Month: March 2020

Categories
Current News

Will Covid-19 Traffic Kill the Internet?

This is the question being asked all across the industry as the volume of data traffic has leaped upward due to students and employees working from their homes. We got our first glimpse of the impact of the crisis when Verizon announced a week into the crisis that they were seeing a 22% increase in data traffic in their network. More recently AT&T announced a 27% increase in network traffic. In perhaps a peek at what might be coming, Italy, which has been in a lockdown for longer than the US has seen a 90% increase in Internet traffic.

The answer to the question differs depending on somebody’s perspective of the network. For example, Evan Swartztrauber, described as an advisor to the FCC, says that the US Internet network is handling the surge in traffic just fine. He says the increased volume is significant, but it’s not at the same level as what is seen during the Superbowl or the finale of Game of Thrones. That’s reassuring news to hear, but he’s talking from the perspective of the big Internet POPs and the long-haul networks that carry Internet traffic from city to city. Even his answer is a bit glib because we’ve just seen more than a year’s growth in traffic in a matter of weeks and there must be places in the Internet backbone that need to be beefed up to meet the increased demand.

The question that matters is if Internet performance is getting worse for the average user, which is a question about the last mile network. I’ve been checking in on clients to understand the impact. So far, everybody with a fiber-to-the-home network says they are weathering the increased volumes, although several clients are looking into increasing bandwidth in a few parts of the network, such as between the core and field huts. Several clients who operate HFC or DSL networks have told me that their biggest problem is with upload speeds. People working from home as well as students are using a lot more upload bandwidth as they communicate with office and school servers. Gamers also need significant upload bandwidth. These technologies were not designed to handle significant amounts of uploaded bandwidth and customer performance is seriously degrading.

Many clients also say that they are increasing the bandwidth needed to connect to the Internet. Luckily most of them can do this easily, but some rural clients are constrained on the ability to easily add more bandwidth.

What nobody is talking about is the last-mile networks that were already broken. For example, I helped a rural county to get citizens to take speed tests right before the pandemic and we found almost no rural households in that county with broadband speed greater than 5 Mbps – and most are far under that modest number. These customers are served with DSL or fixed wireless broadband, and the local telco and WISPs are obviously bandwidth restricted either due to older technology or due to lack of backbone bandwidth.

Rural networks that are already underperforming might easily collapse under increased bandwidth usage. A 30% increase in usage won’t cut speeds by just 30%, the extra usage is likely to crash the networks. A large portion of rural America already has dreadful broadband. There are terrible ramifications if a network that is only delivering 3 Mbps broadband today gets further stressed. Degraded usage means that a home where a student might have been able to connect to a school server before Covid-19 might now be unable to maintain a connection. Good luck to somebody trying to connect to an office server as they work from home for the first time. And considering that some of these stressed rural networks have upload speeds measured in kilobits per second, good luck to anybody wanting to make a video connection for school or working from home.

Perhaps it’s true that the overall US Internet is not in danger yet of collapsing. Networks are going to see additional stress if the shelter-at-home restrictions carry through April and into May or June. What all of the national headlines are missing is that many rural Internet networks were barely functional before the pandemic. I’ve talked to numerous rural businesses in the last year that don’t even have adequate broadband to sustain a credit card transaction. I hear from homes across the country where the Internet is too slow, or latency too high to sustain connections to a school network to do homework. The current burst in new traffic is going to mean that the Internet performance for many rural users is going to go from barely functional to non-functional.

We might see a little relief if some of the biggest bandwidth users of the web cut back on broadband demand. Google announced that they are going to reduce the quality of video signals from YouTube as a way to cut back on the volume of data hitting networks. There is pressure on Netflix to do the same. AT&T announced that Netflix’s traffic volumes have hit an all-time high. Netflix announced that it is going to reduce traffic volumes by 25% in Europe but hasn’t made the same claim yet for the US. Unfortunately, these fixes are unlikely to make a big difference. the problems in last mile networks is due to having many more Internet users than before the pandemic, and the sheer number of users along with their attempts at using bandwidth-hungry applications is going to kick rural networks in the teeth.

