Monthly Archives: July 2020

Can the FCC Regulate Social Media?

There has been a lot of talk lately from the White House and Congress about having the FCC regulate online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. From a regulatory perspective, it’s an interesting question if current law allows for the regulation of these companies. It would be ironic if the FCC somehow tried to regulate Facebook after they went through series of legal gyrations to remove themselves from regulating ISPs for the delivery and sale of broadband – something that is more clearly in their regulatory wheelhouse.

All of the arguments for regulating the web companies centers around Section 230 of the FCC rules. Congress had the nascent Internet companies in mind when the wrote Section 230. The view of Congress was that the newly formed Internet needed to be protected from regulation and interference in order to grow. Congress was right about this at the time and the Internet is possibly the single biggest driver of our current economy. Congress specifically spelled out how web companies should be viewed from a regulatory perspective.

There are two sections of the statute that are most relevant to the question of regulating web companies. The first is Section 230(c)(1), which states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This section of the law is unambiguous and states that an online platform can’t be held liable for content posted by users. This would hold true regardless of whether a platform allows users free access to say anything or if the platform heavily moderates what can be said. When Congress wrote Section 230 this was the most important part of the statute, because they realized that new web companies would never get off the ground or thrive if they have to constantly respond to lawsuits filed by parties that didn’t like the content posted on their platform.

Web platforms are protected by first amendment rights as publishers if they provide their own content, in exactly the same manner as a newspaper or magazine – but publishers can be sued for violating laws like defamation. But most of the big web platforms don’t create content – they just provide a place for users to publish content. As such, the language cited above completely shields Facebook and Twitter from liability, and also seemingly from regulation.

Another thing that must be considered is the current state of FCC regulation. The courts have given the FCC wide latitude in interpreting its regulatory role. In the latest court ruling that upheld the FCC’s deregulation of broadband and the repeal of net neutrality, the court said that the FCC had the authority to deregulate broadband since the agency could point to Congressional laws that supported that position. However, the court noted that the FCC could just as easily have adopted almost the opposite position, as had been done by the Tom Wheeler FCC, since there was also Congressional language that supports regulating broadband. The court said that an agency like the FCC is only required to find language in Congressional rules that support whatever position they take. Over the years there have been enough conflicting rules from Congress to give the FCC a lot of flexibility in interpreting Congressional intent.

It’s clear that the FCC still has to regulate carriers, which is why landline telephone service is still regulated. In killing Title II regulation, the FCC went through legal gymnastics to declare that broadband is an ‘information service’ and not a carrier service.

Companies like Facebook and Google are clearly also information services. This current FCC would be faced with a huge dilemma if they tried to somehow regulate companies like Facebook or Twitter. To do so would mean declaring that the agency has the authority to regulate information service providers – a claim that would be impossible to make without also reasserting jurisdiction over ISPs and broadband.

The bottom line is that the FCC could assert some limited form of jurisdiction over the web companies. However, the degree to which they could regulate them would be seriously restricted by the language in Section 230(c)(1). And any attempt to regulate the web companies would give major heartburn to FCC lawyers. It would force them to make a 180-degree turn from everything they’ve said and done about regulating broadband since Ajit Pai became Chairman.

The odds are pretty good that this concept will blow over because the FCC is likely to quietly resist any push to regulate web companies if that means they would have to reassert jurisdiction over information service providers. Of course, Congress could resolve this at any time by writing new bills that would explicitly regulate Google without regulating AT&T. But as long as we have a split Congress, that’s never going to happen.

Who Has the Fastest Broadband?

Ookla recently released a report for the second quarter that summarizes its findings on speed tests conducted throughout the US. The report was generated using the results from 85.1 million speed tests taken during the quarter at the speed test site operated by Ookla. This kind of summary is always interesting, but I’m not sure how useful the results are.

The report looks at both wireless and landline speeds. Ookla says that AT&T was the fastest of the four major wireless carriers in the first quarter, with a ‘speed score’ of 41.23, with Verizon the slowest with a speed score of 30.77. The speed score is a unique metric from Ookla that weights 90% of the download speed and 10% of the upload speed. The reported speeds also toss out the slowest and fastest speeds and concentrate on the median speed.

T-Mobile had the best average latency at 31 milliseconds with Sprint the slowest at 39 milliseconds. The most interesting wireless statistic in the report is called the ‘consistency score’. This is the measure of the percentage of the traffic from each wireless carrier that was at least 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. AT&T had the highest consistency score at 79.7% with Sprint at the bottom with 66.1%. This score implies that between 20% and 35% of cellular data connections were are at speeds under 5/1 Mbps.

