Monthly Archives: October 2024

The Trajectory of FWA

In what is bad news for many other ISPs, both T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to continue their aggressive growth of FWA cellular broadband. As a reminder, this is home broadband delivered from cell towers that mostly uses the same spectrum already being used at cell towers for cell service.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have had unprecedented success with this new broadband product since it first launched in 2021. The following table shows the growth in FWA so far this year.In the first two quarters of this year, the three carriers added almost 1.8 million customers, while big cable companies lost almost 500,000 customers, and big telcos saw a net gain of under 50,000 net new customers.

AT&T is the newest provider of FWA service and just getting serious about selling the service in 2023. AT&T does not provide FWA everywhere it has cell customers, and strategically uses FWA, mostly in rural markets, as a replacement technology when discontinuing copper service. AT&T continues to be focused on fiber expansion and has passed far more new locations with fiber in recent years than anybody else.

T-Mobile has been the most aggressive in deploying FWA broadband and now has over 6 million customers. T-Mobile says it’s goal is to reach 8 million customers by the end of 2026, which would require a continued growth of 400,000 new customers per quarter. T-Mobile recently announced longer-term plans to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028 – which would mean stepping up customer acquisition to an average of 500,000 net new customers per quarter.

Verizon recently announced plans for aggressive FWA growth. The company says it will set a goal somewhere between 8 and 9 million customers by the end of 2027. This would mean average growth in the range of 275,000 to 350,000 customers per quarter – slower than the current rate of growth.

T-Mobile currently has over 1 million customers on a waiting list for FWA. Like Verizon, T-Mobile uses excess spectrum capacity at cell sites for FWA. Each company likely has an algorithm for each cell site to calculate the safe number of FWA customers that can be added without degrading cellular broadband service. Both carriers have said that they can’t justify building cell sites strictly for FWA service and only plan to deploy it at current or new cellular cell sites.

Verizon has been increasing FWA speeds in some markets by layering on C-band or millimeter wave spectrum for FWA. The advantage FWA has today is lower prices, but the product become formidable if download speeds can compete with fiber and cable companies.

If the three companies meet their growth goals, they will collectively have almost 20 million broadband customers in 2028 – almost as big as Charter or Comcast today. This growth is by far the biggest disruption of the traditional broadband industry, with FWA growth taking customers away from all other ISPs.

The real key to these growth plans is waiting to see if the public likes the FWA product and doesn’t go back to faster broadband alternatives. Reaching 10 million customers so quickly is impressive and unprecedented in the industry. But it’s no guarantee that they can grow at the same pace to reach 20 million customers.

 

Comparing State Broadband Performance

Ookla recently published a report that compares broadband connectivity and performance in each state. The report highlights the percentage of broadband customers who are receiving broadband speeds that meet the FCC’s definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps.  This is also the speed threshold being used for the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program, which is supposed to provide grants to every part of the country that can’t achieve 100/20 Mbps. Ookla is the largest and most commonly used speed test in the country and receives millions of tests each day, so these comparisons are based on huge numbers of speed tests.

The Ookla results are interesting and give states a way to compare themselves to peer states. Connecticut, North Dakota, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Tennessee had the highest percentage of speed tests that met the 100/20 Mbps threshold. downstream and 20 Mbps upstream. Each state had over 62% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps – with Connecticut at 65.8% and Tennessee at 62.2%.

