow shove today’s unregulated companies back into a regulated environment. Even was the government determined to do so it might be too hard to do without causing more harm than good.

Why Isn’t Cord Cutting Going Faster?

If cord cutting is such a big deal, then why aren’t more people leaving traditional television? That’s a question I’ve been asked several times lately and it’s a good one.

Cord cutting is definitely real. Numerous articles make cord cutting seem like an imminent disaster for the cable industry. But industry estimates are that between 1.7 million and 2.5 million people walked away from traditional cable TV in 2016. The lower number is the net drop in national cable subscribers while the higher number takes into account the fact that there were over a million new housing units built in the country – and I think the higher number is closer to correct.

And while losses of that many customers hurts the cable industry, it’s hard to yet call it a flood. If annual losses stay at this level the cable industry will still have over 50 million customers twenty years from now. The real story might be that most people aren’t yet cutting the cord. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the most important ones are:

People Still Like Cable. Total pay television subscribers just fell to under 100 million sometime last year. There are a lot of households that still like the variety of channels that come with the big packages. While a lot customers are now time shifting by the use of DVRs and TV everywhere, they still like what they are buying.

Bundling Discount. It’s really easy to forget that the big cable companies have priced their bundles in such a way as to penalize customers for leaving just one service. Cord cutters generally want to retain their broadband while dropping cable – and when they go to do this they find that the savings is not as large as they thought. Interestingly, if you want to keep cable and drop broadband the same thing is true. The big cable companies apply the ‘bundling’ discount to whatever product you want to drop – meaning that you then revert to paying full market price for whatever product is kept. People that want to save $20 per month by switching to an OTT service like Sling TV quickly find out that they actually won’t save much.

Cord Shaving Instead. There is a whole lot of cord shaving going on – that is, people migrating to smaller cable packages. Cord shaving lets people who mostly like Netflix to keep local network stations and a few other things they like about traditional TV, without fully cutting the cord. This is best evidenced by looking at the subscriber numbers to the various cable networks, which are losing subscriptions at a much faster pace than total pay TV subscribership. For example, ESPN has lost around 12 million subscribers since their peak in 2013, and the majority of other cable networks are also seeing large subscriber losses. Since the total net subscribers to pay television are dropping more slowly, the only explanation is that customers are opting out of the big cable packages for smaller ones. The cable companies don’t release statistics on cord shaving, and so we can only guess at the magnitude of the changes by seeing what is happening to ESPN and other networks.

The Alternatives are not that Different. Over half of the homes in the country now subscribe to at least one of the OTT services like Netflix. But it appears that most homes are viewing this content as alternate content and not a straight replacement for traditional cable.

There are a lot of new alternatives to traditional cable such as Sling TV or Playstation Vue – but I don’t think most customers are seeing them as significantly different than traditional cable content. I’ve been trying some of these services and they honestly still feel like cable. The content is mostly streamed at fixed times and even with smaller line-ups I find I’m not interested in most of the channels they carry. While these alternatives can save money, they often don’t have the same reliability or quality of picture as a cable system. The bottom line, at least to me, is that services like Sling TV still feel like cable offerings to me.

It’s Not Easy for Some. It’s not easy for the technically unsophisticated to totally cut the cord. Unless you live in a major metropolitan market you’re going to want to somehow tie in your local network stations with other online programming, and that is still not that easy. You can get an antenna to pick up off-the-air content, but that is not easily integrated into any easy-to-use program guide or search engine.

It’s also not always easy to drop the cable company. People get tied up in contracts that are expensive to break. There is a whole gauntlet of steps needed to get away from the cable company from listening to retention specialists to returning settop boxes that make leaving a hassle – and the cable companies know that these tactics work.

We may get to a time when cord cutting accelerates more quickly, as happened with landline telephones. But before that happens there needs to be easier to use and more satisfying alternatives to draw most people away from traditional cable altogether. If there is any one issue that might push more households over the edge it’s the price of cable packages – but the big cable providers are now introducing skinny bundles to try to retain the budget minded customers. I’m looking at the numbers and thinking we are going to have traditional cable around a lot longer than many people predict.

