Monthly Archives: November 2022

My 2023 Broadband Predictions

You may have noticed that WordPress decided to halfway publish a draft of this blog on Sunday.

This is my annual stab at predicting the major trends in the broadband industry in the coming year.

FCC Mapping Will be a Mess

This might be the least brave prediction I think I’ve ever made. The first iteration of the new map just came out, and there is a lot to like and hate about the new maps. Early reports, like from the State of Vermont, are that the new maps are pretty far off in identifying the locations that can buy broadband. But the more disturbing issue is that the new maps are showing a lot of broadband availability that doesn’t seem to exist – largely due to the FCC still allowing ISPs to report marketing speeds instead of more realistic speeds. I can’t foresee the maps being useful for counting broadband customers for all of 2023.

Supply Chain Inflation Will Slow

The big supply chain issues that caused price spikes in fiber, conduit, and electronics have peaked, and I don’t think we’re going to see component prices continuing to rise. The only wild card that could still impact electronics prices is the continued bizarreness happening in the Chinese economy. Unfortunately, very few vendors will lower prices even if their own supply chain issues are solved, so we aren’t going to see material costs dropping. There will still be labor rate increases since work crews continue to be in short supply and can command premium rates. Increases in Davis-Bacon wage levels will continue to push up the cost of grant-funded labor.

Cable Companies Will Continue to Aggressively Increase Rates

There was some question about how cable companies would react to the fact that broadband customer growth has stagnated. In the second and third quarters of 2022 combined, the big cable companies collectively lost 20,000 broadband customers. Charter decided to raise rates by $5 on November 1, and I think all of the big cable companies will continue to increase rates in 2023. Rate increases bring far more bottom line benefits than any downside from customer losses. If anything, slower growth might make it more imperative to raise rates to satisfy stockholders.

Only a Trickle of BEAD Grant Cycles will Start in 2023

It’s been over a year since the announcement of the BEAD grants, but I don’t think there will be many BEAD grant applications due in 2023. State Broadband offices can request 20% of the BEAD funding after the NTIA approves a State’s initial broadband grant plan, and some of that funding will become available late in the year. There are still major hurdles for States to get the full funding, including workable FCC maps, States developing a broadband grant plan, States getting feedback from stakeholders, and a challenge of the FCC maps used for broadband (which is different than the current challenge about the map fabric). I predict that the bulk of the BEAD grant program awards will happen in 2024, more than two years after the grant program was announced.

FWA Broadband Will Continue to Make Waves.

While the big traditional ISPs are seeing no customer growth, fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband using cellular frequencies is growing explosively. T-Mobile and Verizon together added 816,000 new customers in the second quarter and 920,000 in the third quarter of 2022. These carriers are still in the process of the widespread deployment of the technology, so  I expect to see big growth continuing in 2023 to the detriment of other big ISPs.

We’ll Finally Get a Fifth FCC Commissioner

I whiffed on one prediction last year. The Senate never mustered enough votes to confirm GiGi Sohn, and the FCC has been a Commissioner short for two years. I don’t know of anything that has changed, but I’m still optimistic that the Senate will finally muster enough votes to seat the fifth Commissioner. That will lead to redefining the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps – two years too late, and when it’s already time to be thinking about an even faster definition.

Real Movement on Solving the Digital Divide

Congress created two large digital divide grant programs aimed at tackling the underlying issues that lead to homes not having broadband. This has activated non-profits, local governments, and others to finally start getting broadband into more homes. There will be grant awards made in 2023 from the two grant programs, but I predict that communities are going to move forward with the effort regardless of winning these grants.

Electric Grants and Broadband

The U.S. Department of Energy finally announced the first round of grant applications for funding that was created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. While these grants are aimed at improving the electric grid, any projects built with these grants could also build some fiber. The grants will total $13 billion. It’s worth noting that 30% of the funding will go to small utilities that sell no more than 4 million MWh of electricity per year.

There will be $10.5 billion in grants from the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership, or GRIP grants. Within the GRIP grant program are three separate programs:

  • $2.5 billion will go to grid resiliency grants to provide infrastructure to improve the survivability of the electric grid from weather-related and other events.
  • There are $3 billion for smart grid grants that can be used for projects that add intelligence to the electric grid.
  • Finally, $5 billion in grants is aimed at grid innovation. This grant is looking for creative ideas for improving the electric grid.