This pandemic has highlighted the horrendous inadequacies of rural broadband. The shortfalls of rural broadband already existed, but with the added traffic volumes, rural broadband is going to significantly worsen. Unfortunately, we didn’t see much funding to help rural broadband as part of the recent stimulus plan. I’m pretty sure politicians with rural constituents are going to hear a lot about this – at least constituents with enough bandwidth to tell their story.

Categories
Current News

Congress Ignores Rural Broadband

One of the biggest topics in rural America right now is the inability of employees to work from home and students to stay connected to schools from home due to the lack of broadband. Rural homes have struggled with poor broadband for many years, but the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the issue into a focus as rural residents are told to shelter in place, but don’t have the broadband needed to stay employed or to keep up with schoolwork.

I expected Congress to tackle this issue to some significant extent in the stimulus package that was just passed. However, the level of funding for broadband is disappointingly small in terms of finding any meaningful broadband solutions. The Senate bill contains the following:

  • $25 million to the RUS Distance Learning, Telemedicine & Broadband Program for the ‘‘Distance Learning, Telemedicine, and Broadband Program” (page 617).
  • $100 million for the USDA Reconnect program. This is a grant program administered by the USDA that provides grants and loans for bringing broadband to areas where at last 90% of households don’t have access to broadband of at least 10/1 Mbps. The money is to be prioritized to previous recipients of this grant (pages 622/623)
  • $50 million to the Institute of Museum and Library Services to prevent, prepare for, and respond to the coronavirus, including grants to States, territories, and tribes to expand digital network access (page 773).
  • Secretary of Veterans Affairs may enter into short-term agreements with telecommunications companies to provide temporary, fixed or mobile broadband service to provide mental health services to isolated veterans (page 807).

There is no such thing as bad grant money that brings better broadband, and all of the above allocations are welcome. However, none of this money is going to make more than a miniscule dent in the rural broadband issue. The only award that is likely to construct new broadband facilities is the $100 million for the ReConnect grant program. I’ve seen estimates over the years that it will take $100 billion to bring fiber to everybody in rural America. While a $100 million grant program might sound huge, if the need is $100 billion, then Congress just allocated one-tenths of one percent (0.1%) of the money needed to solve the rural broadband issue. It would take 1,000 years of grants at that level to bring fiber broadband to rural America.

Don’t get me wrong – the ReConnect grants have been going to independent telcos, electric cooperatives, and independent ISPs and any ISP that gets this extra money will be glad to get it. But when we map out the areas covered by this extra money you won’t be able to see it on a map of the US.

I think Congress is misreading rural America. My consulting firm does surveys and interviews in rural America and we have continued to do this during the pandemic. Rural America is pissed. They aren’t annoyed, they aren’t just sore – they are fuming mad that the government has been ignoring them for a decade by not bringing them broadband. They are mad at everybody – local politicians, state politicians, and federal politicians. Broadband isn’t a partisan issue, and I’m getting the sense that folks without broadband are ready to vote out anybody who is not bringing them a broadband solution, regardless of party.

You can’t blame them for being mad. One of the counties I’m working with right now is typical of much of rural America. We’ve done speed tests across the county and found almost nobody getting speeds faster than 5 Mbps, with many getting only a fraction of that. These homes mostly have DSL or fixed wireless broadband. These slow speeds are for the homes that can get at least some broadband – many homes have nothing. A large percentage of residents have tried satellite broadband and found it to be worthless. That’s understandable since we’re seeing latency of 700 to 900 milliseconds for satellite households – too much latency to connect to a corporate server or to connect to a school for remote classes or to do homework.

Almost every home we talk to has a story about how a lack of broadband costs them money when they have to drive 30 minutes each way to sit outside for a WiFi connection so their kids can complete their homework. Residents tell us of the inability to work from home or to start a home-based business. These folks are frantic and angry now that they are cut off from their jobs and schools.