The landline speed results used the same criteria for summarizing the results of the many speed tests. For example, Ookla used the ‘speed score’ that uses 90% of the download speed and 10% of the upload speed – and the results also throw out the slowest and fastest speeds. Verizon had the highest speed score at 117.1, with Comcast and Cox being the only two other ISPs with speed scores over 100. Charter achieved a speed score of 95, AT&T at 82.8, and CenturyLink at 36.1. The AT&T and CenturyLink scores are lower due to customers still using DSL.

Verizon had the best latency at 9 milliseconds, which is a good indication that a large percentage of their customers are using Verizon FiOS on fiber. AT&T and Sprint had the highest latency of the big ISPs at 18 and 22 milliseconds, indicating that the two companies still have a lot of customers on DSL.

The consistency score is more of a headscratcher for the landline ISPs. For example. Spectrum and Comcast had the highest consistency ratings at over 84%, meaning that only 16% of the speed tests on these companies didn’t meet the 25/3 Mbps landline target speed. However, other than perhaps a few grandfathered customers that are still being sold slow products, these companies don’t sell products that should fail that test.

This raises the question of what speed test results mean since there are factors that likely influence the results. For example, I would guess that a lot of customers take a speed test when they are experiencing a problem. I know that’s what prompts me to take speed tests. The other issue that might make Comcast or Charter test at slower than 100 Mbps download is customer WiFi connections. It’s hard to know how many people get slow readings due to poor WiFi. I again understand this issue first-hand. I have a 3-story narrow and long house. The broadband enters on the first floor at the front of the house and my office is at the top of the rear of the house, with some thick hundred-year-old walls in between. Even with an array of WiFi repeaters, the speed in my office varies between 35 and 45 Mbps download – about one-third of the speed delivered at the router. How can Ookla understand the context of a given speed test result? Maybe it doesn’t matter since all of the ISPs have customers with WiFi issues and maybe it averages out. I would think situations like mine are what drive the consistency score. These kinds of questions make it hard to make meaningful sense out of the Ookla results in the report.

Ookla also uses the median broadband speeds to rank the 100 cities with the fastest broadband and also ranks the states. As would be expected, the states in the northeast with a lot of Verizon Fios like New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island top the list as having the fastest average broadband speeds. More interesting to me is the bottom of the list. Ookla says that the states with the slowest median broadband are Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska. Several other entities that rank state broadband usually put West Virginia and New Mexico at the bottom, followed by Idaho and Arkansas. Those other rankings include an assessment that there are many homes in some states with little or no broadband options at home, while a ranking using speed tests only counts home with broadband.

Overall, this is an interesting way to look at broadband. States with median download speeds under 50 Mbps (6 states) certainly have a different broadband environment than states with the median broadband speeds over 90 Mbps (11 states). But there are places in the highest-ranked states with no broadband options and places in the states with the poorest broadband that are served by fiber.

Can 5G Compete with Cable Broadband?

One of the recurring themes used to promote 5G is that wireless broadband is going to become a serious competitor to wireline broadband. There are two primary types of broadband competition – competition by price or performance. Cable companies have largely won the broadband battle in cities and suburbs and I’ve been thinking about the competition that cable companies might see from 5G.

Cable broadband is an interesting product. In most cities and suburbs today, the basic broadband product has a download speed between 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps with upload speeds in the range of 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps. The cable companies decided over a decade ago that they were going to stay in front of market demand and have periodically increased speeds, with the most recent speed increases introduced around two years ago. Cable systems can offer speeds up to a gigabit, but the ugly secret that cable companies don’t want to talk about is that it would be incredibly expensive if too many people bought and used gigabit speeds. CCG does market surveys and the primary complaints that customers have about urban cable broadband is inconsistency – networks have periodic slowdowns and outages that customers find frustrating. As much as one third of cable customers also poll as hating the customer service of the larger cable companies.

The biggest weakness of cable broadband is the upload speed. This wasn’t an issue for most homes until the recent pandemic sent students and parents home. Many homes that were satisfied with cable broadband have found that the upload streams are inadequate to allow multiple people in a home to connect to servers and video conferencing services. Cable companies can probably tweak upload speeds upward by 50% more, but that will still feel slow to many homes. Cable companies are faced with an expensive upload to DOCSIS 4.0 to create symmetrical speeds.