Broadband and Apartments

Comcast just released the results of a survey they completed that talked to apartment building managers around the country. The published results of this survey can be found here. No doubt the survey was conducted and published as a way for Comcast to convince apartment owners and managers that Comcast can provide them with a broadband solution. But the findings are interesting in that I’ve seen few such surveys that concentrate on the MDU demographic. I’m sure the big ISPs do this kind of market research all of the time, but have rarely disclosed their findings.

While there are some apartment buildings in most communities, this is particularly of interest for urban areas where there are significant numbers of people living in apartments. There are a number of big cities in the country where half or more of residents live in apartments and condominiums. As I’ve discussed in a number of blogs, many cities have spotty broadband coverage that ranges from buildings with fiber for tenants down to buildings with no broadband connectivity. Here are the most interesting results of the survey:

Renter’s Expectations. 87% of apartment managers thought that technology played a vital role in keeping tenants satisfied. 75% of managers said that a majority of prospective tenants ask about communications services. 46% of managers said that having fast broadband connections was their most important amenity for residents with another 36% ranking WiFi as the most important. A distant third was in-apartment laundry.

Property Values. Property managers were asked how technology improves the value of their properties. 30% of managers said that providing good communications services boosted the value of their property by at least 20%. Over 90% of building managers said that good infrastructure increased their value to some degree.

Competition. 67% of the buildings involved in the survey have only one or two telecom service providers – meaning generally the incumbents.

Desire to Modernize. A lot of building managers have plans to improve technology for tenants. 47% have plans to improve infrastructure capable of delivering gigabit speeds. 48% have plans to introduce some smart home technologies (which also require good communications infrastructure).

Challenges Faced. While apartment managers almost universally want to improve their communications infrastructure, they face several roadblocks. 67% are worried about the cost of upgrades. 40% worry about having a quality ISP available even should they make the upgrades. 82% said that they would be quick to adapt upgrades that reduce their operating costs.

Plans for Future Technology Improvements. 89% of managers said that technology plays an important role in the decision of tenants to renew leases. The same percentage said that they wanted to improve WiFi performance in their buildings; 60% want to add energy-efficiency improvements; 49% want to add better security; 43% want to add smart home technology and 43% also want to bolster the underlying communications infrastructure.

Demographics. Looking at the trends with apartments provides one of the few glimpses into how younger households are shaping broadband demand. The managers surveyed said that 36% of their tenants were between 18 and 34, a much higher percentage than seen in single family homes. 90% of building managers said that younger renters were driving the demand for faster broadband speeds and better WiFi.

Municipal Broadband

One of the fights that I expect to see resurface this year is on the topic of whether local governments should be allowed to build fiber networks and become ISPs. The last FCC tackled this issue in a small way when they granted petitions by Chattanooga, TN and Wilson, NC to expand their broadband networks beyond their electric service territories and municipal boundaries. That ruling got reversed by a US district court and was not appealed by the FCC. But the ruling was of limited scope anyway and only addressed those two cities and didn’t set any precedent for other communities.

There are a lot of moving parts on this topic and it’s hard to know where this might go with the current FCC. This FCC is obviously pro-big ISP and companies like Comcast and AT&T have been staunch opponents of municipal broadband. But by the same token, this administration seems to lean towards states’ rights – and up until now municipal broadband has been regulated on a state-by-state basis.

Interestingly, at the local level municipal broadband has broad bipartisan support. In most communities almost all local politicians of both major parties support local broadband efforts. In my experience in working around the country, the only local political opponents of municipal broadband I have seen are those who are strong opponents of government spending money for anything but essential services. Generally local, state and even federal politicians support local broadband efforts in the communities they serve. I think the broad bipartisan appeal is due to politicians recognizing the strong public support for broadband and that almost every household wants broadband these days.