It’s impossible not to sympathize with these rural residents. I am sitting in an office with good broadband. Sheltering in place is, at worst, a hassle for my wife and me. We’re able to work all day and we’re able to spend as much time on the Internet as we want when we’re not working. But what about people who have lost their paycheck because they are unable to work from home? What about students who feel they are losing a school year and are fearful they’ll have to repeat a grade? I find it impossible to believe that members of Congress aren’t hearing these same stories and I can’t understand how Congress ignored the millions of Americans without broadband in the stimulus plan.

Categories
The Industry

Broadband Stats for 2019

Leichtman Research Group recently released the broadband customer statistics for the end of 2019 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than Cox, which is estimated.

The numbers are lower than broadband customers these same companies report to the FCC, and I think that most of the difference is due to the way many of these companies count broadband to apartment buildings. If they provide a gigabit pipe to serve an apartment building, they might count that as 1 customer, whereas for FCC reporting they are likely to count the number of apartment units served.

4Q 2019 2019 Change % Change
Comcast 28,629,000 1,407,000 5.2%
Charter 26,664,000 1,405,000 5.6%
AT&T 15,389,000 (312,000) -2.0%
Verizon 6,956,000 (5,000) -0.1%
Cox 5,170,000 110,000 2.2%
CenturyLink 4,678,000 (134,000) -2.8%
Altice 4,187,300 71,900 1.7%
Frontier 3,500,000 (235,000) -6.3%
Mediacom 1,328,000 64,000 5.1%
Windstream 1,049,300 28,300 2.8%
Consolidated 784,165 5,195 0.7%
WOW 781,500 21,900 2.9%
Cable ONE 773,000 39,000 5.3%
TDS 455,200 31,800 7.5%
Atlantic Broadband 451,463 25,857 6.1%
Cincinnati Bell 426,700 1,100 0.3%
101,222,628 2,525,052 2.6%

Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US broadband customers. For the year these large ISPs collectively saw growth that annualizes to 2.6%.

The customer additions for 2019 for these large ISPs are just slightly higher than customers additions for 2018. The cable companies performed a little better in 2019 while the losses continue to accelerate for the big telcos. The big telco losers for the year are Frontier, which lost 6.3% of its customer base, AT&T (lost 2.0 %) and CenturyLink (lost 2.8%). AT&T claims to have added 1.1 million customers to fiber for the year, so they are still losing a lot of customers on DSL. Frontier is a total disaster and there may be no recovery for the company if they keep losing broadband customers at a pace of over 6% annually.

‘                                        2018                 2019

Cable Companies        2,987,721        3,144,657

Telcos                           ( 472,124)        ( 619,605)

Total                             2,425,597        2,525,052

The two best-performing companies were again Comcast and Charter, which each added over 1.4 million customers for the year while the rest of the ISPs, including cable companies, collectively lost half a million customers.

One note on the above numbers – the TDS and Cable One numbers include adjustments due to small acquisitions).

Categories
Current News

A New Partnership Model

Last year the New Hampshire legislature passed bill SB170 that allows municipalities to bond for a broadband network as long as the town doesn’t have existing broadband speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps.

Several small towns in the state have taken advantage of the new legislation and have entered into a partnership with Consolidated Communications, the incumbent telephone company serving much of the state. Consolidated became the incumbent after acquiring Fairpoint in February 2017.

The latest announced partnership is for Dublin, NH, a town of a little more than 1,500 residents. In the announced partnership, Dublin will finance a $1.3 million bond to build fiber to every resident and business in the town. The bond passed by a vote of 223 to 5. The town will own the network and has partnered with Consolidated to operate the business.

On paper, Consolidated will make the bond payments, but in fact, the residents of the town will make the payments. Consolidated plans to add a surcharge to each broadband bill of $11.50 per month. I assume the surcharge will go away once the bonds have been retired. Residents are not required to subscribe to broadband and won’t pay the surcharge unless they are a broadband customer.

The partnership in Dublin follows a similar partnership last year in Chesterfield, a town of 3,600. Other New Hampshire towns are weighing similar partnerships – with Consolidated and with other ISPs.