There are two products being marketed as 5G. The first is Verizon’s fixed wireless access product. This is not 5G and is best described as fiber-to-the-curb, because it requires a fiber network built close to homes to provide this product. This is a fiber technology that happens to use a wireless drop. As such, it is technologically superior to cable broadband in that speeds can be symmetrical. Verizon says speeds can be as fast as a gigabit, but speeds will vary by customer and will likely slow down during heavy rain or get slower in summer when shrubs and trees are in full leaf. From a price perspective, Verizon is using this product to reduce cellular churn and is pricing it at $50 for a Verizon wireless customer and $70 for everybody else.  The $70 price is not going to push Comcast and Charter to lower prices, but it might force them to hesitate with future rate increases for neighborhoods that are competing with the Verizon product.

The FCC and the industry have implied for years that 5G cellular will be a competitor for landline broadband. I still can’t see many homes accepting 5G cellular as a replacement for landline broadband. I can think of a number of important ways to compare and contrast the two broadband products:

Speed. Forget the millimeter-wave product that cellular companies are touting as delivering cellular speeds over a gigabit. It’s a gimmick product used  to try to promote the idea that 5G is fast. The millimeter-wave technology is only good outdoors, and even then only travels a few hundred feet from a cell site. It delivers gigabit speeds to cellphones – when cellphones aren’t designed to run multiple apps that require fast broadband. The 5G download speeds on regular cellphones should creep up 100 Mbps over the next 5 to 7 years, and would rival the base speeds on cable company networks – but by that time the cable companies are likely to upgrade all of their customers to 250 Mbps. Cellular upload speeds don’t matter, because no family is going to conduct multiple upload sessions over a single cellphone.

Overall Capacity. Cellular networks today carry less than 5% of all US broadband. Even the majority of data passed through cellphones is handed off to landline networks through WiFi. In North America this year, Cisco predicts that in 2020 there will be 77 exabytes per month carried by landline networks compared to 3.4 exabytes carried by cellular networks. By 2022 that will grow to 109 exabytes for landline networks and 6 exabytes for cellular networks – the gap between the two technologies is rapidly widening. There is no scenario where cellular networks can somehow steal away a lot of the traffic carried by landlines. When cellular companies make this claim they are arguing against the realities of physics.

Household Usage. Household usage of broadband has exploded. In the first quarter of 2018, the average US home used 215 gigabytes of data per month. At the end of the recent first quarter of 2020 that had grown to over 400 gigabytes per month. By 2024 the average home might be using more than 700 gigabytes per month.

Data Caps. The above statistics show the absurdity of the claim that cellular will somehow overtake landline broadband. Even the ‘unlimited’ cellular data plans today are capped or heavily throttled after 20 or so gigabytes of data used in a month. Cellular companies are not likely to raise the data caps much because they don’t want heavy data users sucking all of the capacity out of the cellular networks.

Pricing. US cellular data is the most expensive broadband in developed countries. For 5G to compete with landline broadband, the cellular companies would have to kill the paradigm of selling an extra gigabyte of data for $10. 5G can only compete with landline broadband if the cellular carriers can increase wireless network capacity by a factor of ten and are willing to lower prices by more than a factor of ten. The first is not possible due to the limitations of physics and there are no indications that cellular carriers are willing to consider the second.

The FCC and Urban Broadband

Chairman Ajit Pai recently said during an interview in Buffalo that he supported what he called Gigabit Opportunity Zones as a way to get fiber built to poor neighborhoods in downtown areas of cities like Buffalo.

The idea of Gigabit Opportunity Zones comes from a bill that was introduced in the last Congress in November of 2019 by Georgia Representative Doug Collins. The bill is H.R. 5082 – the Gigabit Opportunity Act.

The bill would mimic many of the provisions of the Opportunity Zones that were created in the Tax Cuts ad Jobs Act of 2017. That law intended to spur infrastructure investment in low-income Census blocks. The original tax change allowed investors to gain two major tax benefits from investing in qualified infrastructure. They could defer or erase existing capital gains by investing capital gain profits into qualified projects for at least ten years. Investors would also see no capital gains from profits made on an opportunity zone investment.

The proposed broadband bill has similar, but different benefits. First, governors would have to

nominate areas in their state that would be eligible for the gigabit tax breaks. Such areas would have to

  • Face obstacles to economic development due to a lack of geographic broadband coverage or speed;
  • Are the focus of mutually reinforcing state, local, or private economic development initiatives;
  • Are poised for economic growth that requires access to high speed broadband for commercial purposes; and
  • Represent the areas of a state where such service would result in the highest return on investment.

Just like with the existing opportunity zone rules, an investor could defer or eliminate existing capital gains by bringing capital gains proceeds to a new qualified project. Even better than the existing opportunity zones investing, the new project could expense the cost of building the fiber network in the first year, thus realizing a huge capital loss in the first year (which is a great way to wipe out capital gains).

