Newspaper articles and customer reviews provide a glimpse into the AT&T wireless LTE product being used to satisfy the original CAF II obligations. This article from the Monroe County Reporter reports on AT&T wireless broadband in Monroe County, Georgia. This is a county where AT&T accepted over $2.6 million from the original CAF II program to bring broadband to 1,562 rural households in the County.
Monroe is a rural county southeast of Atlanta with Forsyth as the county seat. As you can see by the county map accompanying this blog, AT&T was required to cover a significant portion of the county (the areas shown in green) with broadband of at least 10/1 Mbps. In much of the US, AT&T elected to use the CAF II money to provide faster broadband from cellular towers using LTE technology.
The customer cited in the article is happy with the AT&T broadband product and is getting 30/20 Mbps service. AT&T is cited in the article saying that the technology works best when serving customers within 2 miles of a cell tower, but that the coverage can sometimes extend to 3 miles. Unfortunately, 2 miles or even 3 miles isn’t very far in rural America and there are going to be a lot of homes in the CAF II service area that will be too far from an AT&T cell tower to get broadband.
From the AT&T website, the pricing for the LTE broadband is as follows. The standalone data product is $70 per month. Customers can get the product for $50 per month with a 1-year contract if they subscribe to DirecTV or an AT&T cellular plan that includes at least 1 GB of cellular broadband allowance. The LTE data product has a tiny data cap of 215 GB of download per month. Customers that exceed the data cap pay $10 for each additional 50 GB of data, up to a maximum fee of $200 per month.
The average household broadband usage was recently reported by OpenVault as 275 GB per month. A household using that average broadband would pay an additional $30 monthly. OpenVault also reported recently that the average cord cutter uses over 520 GB per month. A customer using a cord cutter level of data would pay an additional $70 per month. The product is only affordably priced if a household doesn’t use much broadband.
The article raises a few questions. First, this customer had to call AT&T to get the service, which apparently was not being advertised in the area. He said it took a while to find somebody at AT&T who knew about the LTE broadband product. The customer also said that the installer for the service came from Bainbridge, Georgia – which is a 3-hour drive south from the AT&T cell site mentioned in the article.
This highlights one of the major problems of rural broadband that doesn’t get talked about enough. The big telcos all have had massive layoffs over the last decade, particularly in the workforces supporting copper and rural networks. Even should one of these big telcos offer a rural broadband product, how good is that product without technician support? As I travel the county, I hear routine stories of rural folks who wait weeks to get broadband problems fixed.
When I heard that AT&T was going to use LTE to satisfy it’s CAF II requirements, my first thought was that their primary benefit was to use the federal funding to beef up their rural cellular networks rather than to start caring about rural broadband customers. In Monroe County, AT&T received almost $1,700 per CAF household, and I wonder if they will all see the benefits of this upgrade.
I’ve always suspected that AT&T wouldn’t aggressively market the LTE broadband product. If they were heavily marketing this by now, at the end of the fifth year of the CAF II buildout, there would be rural customers all over the country buying upgraded broadband. However, news about upgraded broadband is sparse for AT&T, and also for CenturyLink, and Frontier. I work with numerous rural counties where the local government never heard of CAF II since the telcos have done little marketing of improved rural broadband.
The article highlights a major aspect of the plight of rural broadband. We not only need to build new rural broadband infrastructure, but we need to replenish the rural workforce of technicians needed to take care of the broadband networks. The FCC needs to stop giving broadband money to the big telcos and instead distribute it to companies willing to staff up to support rural customers.