These partnerships are unique in that the towns are trusting their network to the incumbent telecom provider. Granted, Consolidated is new to the state and is probably being viewed as a breath of fresh air. The company is also investing in fiber in larger communities in the state and announced it will build fiber to pass over 86,000 residents in the state. There was a lot of frustration with the previous incumbent Fairpoint, which seemed unwilling to build fiber or even to upgrade DSL to faster speeds. Consolidated is currently embarking on improving DSL speeds for 500,000 customers.

These small communities know that lack of broadband is hurting their communities. People don’t want to buy houses in communities without good broadband, and communities without broadband foresee a bleak future as people settle instead in other communities around them.

Dublin and Chesterfield are joining a long list of towns that are willing to borrow the money needed to bring broadband. Every community in this situation looks around for the best operating model available to them – and in this case they chose the incumbent telco.

Legislators around the county need to take a look at the realities of municipal broadband. For every community that decides to become an ISP there are a lot more cities that instead partner with an existing ISP. The vast majority of cities have no interest in becoming a commercial ISP, but still can be hindered from finding partnerships by existing laws that prohibit municipal participation in broadband.

It’s time for legislators to ignore the lobbyists of the giant telcos and cable companies and do what’s right for their constituents and communities. These two New Hampshire towns will be better places to live when they get fiber – the residents and businesses will be able to fully partake in our modern online society and not be left behind. The New Hampshire legislature did the right thing last year and a whole lot of other states need to take heed.

Categories
The Industry

We Need Penalties for Bad FCC Mapping Data

The FCC has been in the process of implementing revised mapping that will fix a lot of the problems with the current 477 broadband reporting process. The needed changes should be further boosted by the Broadband DATA Act that was signed into law on Monday. The new mapping will use polygons, and ISPs are supposed to show precise coverage areas for where they offer or don’t offer broadband.

If ISPs do this correctly – and that’s a big if – then this will fix at least one big problem that I call the town boundary problem. The current FCC data gathering asks ISPs to report the fastest speed they can deliver in a census block. Unfortunately, census blocks don’t stop at town boundaries, and so the FCC databases regularly assumes that all of the people outside of town can receive the same speeds as people inside the towns. If cable companies and fiber providers draw honest polygons that stop where their network stops, this boundary issue should disappear.

Unfortunately, the benefits of the new mapping are not so clear cut in rural areas. DSL providers and fixed wireless providers are also supposed to draw polygons. The rural polygons are supposed to only cover existing customers as well as places that can be connected within ten business days of a customer request for activation.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking through the claimed coverage on Form 477 by telco DSL and WISPs. Some of the things I see in the FCC database are massively erroneous and I’m not convinced that rural ISPs will clean up their act even if they are forced to use the polygons. Consider a few examples:

  • I’ve been working with a sparsely populated county that has large rural census blocks – which is pretty normal. The incumbent telco claims 25/3 Mbps coverage for almost all of the rural areas of the county. We’ve been working with the county to have residents perform speed tests and have seen almost no speeds faster than 5 Mbps, with some speeds on DSL below 1 Mbps. The incumbent telco does widely offer DSL, but the claimed 25/3 Mbps capability reported to the FCC is pure fantasy.
  • I’m working with another rural county where two WISPs claim to provide 100 Mbps wireless service covering the whole county. The WISPs don’t operate towers in the county and their nearest towers are in a nearby county. The county has undertaken a large canvass of residents to identify the ISPs in the county and so far hasn’t found even one customer of these WISPs. Even if they find a few customers, the WISPs can’t deliver 100 Mbps wireless broadband from towers more than 10 miles away – it’s doubtful they deliver that much speed even next to the existing towers.

I am not convinced that the revised FCC mapping is going to fix these two situations. The incumbent telco is going to say that they can install DSL within ten business days everywhere in the county – so they might not shrink their claimed coverage when going to the polygons. The problem with the telco isn’t the coverage area – it’s the claimed speeds. If the new FCC reporting still allows ISPs to overstate speeds, then nothing will be fixed in this county with the new mapping.