It doesn’t look like the bill has moved forward since introduction beyond being referred to the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The purpose of the blog is not to say anything negative about the bill. It would be great if something like this would help spur building fiber to urban neighborhoods that might otherwise never see fiber. It does seem to me that the provisions that a qualified investment must result in the highest return on investment makes it likely that this would benefit the richest neighborhoods rather than the poorest. But those kinds of details get worked out during the legislative process.

What I found a bit disturbing is that this bill was brought up in response to the question of what the FCC could do for cities like Buffalo. The Chairman offered the following responses to the question:

  • He said the FCC had expanded the opportunity for people to qualify for the Lifeline program. From what I can see, this FCC has done the exact opposite and would like nothing better than to eliminate this part of the Universal Service Fund.
  • He mentioned E-Rate programs to bring better broadband to schools and libraries. The FCC did make it a bit easier for schools to turn that broadband outward to the parking lots during the pandemic, but otherwise this FCC hasn’t improved the E-Rate program.
  • Chairman Pai said he had asked Congress for the authority to provide hotspots to poor urban neighborhoods, but that Congress hasn’t given him that authority. This highlights that the FCC gave away their authority over broadband and now has no authority to do things like promote hotspots.
  • He mentioned the RDOF grant process as one that is bringing broadband to those that need it, without mentioning that the ‘R’ in RDOF stands for rural – none of that money is going to Buffalo.
  • He mentioned regulatory reform. By that, he is sticking with his story that deregulating the big ISPs will result in more investment in places like Buffalo. From what I can see, none of the big ISPs have responded to ‘light-touch’ regulation by building fiber to poor neighborhoods.
  • Finally, he cited the Gigabit Opportunity Zone legislation. That’s a stalled piece of legislation that might bring benefits, but which has nothing to do with the FCC.

The Chairman’s response should have been that the FCC is not seriously looking at solving the digital divides in cities. The FCC has done its best to write itself out of the broadband picture. The FCC still must administer the Universal Service Fund because it has no choice. The FCC Chairman is sticking to the pure fiction that the big ISPs will solve the broadband problems of the world in response to being deregulated. But in reality, the FCC is doing almost nothing for urban broadband and has no intentions of doing so.

Google Fiber Comes to Iowa

The City of West Des Moines recently announced a deal with Google Fiber to bring fiber to pass all 36,000 residents and businesses in the city. This is a unique business model that can best be described as open-access conduit.

The city says that the estimated cost of the construction is between $35 million and $40 million and that the construction of the network should be complete in about two-and-a-half years. The full details of the plan have not yet been released, but the press is reporting that Google Fiber will pay $2.25 per month to the city for each customer that buys service from Google Fiber.

What is most unique about this arrangement is that conduit will be built along streets and into yards and parking lots to reach every home and business. I know of many cities that lease out some empty conduit to ISPs and carriers, but the big limitation of most empty conduit is that it doesn’t provide easy access to get from the street to reach a customer. West Des Moines will be spending the money to build the conduit to serve the last hundred feet.

This business arrangement will still require Google Fiber to pull fiber throughout the entire empty conduit network – but that is far cheaper for the company than building a network from scratch. The big cost of building any fiber network is the labor needed to bring the fiber along every street – and the city has absorbed that cost. The benefit of this arrangement for Google Fiber is obvious – the company saves the cost of building a standalone fiber network in the City. It’s the cost of financing expensive networks up-front that makes ISPs hesitant to enter new markets.

From a construction perspective, I’m sure that the City is building fiber with some form of innerduct – which is a conduit with multiple interior tubes that can accommodate multiple fibers (as is shown in the picture accompanying this blog). This would allow additional ISPs to coexist in the same conduits. If the conduits built through yards also include innerduct it would make it convenient for a customer to change fiber ISPs – disconnect fiber from ISP A and connect to the fiber from ISP B.

The City is banking on other ISPs using the empty conduit because Google Fiber fees alone won’t compensate the city for the cost of the conduit. The press reported that Google Fiber has guaranteed the City a minimum payment of at least $4.5 million over 20 years. I’m sure the City is counting on Google Fiber to perform a lot better than that minimum, but even if Google Fiber connects to half of all of the customers in the City, the $2.25 monthly fee won’t repay the City’s cost of the conduit.

This business model differs significantly from the typical open-access network model. In other open-access networks, the City pays for 100% of the cost of the network and the electronics up to the side of a home or business. The typical monthly fee for an ISP to reach a customer in these open access-networks ranges between $30 and $45 per month. Those high fees invariably push ISPs into cherry-picking and only pursuing customers willing to pay high monthly rates. The $2.25 fee in West Des Moines won’t push ISPs to automatically cherry-pick or charge a lot.