The other grant program is the Transmission Facilitation Program, which will provide $2.5 billion to improve the long-haul electric grid between communities.

The first and immediate round of funding for the GRIP program will be for $3.9 billion, with additional rounds of funding being announced next year. Unlike broadband grants, the first-round GRIP grants are on a rapid timeline. It took the DOE over a year to announce the specifics of the grants, but there are almost immediate deadlines coming. The White House has said that it wants to see more of the infrastructure spending being used, and this timeline will see grant awards made in 2023.

  • Anybody interested in applying for the smart grid or resiliency grants must submit a concept paper by December 16 that explains the proposed project. Concept papers for the innovation grants are due January 13. Concept papers for the transmission grants are due February 1. The DOE will have to accept a concept paper in order for an applicant to move on to the next phase of the grant application.
  • Full grant applications for the smart grid, grid resilience, and innovation programs will be due in March, April and May, respectively.

All of these grants could propose building fiber as part of the solution. Fiber is a way to get more brains into the electric grid and as a tool for making networks more resilient. There is no reason why any constructed fiber from these grants couldn’t serve the dual role of supporting a broadband network.

The short timelines for the first round of funding are going to make it a challenge for anybody that doesn’t already have a grant proposal on the drawing board. It seems unlikely that anybody who hasn’t already done so could create a partnership with an electric company and meet the concept paper deadlines. But electric companies can do this quickly, and I would expect that municipal electric companies and electric cooperatives will propose concept papers that will both improve the electric grid and also improve fiber infrastructure.

These grant announcements are a wake-up call for communities that have not already had discussions about how to improve the electric grid. There is still time to create partnerships for future grant cycles, but the time to start these discussions is now.

According to the DOE, these grants are only the down payment for the funding needed to improve electric grids. Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of Energy, says the country might need to triple transmission capacity by 2050. Unfortunately, there were insufficient votes in the Senate to approve a large amount of proposed additional funding for the electric grid.

How Good are the New FCC Maps?

The long-promised new FCC maps came out recently, and everybody rushed to see what the maps said about their own home. But a lot of folks looked deeper to try to understand the difference between this and earlier maps. There are two ways to judge the maps – the mapping fabric and the broadband coverage story.

The mapping fabric represents the FCC’s attempt to count the number of locations with or without broadband. They chose to do this by trying to put every potential broadband customer on the FCC map. The FCC hired CostQuest to create the mapping fabric, and the company used a variety of data sources to pinpoint locations on the fabric.

The State of Vermont has already sent a challenge letter to the FCC that says that 11% of the locations in the FCC mapping Fabric don’t match Vermont’s own data. Even worse, Vermont says that 22% of locations it knows about are missing from the FCC map.

I looked at my own neighborhood, which is deep inside Asheville, NC. My neighborhood was established one hundred years ago, and as I expected, most homes are shown on the FCC map. But the FCC maps did not show several new homes that were built here in the last few years. My guess is that the FCC maps generally do better in cities than in suburbs and total areas.

Vermont also looked at the broadband coverage claims by ISPs. According to the new maps, over 95% of Vermont homes have access broadband to broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps. The State created its own broadband maps, which show that only 71% of homes in the state could receive broadband at 100 Mbps or faster at the end of 2021. In looking at the data, the difference seems to come from claims on the new FCC maps that satellite and fixed wireless broadband can reach huge numbers of folks – something that is not true in hilly and wooded Vermont. There also are ISPs that have claimed speeds that are faster than what the State believes is being delivered.

Industry folks have said all along that the new maps are not going to be any better than the old ones if an ISP can claim any marketing speed it wants with no repercussions for exaggerating speeds. There seems to be a lot of work still needed if the new maps are going to be used to allocate BEAD funding to states and, more importantly, to define areas that are eligible for grant funding.

On a local level, the new reporting is interesting. For example, in looking around my city, I can now find the little pockets where AT&T has built a few blocks of fiber. There was no way in the past to be this granular. The new maps are going to drive a lot of folks crazy to see that fiber is only a block away.

The new maps also let me look at Charter’s coverage in more detail than ever before. It’s been said for years that the big cable companies don’t serve everybody in cities, and assuming that Charter is reporting coverage accurately, this can now be verified. I found little pockets all around my city where Charter doesn’t serve. The old FCC reporting by Census block normally showed everybody in a metropolitan area having access to cable company broadband. The new map also shows at the edges of the city how Charter hops over some neighborhoods to serve others that are farther out.