The two WISPs have a double problem. First, the coverage area of the two WISPs seem to be highly exaggerated. The WISPs are also exaggerating the broadband speeds available and there is zero chance that the WISPs are delivering speeds even remotely close to 100 Mbps broadband from a distant tower. These WISPs seem to be guilty of overstating both the coverage areas and the speeds. Unfortunately, the WISPs might still claim they can install in this area within 10 business days and might not shrink their claimed coverage. And unless they are somehow forced, the WISPs might not lower the claim of 100 Mbps.

There are real life consequences to the claims made in these two examples. In the first example, the FCC believes the whole county has access to 25/3 Mbps DSL, when in fact it looks like nobody has DSL even close to that speed. The county with the two WISPs is in even worse shape. The FCC considers this county completely covered with 100/10 Mbps broadband, when in fact there is no fast broadband coverage. In reality, the fastest broadband option in some parts of the county is a third WISP that markets speeds of 15 Mbps but mostly delivers less.

The consequences of the current mapping are dire for both of these counties. These counties are not included in the FCC’s eligible areas for $20 billion RDOF grants that was just published because the FCC thinks these counties have good broadband. If the ISP data being reported was honest, both counties would be eligible for these grants. These counties might be eligible for other grants that would allow the grant applicant to challenge the FCC speed data – but such challenges are a lot of work and don’t always get accepted.

I know there are hundreds of other counties in the same situation, and I have little faith that new mapping is going to fix this in rural areas. What is needed are severe fines for ISPs that overstate speed or coverage areas. In this case, the existing ISPs are causing huge economic harm to these counties and the fines ought to be set accordingly. I don’t understand what motivates ISPs to claim speeds that don’t exist – but if we are going to fix rural broadband, we need to start by kicking the bad ISP actors hard in the pocketbook.

The Broadband DATA Act allows for a challenge process so that localities can force honest reporting. The FCC needs to implement this immediately, without more study or delay.

Categories
The Industry

Using Bigger Bandwidth Applications

The recent Cisco Annual Internet Report for 2018 – 2023 had one chart that I found intriguing. The purpose of Cisco’s report is to look at the future of broadband usage, and the report included a chart showing the amount of bandwidth needed for various web functions. To me this list was reminiscent of the list that the FCC made in 2015 when they set the definition of broadband at 25/3 Mbps – except that all of the item on this list require more bandwidth than the functions the FCC foresaw just five years ago.

I think Cisco’s point is that we find ways to use more broadband when it’s available. Most of the items on this list are already in use today, with the last few on this expected in the near future.

  • 4K security cameras – 16 Mbps
  • Streaming 4K Video – 16 Mbps
  • Virtual Reality Streaming – 17 Mbps
  • Self-Driving Car Diagnostics (done when your car pulls into the driveway) – 20 Mbps
  • Cloud Gaming – 30 Mbps
  • Streaming 8K Video – 51 Mbps
  • 8K Wall TV – 100 Mbps
  • Online HD Virtual Reality – 167 Mbps
  • Online 8K Virtual Reality – 500 Mbps

Cisco notes that these functions have become viable for the public as the amount of bandwidth to homes has grown. Anybody with broadband speeds of 125 Mbps or faster should be able to use all except the last few services. In the US a lot of homes now have Internet speeds in this range as Comcast, Charter and the other big cable companies have increased basic speeds to 100 – 200 Mbps homes with the introduction of DOCSIS 3.1. Charter increased my home last year from 60 Mbps to 135 Mbps.

4K security cameras have been on the market for a few years. They provide enough resolution to clearly identify people at the front door or outside a factory. The 16 Mbps bandwidth application is needed to upload video images into the cloud or to view the camera feed remotely over the web. Interestingly, a 4K security camera ought to have a fast upload speed to work properly – something that is still lacking for most cable company connections.

The web is now full of 4K videos on Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and elsewhere. There are already web sites doing virtual reality streaming.

The self-driving car diagnostics is an interesting category. My wife’s 2019 Subaru already connects to the web every time she pulls into the driveway. This connection is likely not at 20 Mbps, but her car is doing diagnostics and uploading the results of driving to Subaru, and also making driving statistics available to us.

