Frontier Communications just announced that they are testing the use of wireless spectrum to complete the most rural portions of their CAF II build-out requirement. The company accepted $283 million per year for six years ($1.7 billion total) to upgrade broadband to 650,000 rural homes and businesses. That’s a little over $2,600 per location passed. The CAF II program requires that fund recipients increase broadband to speeds of at least 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up.

Frontier will be using point-to-multipoint radios where a transmitter is mounted on a tower with the broadband signal then sent to a small antenna at each customer’s location. Frontier hasn’t said what spectrum they are using, but in today’s environment it’s probably a mix of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi spectrum and perhaps also some 3.65 GHz licensed spectrum. Frontier, along with CenturyLink and Consolidated told the FCC a year ago that they would be interested in using the spectrum in the ‘citizens’ radio band’ between 3.7 MHz and 4.2 MHz for this purpose. The FCC opened a docket looking into this spectrum in August and comments in that docket were due to the FCC last week.

I have mixed feelings about using federal dollars to launch this technology. On the plus side, if this is done right this technology can be used to deliver bandwidth up to 100 Mbps, but in a full deployment speeds can be engineered to deliver consistent 25 Mbps download speeds. But those kinds of speeds require an open line-of-sight to customers, tall towers that are relatively close to customers (within 3 – 4 miles) and towers that are fiber fed.

But when done poorly the technology delivers much slower broadband. There are WISPs using the technology to deliver speeds that don’t come close to the FCC’s 10/1 Mbps requirement. They often can’t get fiber to their towers and they will often serve customers that are much further than the ideal distance from a tower. Luckily there are many other WISPs using the technology to deliver great rural broadband.

The line-of-sight issue is a big one and this technology is a lot harder to make work in places with lots of trees and hills, making it a difficult delivery platform in Appalachia and much of the Rockies. But the technology is being used effectively in the plains and open desert parts of the country today.

I see downsides to funding this technology with federal dollars. The primary concern is that the technology is not long-lived. The electronics are not generally expected to last more than seven years and then the radios must be replaced. Frontier is using federal dollars to get this installed, and I am sure that the $2,600 per passing is enough to completely fund the deployment. But are they going to keep pouring capital into replacing radios regularly over time? If not, these deployments would be a sick joke to play on rural homes – giving them broadband for a few years until the technology degrades. It’s hard to think of a worse use of federal funds.

Plus, in many of areas where the technology is useful there are already WISPs deploying point-to-multipoint radios. It seems unfair to use federal dollars to compete against firms who have made private investments to build the identical technology. The CAF money ought to be used to provide something better.

I understand Frontier’s dilemma. In the areas where they took CAF II money they are required to serve everybody who doesn’t have broadband today. My back-of-the envelope calculations tells me that the CAF money was not enough for them to extend DSL into the most rural parts of the CAF areas since extending DSL means building fiber to feed the DSLAMs.

As I have written many times I find the whole CAF program to be largely a huge waste of federal dollars. Using up to $10 billion to expand DSL, point-to-multipoint, and in the case of AT&T cellular wireless is a poor use of our money. That same amount of money could have seeded matching broadband that could be building a lot of fiber to these same customers. We only have to look at state initiatives like the DEED grants in Minnesota to see that government grant money induces significant private investment in fiber. And as much as the FCC doesn’t want to acknowledge it, building anything less than fiber is nothing more than a Band-aid. We can and should do better.