Ookla also got more granular in its analysis. For example, the analysis compared average speed tests result in each state for urban and rural broadband customers. There is a map in the report that industry folks are going to want to explore. This comparison produced some interesting results:

  • Connecticut, which has the overall highest percentage of homes receiving 100/20 Mbps had 72.4% of urban households and 62.3% of rural households receiving that speed. Number two overall fastest was North Dakota which had 69.7% urban and 64.6% rural.
  • The state with the biggest urban/rural digital divide was Washington, with 61.1% of urban households and only 28.7% or rural households receiving 100/20 Mbps.
  • South Carolina has a higher percentage of rural homes receiving fast speeds (56.4%) than urban homes (55.1%). The other states where urban and rural broadband performance is similar are North Dakota and Nevada.
  • Some of the most populous states had low rural broadband speeds including Illinois (38.7%), New York (39.4%), and California (40.1%).
  • The states with the lowest percentage of rural homes meeting 100/20 Mbps are also the least densely populated – Alaska (17.3%), Montana (20.8%), and Wyoming (25.3%).
  • The other states with percentage of rural broadband coverage under 40% include New Mexico (29.4%), Wisconsin (31.4%), Oregon (32.2%), Idaho (34.1%), Michigan (37.5%), and Maine (37.6%). These are the states that will require a heavy life from BEAD grants.
  • Some states are probably surprising to those outside of the industry. The best example is Mississippi, which historically had poor broadband coverage. However, the analysis shows urban coverage at 62.3% and rural at 56.6%. There is a lot of industry derision aimed at the RDOF program, but that program enabled rural electric coops in the state to build fiber.
  • Finally, a few states showed big improvement between the first two quarters and 2023 and the first two quarters in 2024. The states with the biggest improvements are New Mexico (50%), Arizona, (45%), Minnesota (38%), and Nevada (37%).

Anybody who looks closely at speed test results will quickly understand that any given speed test might not be accurate because of issues inside a home. A home might receive adequate broadband, but an old or underperforming WiFi router might lower the speed delivered to devices. WiFi is also subject to distance and interference issues, and computers located at the far end of a house might receive significantly slower speeds.

However, when taken in mass, speed tests provide an accurate comparison – if you assume that WiFi is a problem everywhere. This means is that every state actually has a higher percentage of homes that receive 100/20 Mbps than shown by the Ookla numbers. However, the relative differences between states, or between urban and rural parts of states are believable.

Starlink and Broadband Subsidies

The House Oversight Committee recently decided to investigate the FCC’s decision in 2022 to deny RDOF funding to Starlink. Anybody who has been reading this blog knows that I don’t take political positions, and the timing of this announcement clearly has political overtones since it was announced as Elon Musk took the stage at a campaign event with one of the presidential candidates. However, there were a few technical and policy issues raised recently about Starlink that means the issue is worth discussing.

I should make my own position on Starlink known upfront. I happen to live in a city, but if I was in a rural area with no good broadband option, I would have been one of the first people on the Starlink waiting list years ago. I think the broadband they bring into areas with no other options is awesome. Their products aimed at folks who are largely mobile are also unique and valuable.

The House announcement praised Starlink for helping the areas destroyed by Hurricane Helene. I live in western North Carolina, and Starlink got some good press here from its willingness to bring broadband to help areas without it. Starlink offered a free month of service, and I’m sure they gained new customers through that offer. But a new subscriber still had to pay for the receiver, and the logistics of getting a receiver delivered to rural areas post-hurricane were daunting – there are still many places that can’t be reached by vehicle. Also, unfortunately, the areas that need broadband the most are still without power.

But back to the issue of RDOF. The subsidy was awarded using a reverse auction, where the ISP willing to take the lowest amount of subsidy winning the funding. RDOF had two key requirements – the ability to deliver broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps, and the ability to serve every home and business inside a Census block that got the award.

The FCC finally decided to reject Starlink on the speed issue. When Starlink applied to enter the RDOF reverse auction, it said it could meet the 100/20 Mbps speed goal. And it looked for a while like it might. In the first quarter of 2021, Ookla says Starlink had an average U.S. speed of 66/16 Mbps but improved to 91/11 Mbps by the second quarter of 2022. However, since then, the speeds have slipped, and for the whole U.S. Ookla says speeds were 67/8 Mbps at the end of 2023 and a little slower in the first quarter of 2024.