Cloud gaming is already here, although most applications are streaming at 4K or slower speeds. However, since several of the game companies have migrated online, the intensity and bandwidth needed for games is expected to increase, and Cisco pegs that at needed a 30 Mbps connection. What this speed requirement doesn’t tell you is that kids that routinely run several games simultaneously.

Bandwidth needs really shoot up for 8k video at 51 Mbps per stream. 8K content is already widely available on YouTube and other websites. 8K TVs have been around for a few years. Their prediction of 100 Mbps for an 8K TV assumes multiple simultaneous streams – something that sports fans routinely do.

Cisco also lists two near-future applications that will be real bandwidth hogs. They estimate that HD virtual reality done online will require 167 Mbps. They set 8K virtual reality as needing 500 Mbps. These functions are going to need faster broadband connections than what most homes have today. However, OpenVault reports that the number of US homes subscribing to a gigabit connection doubled in 2019 to 2.8% of all households. As that number keeps growing there will finally be a market for applications that need giant bandwidth. For years the industry has searched for gigabit applications, but nobody developed them since there have been so few homes that could use them. 8K virtual reality would bring true immersive virtual reality into the home – but ISPs are going to hate it. They love selling gigabit connections, but they don’t really expect homes to use that much bandwidth.

Categories
Improving Your Business Technology

Expect a New Busy Hour

One of the many consequences of the coronavirus is that networks are going to see a shift in busy hour traffic. Busy hour traffic is just what is sounds like – it’s the time of the day when a network is busiest, and network engineers design networks to accommodate the expected peak amount of bandwidth usage.

Verizon reported on March 18 that in the week since people started moving to work from home that they’ve seen a 20% overall increase in broadband traffic. Verizon says that gaming traffic is up 75% as those stuck at home are turning to gaming for entertainment. They also report that VPN (virtual private network) traffic is up 34%. A lot of connections between homes and corporate and school WANs are using a VPN.

These are the kind of increases that can scare network engineers, because Verizon just saw a typical year’s growth in traffic happen in a week. Unfortunately, the announced Verizon traffic increases aren’t even the whole story since we’re just at the beginning of the response to the coronavirus. There are still companies figuring out how to give secure access to company servers and the work-from-home traffic is bound to grow in the next few weeks. I think we’ll see a big jump in video conference traffic on platforms like Zoom as more meeting move online as an alternative to live meetings.

For most of my clients, the busy hour has been in the evening when many homes watch video or play online games. The new paradigm has to be scaring network engineers. There is now likely going to be a lot of online video watching and gaming during the daytime in addition to the evening. The added traffic for those working from home is probably the most worrisome traffic since a VPN connection to a corporate WAN will tie up a dedicated path through the Internet backbone – bandwidth that isn’t shared with others. We’ve never worried about VPN traffic when it was a small percentage of total traffic – but it could become one of the biggest continual daytime uses of bandwidth. All of the work that used to occur between employees and the corporate server inside of the business is now going to traverse the Internet.

I’m sure network engineers everywhere are keeping an eye on the changing traffic, particularly to the amount of broadband used during the busy hour. There are a few ways that the busy hour impacts an ISP. First, they must buy enough bandwidth to the Internet to accommodate everybody. It’s typical to buy at least 15% to 20% more bandwidth than is expected for the busy hour. If the size of the busy hour shoots higher, network engineers are going to have to quickly buy a larger pipe to the Internet, or else customer performance will suffer.

Network engineers also keep a close eye on their network utilization. For example, most networks operate with some rule of thumb, such as it’s time to upgrade electronics when any part of the network hits some pre-determined threshold like 85% utilization. These rules of thumb have been developed over the years as warning signs to provide time to make upgrades.

The explosion of traffic due to the coronavirus, might shoot many networks past these warning signs and networks start experiencing chokepoints that weren’t anticipated just a few weeks earlier. Most networks have numerous possible chokepoints – and each is monitored. For example, there is usually a chokepoint going into neighborhoods. There are often chokepoints on fiber rings. There might be chokepoints on switch and router capacity at the network hub. There can be the chokepoint on the data pipe going to the world. If any one part of the network gets overly busy, then network performance can degrade quickly.