My own house shows a lot of ISP options, some of which don’t really exist. For example, there are several WISPs shown as covering my neighborhood. There is no way that is possible from where the towers are located due to the large hills in the city that creates huge wireless dead zones. The cellular broadband speeds reported were a little more accurate. Verizon doesn’t show coverage at my home at all – which is true since there are also zero bars of voice coverage at my end of the block. I’m not sure why T-Mobile even bothers reporting the 0.2 Mbps speeds – that might be true – but isn’t that really zero broadband? The satellite speeds reported at my house are improbable in a city surrounded by a bowl of mountains and a lot of trees.

For those who haven’t looked yet, here is the new map. I’d be interested to hear from anybody who was surprised by what the maps show for your home.

Does New Technology Thrill You?

Today’s blog is not about broadband, or perhaps only peripherally. As I write this holiday weekend blog, I find myself thinking a lot about an article written last month by Shannon Vallor in the MIT Technology Review. She asks the question, “We used to get excited about technology. What happened?”.

The world is full of new technologies, yet I’ve had the same feeling as Shannon that these new technologies don’t excite me as they once did. She recalls a few technologies that brought her wonder and awe, such as her first ride on the San Francisco BART, seeing a Concorde for the first time, or her first Commodore PET.

We all have our own list of technologies that thrilled us or that we recognized instantly as game changers. My list includes things like Alan Shepard in the first Mercury flight, my first DSL connection that got me off dial-up, online music libraries like Napster and Spotify, and seeing the first iPhone.

The technological breakthroughs I loved the most were good for me or good for mankind. The childhood me saw the Mercury flight as the first step towards mankind expanding our boundaries past this planet. DSL liberated me to finally search the whole world from my living room. Online music meant I was no longer constrained to the music I could afford to buy and could explore the forty different genres of music I like. The iPhone gave everybody a portable handheld computer. The many other technologies I loved at first sight had similar benefits.

The article discusses how a lot of new breakthroughs feel small and somewhat tawdry because they are aimed at helping the companies that sell the technology more than the people who buy it. She cites how farmers feel captive to John Deere because of the way it controls self-driving tractors. She talked about how Roombas and smart refrigerators spy on us  – our transaction with technology companies doesn’t stop when we bring the technology home.

I remember going to Epcot when it first opened. I’m the first to admit that Disney’s vision of the future was schmaltzy, but the vision shown in the Epcot globe is how the history of technology is inexorably tied to making people’s lives better. The century before I was born saw amazing new technologies like electricity in homes, automobiles and planes, refrigeration, vaccines against some of the worst diseases, and mass communications through telegraphs, telephones, and radio.

The article talks about how technology breakthroughs today seem to be more about making the developers rich. If there is any one technology trend I’d like to see undone, it is how we’ve decided to reward companies with breakthrough technology as unicorns and make the founders into instant billionaires. I’m having a hard time getting as excited as I once with space when we’re using the latest technologies to provide private space rides to billionaires. It’s disheartening to see drones becoming the next weapons of war that can threaten us all. It’s disturbing to see vaccines going to wealthy countries instead of everybody. It’s scary that a lot of the electronics we bring into our homes are watching us and reporting back to parties unknown.

However, while I share the same unease as Vallor, I also read a lot about science breakthroughs in labs around the world. We are surrounded by breakthroughs that would have amazed us a few decades ago that barely rate a mention in the press. We’re discovering amazing materials that will enable the next generation of energy use and communications. The breakthroughs in biology are amazing, and we’re probably not far from finding a cure for the common cold and many cancers. We don’t seem to be far away from the first working generation of fusion reactors.

I guess I’m still hopeful, but at the same time, I’ve been thinking about reducing the number of gadgets in my life instead of adding more. I say all of this knowing that I might get thrilled with a new technology announced tomorrow. But then again, maybe I won’t.

Businesses Are Ready for the Metaverse

The latest technology on the horizon is the metaverse, which, stated simply, is the creation of online environments. While the primary focus of the metaverse is to create alternate realities, an application with a possible immediate big uptake is vertical presence for business meetings.

Ciena, a manufacturer of fiber optic transmission equipment, recently did a survey worldwide of 15,000 business people to understand the interests and expectations of the metaverse. Here are some of the most interesting findings from the survey:

  • 96% of businesspeople surveyed recognize the value of holding virtual meetings.
  • 78% of survey respondents said they would prefer an immersive experience over current tools like video conferencing. Many talked about having Zoom fatigue.
  • 71% thought that virtual meetings and the metaverse could become part of the everyday practices for businesses.
  • 40% thought that their business was likely to move from traditional collaboration tools in favor of virtual-based platforms in the next two years.