Any ISP willing to come to the city has a few issues to consider. They avoid the big cost of constructing the conduit network. But a new ISP will still need to pay to blow fiber through the conduit. Any new ISP will also be competing against Google Fiber. One of the most intriguing ISPs already in the market is CenturyLink. The company has shown in Springfield, Missouri that it is willing to step outside the traditional business model and use somebody else’s network. I would have to imagine that other ISPs in the Midwest perked up at this announcement.

In announcing the network, the City said that they hoped this network would bring fiber to everybody in the City. Google Fiber doesn’t typically compete on price. Earlier this year Google Fiber discontinued its 100 Mbps broadband connection for $50. Many homes are going to find the $70 gigabit product from Google Fiber to be unaffordable. It will be interesting over time to see how the city plans on getting broadband to everybody. Even municipalities that own their own fiber network are struggling with the concept of subsidizing fiber connections below cost to make them affordable.

One thing this partnership shows is that there are still new ideas to try in the marketplace. For an open-access conduit system to be effective means attracting multiple ISPs, so this idea isn’t going to work in markets much smaller than West Des Moines. But this is another idea for cities to consider if the goal is to provide world-class broadband for citizens and businesses.

Did Broadband Deregulation Save the Internet?

Something has been bothering me for several months, and that usually manifests in a blog at some point. During the COVID-19 crisis, the FCC and big ISPs have repeatedly said that the only reason our networks weathered the increased traffic during the pandemic was due to the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality and deregulation of the broadband industry. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The big increase in broadband traffic was largely a non-event for big ISPs. Networks only get under real stress during the busiest times of the day. It’s during these busy hours when network performance collapses due to networks being overloaded. There was a big increase in overall Internet traffic during the pandemic, but the busy hour was barely affected. The busy hour for the Internet as a whole is mid-evenings when the greatest number of homes are watching video at the same time. Every carrier that discussed the impact of COVID-19 said that the web traffic during the evening busy-hour didn’t change during the pandemic. What changed was a lot more usage during the daytime as students took school classes from home and employees worked from home. Daytime traffic increased, but it never grew to be greater than the evening traffic. As surprising as that might seem to the average person, ISP networks were never in any danger of crashing – they just got busier than normal during the middle of the day, but not so busy as to threaten any crashes of the Internet. The big ISPs are crowing about weathering the storm when their networks were not in any serious peril.

It’s ironic to see the big ISPs taking a victory lap about their performance during the pandemic because the pandemic shined a light on ISP failures.

  • First, the pandemic reminded America that there are tens of millions of rural homes that don’t have good broadband. For years the ISPs argued that they didn’t invest in rural America because they were unwilling to invest in an overregulated environment. The big ISPs all promised they would increase investment and hire more workers if they were deregulated. That was an obvious lie, since the big ISPs like Comcast and AT&T have cut investments since the net neutrality appeal, and collectively the big ISPs have laid off nearly 100,000 workers since then. The fact is that the big ISPs haven’t invested in rural broadband in decades and even 100% deregulation is not enough incentive for them to do so. The big ISPs wrote off rural America many years ago, so any statements they make to the contrary are purely rhetoric and lobbying.
  • The pandemic also highlighted the stingy and inadequate upload speeds that most big ISPs offer. This is the broadband crisis that arose during the pandemic that the big ISPs aren’t talking about. Many urban homes that thought they had good broadband were surprised when they had trouble moving the office and school to their homes. The problem was not with download speeds, but with the upload speeds needed to connect to school and work servers and to talk all day on video chat platforms – activities that rely on a solid and reliable upload speed. Homes have reacted by migrating to fiber when it is available. The number of households that subscribe to gigabit broadband doubled from December 2019 to the end of March 2020.

The big ISPs and the FCC have also made big political hay during the crisis about the Keep America Connected Pledge where ISPs promised to not disconnect homes for non-payment during the pandemic. I’m pretty sure the ISPs will soon go silent on that topic because soon the other shoe is going to drop as the ISPs expect homes to catch up on those ‘excused’ missed payments if they want to keep their home broadband. It’s likely that millions of homes that ran out of money due to losing their jobs will soon be labeled as deadbeats by the ISPs and will not be let back onto the broadband networks until they pay their outstanding balance, including late fees and other charges.

The shame of the Keep America Connected Pledge was that it had to be voluntary because the FCC destroyed its ability to regulate ISPs in any way. The FCC has no tools left in the regulatory quiver to deal with the pandemic after it killed Title II regulation of broadband.