What is scariest for network engineers is that traffic from the reaction to the coronavirus is being layered on top of networks that already have been experiencing steady growth. Most of my clients have been seeing year-over-year traffic volumes increases of 20% to 30%. If Verizon’s experience in indicative of what we’ll all see, then networks will see a year’s typical growth happen in just weeks. We’ve never experienced anything like this, and I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of network engineers who are sleeping well this week.

Categories
The Industry

Quantifying the Homework Gap – Finally a Definitive Study

The Quello Center that is part of the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University just released a definitive study that looks at the impact of lack of broadband on students. The study was done in conjunction with Merit Networks, the organization that acts as the ISP for schools in Michigan.

I describe the study as definitive because it used study techniques that isolate the impact of broadband from other factors such as sex, race, and family income. The study was done in conjunction with the schools to allow Quello researchers to get blind performance results from student participants without violating student confidentiality. The study involved 3,258 students in grades 8 – 11 in Michigan from schools described as being in rural areas.

The study showed significant performance differences for students with and without home broadband. Students with no Internet access at home tested lower on a range of metrics including digital skills, homework completion and grade point average. Some of the specific findings include

  • Students with home Internet access had an overall grade point average of 3.18 while students with no Internet access at home had a GPA of 2.81.
  • During the study, 64% of students with no home Internet access sometimes left homework undone compared to only 17% of students with a high-speed connection at home.
  • Students without home Internet access spend an average of 30 minutes longer doing homework each evening.
  • The study showed that students with no Internet at home often had no alternative access to broadband. 35% of students with no broadband also didn’t have a computer at home. 34% of students had no access to alternate sources of broadband such as a library, church, community center, or homes of a neighbor or relative.

One of the most important findings was that there is a huge gap in digital skills for students without home broadband. To quote the study, “The gap in digital skills between students with no home access or cell phone only and those with fast or slow home Internet access is equivalent to the gap in digital skills between 8th and 11th grade students.” It’s almost too hard to grasp that the average 11th grade student without home broadband had the equivalent digital skills an 8th grader with home broadband. Digital skills not only involves competence in working with technology, but also is manifested by the ability to work efficiently, to communicate effectively with others, and managing and evaluation information.

Students with lower digital skills don’t perform as well on standardized tests. Students who are even modestly below average in digital skills (one standard deviation below the mean) rank nearly 7 percentiles lower on their total SAT/PSAT scores, 5 percentiles lower in math, and 8 percentiles lower in evidence-based reading and writing. Students who are even moderately lower in digital skills are also 19% less likely to consider a STEM-related career (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math).

The study also showed lower expectations for students without broadband at home. For example, 65% of students with home broadband have plans to pursue post-secondary education. Only 47% of students with no Internet access have such plans.

This study is significant because it is the first study I know of that isolates the impact of home broadband from other factors. There are other studies that have shown that lack of broadband hurt school performance, but in other studies it was impossible to isolate Internet access from factors like household income levels.

This study should be a wake-up call for getting broadband into the home of every student. It’s not tolerable to allow a big percentage of our kids to underperform in school due to the lack of home broadband. We know that underperforming in school translates to underperforming in lifetime earnings, and so the cost to society for not fixing the homework gap is far larger than the cost to find a broadband solution. If you are lucky enough to have a home computer – do the math.

Categories
Current News

Disconnected – A Documentary about the Broadband Gap

Today I’m touting a documentary created by WRAL TV from Raleigh, North Carolina. The documentary is called Disconnected and looks at the plight of those living without home broadband. I have to disclose that I have a role in the documentary as the industry talking head that comments on the various topics.

The documentary shows what it’s like to not have broadband at home. The majority of Americans have good broadband and many of them have no idea that just a few miles outside their towns and cities that people struggle from having poor broadband or no broadband. Homes without broadband struggle with things that most people take for granted – kids doing homework online, connecting to a doctor’s website, working from home. Communities without broadband struggle because they are losing businesses that need broadband and they can’t attract new businesses.