Of course, the respondents recognized the hurdles to bringing the metaverse into the workplace. 38% thought that network performance would be a challenge and would hold businesses back from using the metaverse. Many respondents also worried that there would be limited availability of high-quality software to operate efficiently in the metaverse.

Overall, the survey showed that there is interest in the metaverse in the workplace. That’s not the same as demand, and companies will likely only embrace the technology if it is affordable and is reliable. I have to admit I am intrigued that so many survey respondents thought that using the metaverse in the workplace is right around the corner.

I’m not sure that a lot of the respondents grasped the network challenges required for using the metaverse in the workplace. A big question that still needs to be answered is how much bandwidth is going to be required to use the metaverse.

There are two visions for the metaverse. One would replace face-to-face Zoom images with avatars. It’s possible that this metaverse would use even less bandwidth than video calls. But this begs the question of whether people want to have meetings with avatars rather than with the actual person. I might be the exception, but I like Zoom calls that let me see the person I’m talking to. I know a lot of people are shy or hate Zoom calls for other reasons, such as having to put on a public face for a function that just a few years ago would have been a phone call. Going from cameras to avatars might be comforting to Zoom haters.

But the other vision of the metaverse in the workplace uses a lot more broadband. This is the concept of telepresence, where a person can feel like they are meeting live with the person at the other end. This might mean beaming the meeting into an actual office or holding meetings in virtual offices and conference rooms. Telepresence is going to require a lot of bandwidth in order to project a real-time hologram of a meeting participant. I also have to assume that a telepresence connection is going to require low latency and jitter.

The big challenge for most of the world is upload bandwidth. Companies aren’t going to make telepresence calls over today’s cable technology. The cable companies could solve this by implementing faster upload speeds, and many are tackling that. But most are not looking at upload speeds that equal the symmetrical speeds on most fiber connections.

The other big challenge for the metaverse is that a lot of employees now work virtually, meaning that companies will have to deal with a wide variety of inferior home broadband connections.

Matching Big ISP Tactics

There are three billing practices that are routine for the large ISPs that smart competitors avoid. First is offering special low prices to attract new customers. The second is bundling, which means giving a discount to customers buying multiple products. Third is what has become known as hidden fees, where there are routine monthly fees that are not included in the online advertised price offers to customers.

A lot of smaller ISPs wonder if they should match these same tactics. The argument for copying the tactic is that it allows advertising rates that can be compared to what the big companies advertise. The main argument against matching these tactics is that the practices are deceptive, and customers have made it clear that they don’t like these tactics. Fiber overbuilders tell me that the first customers they win in a new market are those who feel deceived and mistreated by the bigger ISPs.

Big ISP online advertising has felt sleazy for many years. I wrote a recent blog where Charter in Los Angeles offers customers drastically different introductory rates depending upon neighborhood – with the highest rates being offered to the neighborhoods with the highest level of poverty. It’s common to see broadband specials advertised for less than half of the list price. A customer has to click through multiple levels of footnotes to find out the rate at the end of the special – if it is online at all. It’s not hard to think that somebody could be attracted to low rates without understanding that big increases will be coming in a year or two.

Bundling is an interesting pricing strategy. Customers are given a discount for buying multiple products but are never told which products get the discount. If a customer tries to drop one of the bundled products, they inevitably find that the dropped product had all of the discount and the customer usually ends up paying full price for the products they don’t drop. This tactic is intended to bully folks into not breaking the bundle.

Hidden fees are just plain sleazy. A customer buying an online cable product will get socked with a range of hidden fees on the first bill. While they thought they were buying a $40 cable package, the first bill could easily be $60 or $70. The most common hidden fee for broadband is usually a high rate for the cable modem, which can be over $15 per month. Even more expensive are data caps, which can significantly add to the monthly bill.

The majority of the small ISPs I work with don’t use these tactics. They understand that these tactics are what drive consumers to seek them out. Most of the small ISPs I know have the philosophy of charging the same fair rate all of the time.

But I’ve seen ISPs that start with the simple, fair rate philosophy and get sucked into offering discounts to try to win new customers. Their marketing folks become convinced that matching the big company techniques is the only way to get new customers. I’ll grant that mimicking the big guys is probably the easiest sales technique, but acting like the big ISPs is a poor long-term tactic for many reasons.