I find it irksome to watch an industry that completely won the regulatory battle keep acting like it is under siege. The big ISP lobbyists won completely and got the FCC to neuter itself, and yet the big ISPs miss no opportunity to keep making the same false claims they used to win the regulation fight.

It’s fairly obvious that the big ISPs are already positioning themselves to fight off the time when the regulatory pendulum swings the other way. History has shown us that monopoly overreach always leads to a reaction from the public that demands stronger regulation. It’s in the nature of all monopolies to fight against regulation – but you’d think the ISP industry could come up with something new rather than to repeat the same lame arguments they’ve been making for the last decade about how overregulation is killing them.

Starry Back in the News

I’ve written about Starry several times since they first tried to launch in 2016. Their first market launch was a failure and it seems that the technology of beaming broadband to windows in apartment units never worked as planned. Since then the company has regrouped and now is using a business plan of connecting to the roofs of apartment buildings using millimeter wave radio. This is the same business plan pursued by Webpass, which was purchased by Google, although the technology and spectrum are different.

Starry was founded by Chet Kanojia who was also the founder of Aereo – the company that tried to deliver affordable local programming in cities through a wireless connection. Starry originally launched in Boston but has recently added Los Angeles, New York City, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

Starry is still advertising a simple product set – $50 per month for 200 Mbps symmetrical broadband. There’s a $50 install fee and then no add-ons or extra charges on top of the $50 rate. This easily beats the prices of the big cable companies or of Verizon FiOS. Starry is likely filling a competitive void in New York City where Verizon has still failed to connect broadband to thousands of high rises and millions of potential subscribers.

Starry is advertising ease of use along with low prices. Once a building is added to the Starry network they promise to install a customer at a scheduled time rather than providing a 4-6 hour window like their landline competition. Their web site doesn’t discuss the technology used to reach buildings, but it says they use existing building wiring. G.Fast is likely being used to deliver the technology over telephone wiring inside the building since there is no easy way to share coaxial cable if a customer is still buying cable TV. That would also explain how they can promise fast hook-ups since every unit in a high rise would typically already have telephone wiring.

Starry may be planning for faster speeds in the future since they were one of the largest buyers of spectrum in the 2019 auction for 24 GHz spectrum. Starry still advertises that they use phased-array antennas. This technology allows a single antenna radiator to transmit at different phases of the same frequency. This is one of the easiest ways to ‘steer’ the direction of the signal and Starry uses this technology to accomplish beamforming. What that means in a busy urban environment is that Starry can deliver more bandwidth to a rooftop than a traditional transmitter antenna.

Interestingly, the company doesn’t claim to be delivering 5G, as is every other wireless provider. This should provide a good example, that millimeter wave spectrum does not automatically equate to 5G. Starry says they are still using the simpler and cheaper 802.11 WiFi standards within the broadband path.

MoffettNathanson recently said they were bullish on the Starry model. Even though the company currently has a relatively small number if customers, their goal of chasing 30% of the urban high-rise market seems credible to the analysts. Starry’s technology can deliver broadband all across an urban downtown from one or two big tower transmitters. That contrasts with Verizon’s 5G technology that delivers fast bandwidth from small cells that must be within 1,000 feet of a home. MoffettNathanson did caution that Starry’s business plan is likely not replicable in the suburbs or smaller towns – but there are a lot of potential customers sitting in high rises in the urban centers of the country.

This kind of competition adds a lot of pressure on other ISPs wanting to serve large apartment buildings in downtown areas. Verizon found the gaining entry to buildings was their key stumbling block in gaining access to buildings in Manhattan, which resulted in the company badly violating their agreement with the City to bring FiOS to everybody. A wireless company like Starry can leap over the long list of impediments that make it hard to bring wires into urban high rises – and low prices for good broadband ought to be an interesting competitive alternative for a lot of people.

Charter Asks the FCC to Allow Data Caps

In a move that was probably inevitable, Charter has petitioned the FCC to allow the company to begin implementing broadband data caps. Charter has been prohibited from charging data caps as part of an agreement with the FCC when the agency approved the merger with Time Warner Cable in 2016. Charter is also asking the FCC to lift another provision of the merger agreement that prohibits the company from imposing interconnection fees on Netflix and other companies that generate large amounts of web data.

There was one other requirement of the original merger agreement that the FCC already modified in 2017. Charter had voluntarily agreed to pass 2 million new homes within five years of the merger agreement. The original agreement with the FCC required Charter to compete against other cable companies, but in 2017 that was changed to require Charter to instead pass 2 million new homes.