But there are 22 states with some restrictions on municipal broadband. These range from hurdles that can be overcome, like a referendum, up through states that have a total prohibition on municipal broadband. There has been a continual effort by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) – funded by large corporations – to pass new state restrictions on broadband. But most recent efforts to increase prohibition of local broadband have been rebuffed, because few politicians want to go on the record against broadband. But I would not be surprised to see the big ISPs try to press their current advantage at the FCC and try to pass new national restrictions.

Today I see the municipal world dividing into two separate constituencies – urban and rural. Very few big cities have any desire to become an ISP. But they have legitimate concerns that urban broadband isn’t benefiting everybody. For example, San Francisco and some other cities are unhappy that apartment residents don’t have the same broadband opportunities and options as single family homes. And a lot of cities are still unhappy that after all of these years there is no solution for the digital divide. The FCC said last year that there are still around six million people in pockets of urban areas that don’t have access to broadband that meets the 25 Mbps download standard. But while these issues are viewed as a major problem in urban areas, I don’t see much appetite for big city governments tackling the cost of building broadband networks, which is particularly expensive in cities.

Rural America is a totally different story. We have come to the point where communities without good broadband really suffer. Broadband is not just about Netflix but is necessary to take part in the modern world. Local governments are finding that nobody wants to buy homes without broadband if there is a nearby community with broadband. Worse, communities are seeing businesses move away or bypass them when considering new locations. Lack of broadband puts school kids at a definite disadvantage and there are still a lot of households that drive kids daily to public hotspots just to do homework. And lack of broadband takes away all the opportunities for working at home – probably the biggest area of job growth in rural America.

I see small communities – even down to really small sizes like townships with 700 residents – trying to find ways to build a broadband network. I’ve read a few hundred RFPs from rural communities over the last few years, and probably not more than 5% want to become an ISP. But they will do so if they can’t find a commercial company willing to do it. Rural communities largely favor of public-private partnerships. More and more of them are willing to kick money into a building a network if an ISP will invest in their community and operate a broadband network.

I believe that within a decade we are going to start seeing broadband ‘deserts’ where communities without broadband start withering – just as happened in the past to communities that didn’t get electricity, or that were bypassed by railroads or interstate highways. It’s hard to think that a community today can keep their kids at home without broadband – and this is starting to scare local governments.

I just hope that the FCC doesn’t wade into this battle on the side of the big ISPs. Those big companies are not spending money in rural America – or if they are, it’s only when handed to them by the federal government. And even then they are just putting band-aids on rural broadband rather than building fast new networks. I have a feeling that many of the states that have restrictions on rural broadband are going to start having second thoughts about those restrictions when they realize that broadband is at or near the top of concerns of most of rural America.

There are companies building great rural broadband networks. The small telcos are almost all expanding their service areas to build broadband networks. And many of them are working with or partnering with local governments. But all of these small companies collectively can only solve a relatively small percentage of the rural broadband gap – together they do not have the capacity to borrow anything close to the billions needed to build broadband everywhere. Many rural electric cooperatives are now looking hard at the issue, and they could satisfy another slice of the rural market. But that’s still going to leave millions of rural residents with no broadband on their horizon. And I predict these folks are going to become a vocal constituency that politicians will be unable to ignore.

Is our Future Mobile Wireless?

I had a conversation last week with somebody who firmly believes that our broadband future is going to be 100% mobile wireless. He works for a big national software company that you would recognize and he says the company believes that the future of broadband will be wireless and they are migrating all of their software applications to work on cellphones. If you have been reading my blog you know I take almost the opposite view, but there are strong proponents of a wireless future, and it’s a topic worth continually revisiting.