  • Promotional rates tell customers that rates are negotiable, and once an ISP goes down that path, customers will ask for breaks forever. Many consumers are used to negotiating with the big ISPs and will do so with the small ISP as well.
  • These tactics tell customers that your rates are too high and that the real rate is the discounted rate. Customers who are too timid to negotiate for lower rates feel cheated.
  • Unplanned discounts can be devasting to cash flows and meeting financial objectives. If your business plan and budgets are based upon a specific set of rates, then giving discounts lowers the average revenue per customer. Do the math and consider what happens if the average revenue for all of your customers drops by $5 or $10.
  • Matching the big ISP tactics also attracts customers who will drop an ISP for a small discount elsewhere. Every few years, they will compare you against the competition and will take the best offer. ISPs with fair rates tell me that they rarely lose a customer to special rates – and that might be because they don’t attract customers who get a thrill out of bartering.
  • Finally, special discounts complicate your dealing with customers. The ISP now has to track when special promotions are finished and notify customers that rates will increase. This likely means having to talk with most of your customers, and calls to the call center will skyrocket. It’s important to remember that most customers view the perfect ISP as one they never need to talk with.

I’m a huge fan of keeping things simple because I have seen so many ISPs that thrive with the philosophy. The danger of mimicking the big ISP tactics is that the public will see you as just another untrustworthy ISP.

 

Latest Broadband Statistics 3Q 2022

The latest Broadband Insights Report from Ookla shows broadband statistics for the end of the third quarter of 2022.

The average household used 495.5 gigabits of broadband per month in the quarter. That is the combination of 474.2 gigabytes of download and 32.3 gigabytes of upload.

What Ookla calls power users continues to climb. 13.7% of homes used more than 1 terabyte per month. 2.1% of all households use more than 2.1 terabytes.

The speeds of household broadband subscriptions continue to migrate to faster speeds. A lot of this is ISPs arbitrarily giving consumers faster speeds. But there are also a lot of folks opting to buy faster speeds. Only 13.1% of homes are now subscribed to speeds under 100 Mbps. 15.4 Percent of homes are subscribing to gigabit or faster broadband speeds.

Subscribers 3Q 2020 3Q 2021 3Q 2022
Under 50 Mbps 18.8% 9.8% 4.7%
50 – 99 Mbps 19.9% 8.0% 8.4%
100 – 199 Mbps 36.4% 38.4% 9.9%
200 – 499 Mbps 14.1% 27.4% 54.8%
500 – 999 Mbps 5.2% 5.1% 6.7%
1 Gbps+ 5.6% 11.4% 15.4%

I always wonder when I see one of these monthly reports where the current quarter fits into broadband trends. The following chart shows the average household usage by quarter reported by Ookla since the beginning of 2019.

This chart shows a clear pattern. It shows that broadband usage is strongest in the fourth quarter of each year. The usage dips a bit for the next several quarters each year. This trend was confounded by the pandemic when the first quarter usage spiked over the end of 2019. But from that point forward, the expected trend continued.

But the overall trend is clear, and usage is growing over time. Home broadband usage spiked during the pandemic when 2020 usage was more than 40% higher than in 2019. Usage then grew by 11% from 2020 to 2021 and grew by 14% from 2021 until 2022. Household broadband usage has grown 80% from the third quarter of 2019 until 3Q of this year.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Slowdown in Cellular Expansion?

Mike Dano had a series of articles recently in LightReading talking about how the big cellular carriers plan to significantly cut back on 5G spending in 2023. Dano cited one analyst, Tom Nolle of CIMI that said that the cellular carriers are having a hard time making the business case for expanding 5G. The cellular companies are not seeing an uptick in new incremental revenues as a result of 5G investments. He says the cellular companies are clueless and don’t see a path to increase revenues next year.

This feeling of falling 5G expectations was bolstered by a somber outlook from Crown Castle. The biggest owner of cell sites said that it doesn’t see the big cellular carriers spending heavily in 2023 for cell towers or small cell sites.

As might be expected in complicated economic times, not all analysts agree. Dano cites analysts from Raymond James that say that 2023 will mark the year when the cellular companies start spending at a slow steady pace over multiple years to put in the promised 5G expansions.