The merger agreement between the FCC and Charter is in effect until May 2023, but the original deal allowed Charter to ask to be relieved of the obligations after four years, which is the genesis of this request. If granted, the two changes would occur in May 2021.

Charter is asking to lift these restrictions now because the original order allowed them to do so this year. There seems a decent likelihood that the FCC will grant the requests since both Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Michael O’Rielly voted against these merger conditions in 2016 and said the restrictions were too harsh.

What I find interesting is that Charter has been bragging to customers for the last four years about how they are the large ISP that doesn’t impose burdensome data caps on customers. This has likely given them a marketing edge in markets where the company competes against AT&T, which aggressively bills data caps.

Charter has to be jealous of the huge dollars that Comcast and AT&T are receiving from data caps. Back in 2016, there were not many homes that used more data than the 1 terabyte cap that AT&T and Comcast place on customers. However, home broadband usage has exploded, even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

OpenVault reported in early 2018 that the average home used 215 gigabytes of data per month. By the end of 2019, the average home usage had grown to 344 GB monthly. During the pandemic, by the end of March 2020, the average home used 402 GB.

What’s more telling is the percentage of homes that now use a terabyte of data per month. According to OpenVault, that’s now more than 10% of homes – including nearly 2% of homes that use more than 2 terabytes. Just a few years ago only a tiny percentage of homes used a terabyte per month of data. Charter has undoubtedly been measuring customer usage and knows the revenue potential from imposing data caps similar to Comcast or AT&T. If Charter can charge $25 for exceeding the data caps, with their 27 million customers the data caps would increase revenues by over $800 million annually – for usage they are already carrying on their network. Charter, like all of the big ISPs, crowed loudly that their networks were able to easily handle the increase in traffic due to the pandemic. But that’s not going to stop them from milking more money out of their biggest data users.

The US already has some of the most expensive broadband in the world. The US landline broadband rates are twice the rates in Europe and the Far East. The US cellular data rates rival the rates in the most expensive remote countries in the world. Data caps imposed by landline and cellular ISPs add huge amounts of margin straight to the bottom lines of the big ISPs and wireless carriers.

What saddest about all of this is that there is no regulation of ISPs and they free to charge whatever they want for broadband. Even in markets where we see a cable company facing competition with fiber from one of the telcos, there is seemingly no competition on price. Verizon, AT&T, and CenturyLink fiber cost roughly the same in most markets as broadband from cable companies, and the duopoly players in such markets gladly split the customers and the profits for the benefit of both companies.

I’ve written several blogs arguing against data caps and I won’t repeat the whole argument. The bottom line is that it doesn’t cost a big ISP more than a few pennies extra to provide service to a customer that uses a terabyte per month at home compared to a home that uses half that. Data cap revenue goes straight to the bottom line of the big ISPs. For anybody that doesn’t believe that, watch the profits at Charter before and after the day when they introduce data caps.

Verizon Restarts Wireless Gigabit Broadband Roll-out

After a two-year pause, Verizon has launched a new version of its fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband, launching the service in Detroit. Two years ago, the company launched a trial version of the product in Sacramento and a few other cities and then went quiet about the product. The company is still touting this as a 5G product, but it’s not and using millimeter wave radios to replace the fiber drop in a fiber network. For some reason, Verizon is not touting this as fiber-to-the-curb, meaning the marketing folks at the company are electing to stress 5G rather than the fiber aspect of the technology.

Verizon has obviously been doing research and development work and the new wireless product looks and works differently than the first-generation product. The first product involved mounting an antenna on the outside of the home and then drilling a hole for fiber to enter the home. The new product has a receiver mounted inside a window that faces the street. This receiver connects wirelessly with a home router that looks a lot like an Amazon Echo which comes enabled with Alexa. Verizon is touting that the new product can be self-installed, as is demonstrated on the Verizon web page for the product.

Verizon says the FWA service delivers speeds up to a gigabit. Unlike with fiber, that speed is not guaranteed and is going to vary by home depending upon issues like distance from the transmitter, foliage, and other local issues. Verizon is still pricing this the same as two years ago – $50 per month for customers who buy Verizon wireless products and $70 per month for those who don’t. It doesn’t look like there are any additional or hidden fees, which is part of the new billing philosophy that Verizon announced in late 2019.

The new product eliminates one of the controversial aspects of the first-generation product. Verizon was asking customers to sign an agreement that they could not remove the external antenna even if they dropped the Verizon service. The company was using external antennas to bounce signals to reach additional homes that might have been out of sight of the transmitters on poles. With units mounted inside of homes that kind of secondary transmission path is not going to be possible. This should mean that the network won’t reach out to as many homes.