Certainly we are doing more and more things by cellphone. But I think those that view future broadband as mobile are concentrating on faster mobile data speeds but are ignoring the underlying overall data capacity of cellular networks. I still think that our future is going to become even more reliant on fiber in order to handle the big volumes of bandwidth we will all need. This doesn’t mean that I don’t love cellphone data – but I think it’s a complement for landline broadband and not an equivalent substitute. Cellphone networks have major limitations and they are not going to be able to keep up with our need for bandwidth capacity. Even today the vast majority of cellphone data is handed off to landline networks through WiFi. And in my mind that just makes a cellphone into another terminal on your landline network.

Almost everybody understands the difference in quality between using your cellphone in your home using WiFi versus doing the same tasks using only the cellular network. I largely use my cellphone for reading news articles. And while this is a lot lighter application than watching video, I find that I usually have problems opening articles on the web when I’m out of the house. Today’s 4G speeds are still pretty poor and the national average download speed is reported to be just over 7 Mbps.

I think all of the folks who think cellphones are the future are counting on 5G to make a huge difference. But as I’ve written many times, it will be at least a decade before we see a mature 5G cellular network – and even then the speeds are not likely to be hugely faster than the 4G specification today. 5G is really intended to increase the stability of broadband connections (less dropped calls) and the number of connections (able to connect to a lot of IoT devices). The 5G specifications are not even shooting for at a huge speed increase, with the specification calling for 100 Mbps download cellular speeds, which translates into an average of perhaps 50 Mbps connections for all of the customers within a cell site. Interestingly, that’s the same target speed of the 4G specification.

And those greater future speeds sounds great. Since a cellphone connection by definition is for one user, a faster speed means that a cellular connection will support a 4K video stream eventually. But what this argument ignores is that a home a decade from now is going to be packed with devices wanting to make simultaneous connections to the Internet. It is the accumulated volume of usage from all of those devices that is going to add up to huge broadband demand for homes.

Already today homes are packed with broadband hungry devices. We have smart TVs, cellphones, laptops, desktops and tablets all wanting to connect to the network. We have other bandwidth hungry applications like gaming boxes and surveillance cameras. More and more of us are cutting the cord and watching video online. And then there are going to piles of new devices with smaller broadband demands, but which in total will add up to significant bandwidth. Further, a lot of applications we use are now in the cloud. My home uses a lot of bandwidth every day just backing up my data files, connecting to software in the cloud, making VoIP calls, and automatically updating software and apps.

I’ve touted a statistic many times that you might be tired of hearing, but I think it’s at the heart of the matter. The amount of bandwidth used by homes has been doubling every three years since 1980, and there is no end in sight to that trend. Already today a 4G connection is inadequate to support the average home. If you don’t think that’s true, talk to the homes now using AT&T’s fixed LTE connections that deliver 10 Mbps. That kind of speed is not adequate today to provide enough bandwidth to use the many broadband services I discussed above. Cellular connections are already too slow today to provide a reasonable home broadband, even as AT&T is planning to foist these connections on millions of rural homes.

There is no reason to think that 5G will be able top satisfy the total broadband needs of a home. The only way it might do that is if we end up in a world where we have to buy a small cellular subscription for every device in our home – I know I would prefer to instead connect all of my devices to WiFi to avoid such fees. Yes, 5G will be faster, but a dozen years from now when 5G is finally a mature cellular technology, homes will need a lot more bandwidth and a 5G connections then will feel just as inadequate then as 4G feels today.

Unless we get to a future point where the electronics get so cheap that there will be a ‘cell site’ for every few homes, then it’s hard to figure that cellular can ever be a true substitute for landline broadband. And even if such a technology develops you still have to ask if it would make any sense to deploy. Those small cell sites are largely going to have to be fiber fed to deliver the needed bandwidth and backhaul. And in that case small cell sites might not be any cheaper than fiber directly to the premise, especially when considering the lifecycle costs of the cell site electronics. Even if we end up with that kind of network – it’s would not really be a cellular network as much as it would be using wireless loops as the last few feet of a landline network – something that for years we have called fiber-to-the-curb. Such a network would still require us to build fiber almost everywhere.