As with most topics, I ask what this might mean for rural broadband. T-Mobile and Verizon have made a big recent splash in the industry with the rollout of the FWA fixed cellular broadband product. In the second quarter of 2022, Verizon and T-Mobile added 816,000 FWA customers. For the quarter, the largest seven cable companies collectively lost 60,000 customers. The six largest telephone companies lost 88,000 customers. Before the first quarter of 2022, we heard almost nothing about FWA.

I have to wonder what the news of a cell site expansion means for rural broadband. For customers lucky enough to be able to buy it, the FWA product has been a huge improvement over other kinds of rural broadband. I talked to one farmer who lived adjacent to a cell site and was seeing speeds of 200 Mbps. For this farmer, the faster FWA speeds meant being able to finally utilize his smart farming applications. But his neighbors, only two miles away, weren’t seeing speeds over 50 Mbps.

I’ve always wondered why a cellular company would make the FWA upgrade or even the 5G upgrade at a rural cell site. For a cell site located in a farming area there probably aren’t more than a handful of potential customers within a few miles of a tower. It doesn’t seem like an investment that is ever going to see a return. Voice is a little different because a voice signal can carry many more miles from an upgraded cell site – but most upgrades are leaving voice traffic on 4G.

Both T-Mobile and Verizon said that they were seeing many of the new FWA customers in cities and suburbs and not from rural areas. This makes sense. First, a lot more people are candidates for the product in more densely populated areas. The FWA product is also priced attractively, and I’ve been thinking of it more as a DSL replacement than a direct competitor to cable broadband. The FWA speeds are not as fast as cable broadband, and the signal strength will vary as it does with any wireless product.  Just look at how the cellular bars vary at your house and ask if you want that kind of variance in a home broadband connection. If your only existing choice is lousy rural broadband, you’ll gladly take it as an upgrade. But it seems like a harder sell to folks who have faster alternatives.

I can’t do any more than speculate because even the analysts don’t agree on the trajectory of the cellular industry, although the poor outlook from Crown Castle seems fairly persuasive. We are now sitting at an odd economic time where inflation and interest rates affect everybody, including the big companies. I suspect we’re going to get mixed signals about the near-term future from others, and not just the cellular companies. 2023 is going to be an interesting year to follow the big ISPs.

AT&T in the News

AT&T has not been in the headlines a lot this year, but recently I’ve seen the company’s name everywhere.

In the recently released financial results for the third quarter, AT&T noted that it now has more fiber broadband customers than non-fiber customers. At the end of the quarter, AT&T had 6.93 million fiber customers compared to 6.86 million remaining non-fiber customers. Non-fiber customers are predominantly U-Verse customers served by two pairs of telephone copper. The company still also has 340,000 DSL customers served by a single copper pair. There are also some rural fixed-wireless customers.

In the third quarter, AT&T added 338,000 fiber customers. The company lost 367,000 non-fiber customers in the second quarter – although counting them as lost is probably a misnomer since many were likely upgraded to fiber.

Upgrading to fiber is good for the company’s bottom line. For the quarter, the average revenue per user (ARPU) was $62.62 for fiber customers compared to only $54.60 for non-fiber customers. AT&T has also been saying for years that the cost of maintenance for copper is a lot higher, so the company is likely shedding costs as it sheds customers served on copper.

We also got a peek at market AT&T’s penetration. AT&T says it passes 18.5 million potential customers with fiber, meaning the company has achieved an overall 37% market penetration on fiber. In the third quarter, the company added fiber to pass 500,000 new locations.

I saw another interesting news blurb about AT&T. Bloomberg reported that AT&T is looking for an equity partner to invest in a major expansion of fiber. That would be a big departure from the past since AT&T has always funded its own capital expenditures and networks.

But it’s not hard to see from the third quarter results why AT&T might be seeking additional funding. In the third quarter, the company generated $9.87 billion of cash. It invested $4.71 billion in new infrastructure and paid $3.75 billion in dividends – leaving only $1.41 billion in free cash.

I would conjecture that AT&T wants to invest more heavily in fiber immediately since it’s clear that there is a mad rush nationwide to build fiber in cities. Fiber overbuilders hope that if they are the first to a market with fiber that it might dissuade other fiber overbuilders – so we are currently seeing a fiber land grab. In the long run, sharing fiber profits with an investor will decrease future AT&T earnings. The calculus that the company is betting on is that the market share gained by building first to markets outweighs the cost of sharing profits.