The documentary was created before the coronavirus pandemic which has heightened the need for home broadband. How can we send students and workers home and then expect them to function in homes that don’t have broadband?

Below is the advertisement for the documentary. It will also be available starting this evening on the WRAL website. If you’re in North Carolina, note that the documentary actually airs at 7:30 tonight.

The primary purpose of this documentary is to inform the public that a lot of the people in North Carolina don’t have home broadband. But this is not North Carolina specific because this same documentary could be made about every rural county in America that doesn’t have a broadband solution. As somebody who constantly works to improve rural broadband, I am still surprised when I talk to urban folks who have no idea that many homes don’t have broadband. Hopefully, this documentary will open a few such eyes – because we need everybody’s support to find solutions to close the rural broadband gap.

Categories
Current News

A Message to DC – A Quick Fix for the Broadband Gap

Millions of people without broadband are being sent home to work. Even more millions of households without broadband have kids coming home to finish out the school year. It’s not realistic to expect many of these folks to shelter in place to wait out the coronavirus emergency if they don’t have broadband at home. These folks are going to go out every day to find broadband.

There is one way that the federal government can quickly provide broadband to those without it. The government should buy piles of portable WiFi hotspots that work on cellular networks and distribute them to homes that need the broadband to function.

Distributing hotspots is only half of the needed solution. The cellular carriers will want to be compensated for all of the broadband usage on the cellular networks, and the federal government should just write a lump sum checks to Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and the smaller cellular carriers so that people using these hotspots can get the broadband for free during the crisis. We can’t let the carriers bill this as if it is normal cellular data or everybody working at home would get a bill for $500 per month. One interesting idea is for the cellular carriers to connect these hotspots to the newly released spectrum band they’re touting as 5G – they could then claim that 5G saved the day!

The federal government should also distribute funding now to beef up cellular networks. The FCC was already planning to distribute $9 billion later this year using the newly created 5G Fund which is aimed at improving rural 4G. Let’s fund this now out of coronavirus funding and ask the carriers for an accelerated plan to improve cellular data coverage now.

The final challenge is getting the WiFi hotspots into the right hands. This could be done through employers asking for hotspots for employees and for school systems asking for hotspots for students. Those two groups could do the heavy lifting of identifying the homes that have the most immediate need for a broadband solution.

Most urban ISPs have announced plans to make it easier on folks without broadband, but none of those plans helps the millions of rural homes without broadband today. As a country, there may be no better use of federal money than to enable millions of homes to comply with stay-at-home directives while remaining productive. Every employee we can keep working is one less person that is going to need other assistance due to the crisis. Everybody benefits if we can keep students on track to finish the school year.

I’ve heard giant numbers like a trillion dollars, being thrown around that will be needed to keep the economy afloat. What I’m suggesting would cost only a tiny percentage of that. It’s also an idea that will create a greater dollar benefit than the cost of the program. Keeping folks working and paying taxes might be the best possible use of federal funding during this emergency.

We could skip the hotspots and instead subsidize data plans on cellphones. However, using a hotspot makes it easier to create one connection per household. We also don’t want the hotspots to roam, and activating data on cellphones would likely invite people to leave the home.

We also need a fast solution. People need broadband to work at home now, not 3 months or 6 months from now. We don’t want to create a lot of red tape for this and we don’t run this funding through existing programs like SBA or E-Rate, because doing so means nobody gets a hotspot this year. This is a national emergency and we need to treat it as such.

When this crisis is over we hopefully will finally have the discussion about providing more funding for building rural broadband infrastructure – but those are multi-year plans and don’t help with the immediate problem. We need a solution for those without broadband or we’re going to pay a big price for inaction. Getting a mobile hotspot to somebody trying to work in a home provides a solution immediately.

If the federal government doesn’t tackle this, states might want to consider it. Nobody understands more than local politicians the societal benefit of keeping people working. We can either spend a few hundred dollars per home to get broadband or we can spend thousands for the same homes if people can’t work and are unemployed – the math is simple.

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