Verizon is using introductory pricing to push the product. Right now, the web is offering three months of free service. This also comes with a year of Disney+ for free, Stream TV for free, and a month of YouTube TV for free.

The router connects to everything in the home wirelessly. The wireless router comes with WiFi 6, which is not much of a selling point yet since there are practically no devices in homes that can yet use the new standard – but over time this will become the standard WiFi deployment. Customers can buy additional WiFi extenders for $200 if needed. It’s hard to tell from the pictures if the router unit has an Ethernet jack.

From a network perspective, this product still requires Verizon to build fiber in neighborhoods and install pole-mounted transmitters to beam the signal into homes. The wireless path to the home is going to require a good line-of-sight, but a customer only needs to find one window where this will work.

From a cost perspective, it’s hard to see how this network will cost less than a standard fiber-to-the-home network. Fiber is required on the street and then a series of transmitters must be installed on poles. For the long run operations of the network, it seems likely that the pole-mounted and home units will have to be periodically replaced, meaning perhaps a higher long-term operational cost than FTTH.

Interestingly, Verizon is not mentioning upload speeds. The pandemic has taught a lot of homes how important upload speeds are, Upload speed is currently one of the biggest vulnerabilities of cable broadband and I’m surprised to not see Verizon capitalize on this advantage for the product – that’s probably coming later.

Verizon says they still intend to use the technology to pass 30 million homes – the same goal they announced two years ago. Assuming they succeed, they will put a lot of pressure on the cable companies – particularly with pricing. The gigabit-range broadband products from Comcast and Charter cost $100 or more while the Verizon FWA product rivals the prices of the basic broadband products from the cable companies.

An Update on ATSC 3.0

This is the year when we’ll finally start seeing the introduction of ATSC 3.0. This is the newest upgrade to broadcast television and is the first big upgrade since TV converted to all-digital over a decade ago. ATSC 3.0 is the latest standard that’s been released by the Advanced Television Systems Committee that creates the standards used by over-the-air broadcasters.

ATSC 3.0 will bring several upgrades to broadcast television that should make it more competitive with cable company video and Internet-based programming. For example, the new standard will make it possible to broadcast over-the-air in 4K quality. That’s four times more pixels than 1080i TV and rivals the best quality available from Netflix and other online content providers.

ATSC 3.0 also will support the HDR (high dynamic range) protocol that enhances picture quality by creating a better contrast between light and dark parts of a TV screen. ATSC 3.0 also adds additional sound channels to allow for state-of-the-art surround sound.

Earlier this year, Cord Cutters News reported that the new standard was to be introduced in 61 US markets by the end of 2020 – however, that has slowed a bit due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the new standard should appear in most major markets by sometime in 2021. Homes will either have to buy ATSC-enabled TVs, which are just now hitting the market, or they can buy an external ATSC tuner to get the enhanced signals.

One intriguing aspect of the new standard is that a separate data path is created with TV transmissions. This opens up some interesting new features for broadcast TV. For example, a city could selectively send safety alerts and messages to homes in just certain parts of a city. This also could lead to targeted advertising that is not the same in every part of a market. Local advertisers have often hesitated to advertise on broadcast TV because of the cost and waste of advertising to an entire market instead of just the parts where they sell service.

While still in the early stages of exploration, it’s conceivable that ATSC 3.0 could be used to create a 25 Mbps data transmission path. This might require several stations joining together to create that much bandwidth. While a 25 Mbps data path is no longer a serious competitor of much faster cable broadband speeds, it opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. For example, this bandwidth could offer a competitive alternative for providing data to cellphones and could present a major challenge to cellular carriers and their stingy data caps.

ATSC 3.0 data could also be used to bring broadband into the home of every urban school student. If this broadband was paired with computers for every student, this could go a long way towards solving the homework gap in urban areas. Unfortunately, like most other new technologies, we’re not likely to see the technology in rural markets any time soon, and perhaps never. The broadband signals from tall TV towers will not carry far into rural America.

The FCC voted on June 16 on a few issues related to the ATSC 3.0 standard. In a blow to broadcasters, the FCC decided that TV stations could not use close-by vacant channels to expand ATSC 3.0 capabilities. The FCC instead decided to maintain vacant broadcast channels to be used for white space wireless broadband technology.

The FCC also took a position that isn’t going to sit as well with the public. As homeowners have continued to cut the cord there have been record sales in the last few years of indoor antennas for receiving over-the-air TV. Over-the-air broadcasters are going to be allowed to sunset the older ATSC 1.0 standard in 2023. That means that homes will have to replace TVs or will have to install an external ATSC 3.0 tuner if they want to continue to watch over-the-air broadcasts.