AT&T is currently debt-heavy. AT&T hasn’t had a recent track record of making good investment decisions. It’s been reported that AT&T lost as much as $50 billion from its purchase of DirecTV. In almost the same time frame, the company lost as much as $42 billion from its purchase and sale of WarnerMedia. The company might not be able to easily borrow the money, particularly at current interest rates.

The final news is that AT&T was fined $23 million to resolve a federal investigation that the company had “unlawfully influenced” the former Illinois Speaker of the House, Michael J. Madigan. AT&T admits that it paid Madigan, through an ally, to promote legislation that would eliminate carrier of last resort in the state – meaning that the company is obligated to serve people who ask for a telephone line. That obligation also comes with legacy regulatory requirements that AT&T wanted to ditch.

What always dismays me, but never surprises me, is that nobody at a big company like AT&T got in trouble for breaking the law – in this case, bribing a government official. The size of the fine might be appropriate for the magnitude of the crime, but I’ve always thought that the folk at big companies would be more likely to hesitate to be unethical if they saw others going to jail for breaking the law. The only real consequence for AT&T, in this case, is that they got caught, and the fine will just be viewed as the cost of doing business.

Is it Time to Say Farewell to GPON?

GPON is a great technology, GPON stands for gigabit passive optical network, and it is the predominant technology in place that is delivering fiber last mile broadband. The GPON standard was first ratified in 2003, but like most new technologies, it took a few years to hit the market.

GPON quickly became popular because it allowed the provisioning of a gigabit service to customers. A GPON link delivers 2.4 gigabits downstream and 1.2 gigabits upstream to serve up to 64 customers, although most networks I’ve seen don’t deliver to more than 32 customers.

There is still some disagreement among ISPs about the best last-mile fiber technology, and some ISPs still favor active Ethernet networks. The biggest long-term advantage of GPON is that the technology serves more customers than active Ethernet, and most of the R&D for last-mile fiber over the past decade has gone to PON technology.

There are a few interesting benefits of GPON versus active Ethernet. One of the most important is the ability to serve multiple customers on a single feeder fiber. PON has one laser at a hub talking to 32 or more customers. This means a lot less fiber is needed in the network. The other advantage of PON that ISPs like is that there are no active electronics in the network – electronics are only at hubs and at the customer. That’s a lot fewer components to go bad and a less repairs to make in the field.

We’re now seeing most new fiber designs using XGS-PON. This technology increases bandwidth and delivers a symmetrical 10-gigabit path to a neighborhood (for purists, it’s actually 9.953 gigabits). The technology can serve up to 256 customers on a fiber, although most ISPs will serve fewer than that.

The biggest advantage of XGS-PON is that the electronics vendors have all gotten smarter, and XGS-PON is being designed as an overlay onto GPON networks. An ISP can slip an XGS_PON card into an existing GPON chassis and instantly provision customers with faster broadband. The faster speeds just require an upgraded ONT – the electronics at the customer location.

The vendors did this because they took a lot of grief from the industry when they converted from the earlier BPON or APON to GPON. The GPON electronics were incompatible with older PON, and it required a forklift upgrade, meaning a replacement of all electronics from the core to the customer for the upgrade. I helped a few clients through the BPON to GPON upgrade, and it was a nightmare, with staff working late nights since neighborhood networks had to be taken out of service one at a time to make the upgrade.

The other interesting aspect of XGS-PON is that the technology is also forward-looking. The vendors are already field-testing 25-gigabit cards and are working on 40-gigabit cards in the lab. A fiber network provisioned with XGS-PON has an unbelievable capacity, and with new cards added is going to make networks ready for the big bandwidth needs of the future. Any talk of having online virtual reality and telepresence can’t happen until ISPs can provision multi-gigabit connections to multiple homes in a neighborhood – something that would stress even a 10-gigabit XGS-PON connection.

XGS-PON is going to quickly open up a new level of speed competition. I have one new ISP client using XGS-PON that has three broadband products with download speeds of 1, 2, and 5 gigabits, all with an upload speed of 1 gigabit. The cable companies publicly say they are not worried about fiber competition, but they are a long way away from competing with those kinds of speeds.

I’m sure GPON will be around for years to come. But as happens with all technology upgrades, there will probably come a day when the vendors stop supporting old GPON cards and ONTs. The good news for ISPs is that I have a lot of clients that have GPON connections that have worked for over a decade without a hiccup, and there is no rush to replace something that is working great.