Starlink has done a phenomenal job launching satellites and now has 6,371 functional satellites in orbit. But Starlink is like any ISP might be a victim of its own success – the slower speeds over time probably reflects that the number of customers has outpaced the number of satellites. The FCC was justified in rejecting the RDOF on the speed issue – the FCC 100/20 Mbps goal was not aspirational, but a real technical requirement.

The FCC could also have rejected Starlink on the coverage issue as well. One of the benefits of winning the RDOF subsidy is that winners were protected from any other ISPs receiving subsidies to build in the same Census blocks. For all practical purposes, RDOF winners in rural places were granted a monopoly – but for that award they were expected to be able to serve everybody.

In the early years, when it didn’t have a lot of satellites, Starlink put prospective customers on a wait list. The wait lists have disappeared, and Starlink is now willing to serve almost everybody in the U.S. – although there are a few places with geographical challenges where the company doesn’t claim the ability to serve.

The issue with coverage is that not everybody is a good candidate for Starlink. I live on a steep hill and am surrounded by other hills in all directions. I would guess that 35% to 45% of my view of the sky is blocked. My situation is not unusual in Appalachia, and much of the mountainous West and Southwest. If Starlink had only applied for RDOF in relatively flat areas, this would not have been an issue. However, Starlink won a lot of geography in RDOF in places like western North Carolina and the rest of Appalachia.

Starlink reception is also hindered by heavy foliage. The suggested solution for this is to put the receiver where this is not an issue. But there were places in the RDOF award areas that are fully covered by a forest canopy.

Interestingly, Starlink is back in the conversation in the BEAD grant process. Those awards are supposed to bring a broadband solution to every unserved and underserved location in the country. In every market, there are some locations where building other technologies is infeasible. NTIA prudently decided recently that Starlink is probably the only realistic solution for such places.

Unfortunately, some states say they don’t have enough money to reach everybody with fiber and/or wireless, and Starlink might get the final laugh by winning more subsidy from BEAD grants than it was denied for RDOF.

The Barrier to Closing the Digital Divide

In a finding that will surprise nobody, Pew Charitable Trust analyzed all of state plans related to the Digital Equity Act (DEA). This is the grant program that is aimed at tackling barriers to broadband adoption, such as getting computers into homes, providing training on how to use technology and the Internet, and increasing broadband adoption rates. Pew found that every state and territory says that the primary barrier to closing the digital divide is affordability.

The DEA is the first federal grant aimed at directly tackling digital equity barriers – previous federal grants have largely concentrated on broadband infrastructure. The DEA will provide grants administered directly by NTIA and is also providing funding for every state to make local grant awards.

States area really struggling with the affordability issue after Congress let the Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) lapse – the plan that provided a $30 monthly discount for low-income households. ISPs had responded well to the ACP program. For example, the biggest cable companies offered plans that were zero cost to customers who qualified for ACP, or that let them take the discount for faster-speed plans. States could see that ACP was getting broadband into millions of homes that would not have otherwise afforded it.

A lot of states were expecting to use the DEA grant funding to help people enroll and take advantage of the ACP plan. The vision was that there would be a home broadband plan that every household could afford. The DEA funding was also going to be used to buy computers for homes and to train people on how to best use the Internet.

It’s easy to say in retrospect that every State, County, or non-profit that proposed to use ACP as the primary tool for solving the digital divide was somewhat naïve. It was clear from the start that the ACP program only had enough funding for a few years and that Congress would need to act to keep the plan going. We’ve had a Congress for over a decade that struggles to pass needed legislation. Lawmakers from both parties sponsored bills to continue the ACP, but no bills ever got enough support to even get a Committee vote.

States are now scrambling to find alternative ways to improve broadband in communities with low broadband penetration. The Pew article outlines a few such efforts being tried in communities:

  • Expand free WiFi at community anchor institutions to provide more places for the public to connect to the Internet.
  • Bring free broadband to public housing.
  • Bring free WiFi to parks and other commonly used outdoor locations.
  • Establish tech hubs where people can not only get free WiFi but can use public computers and get trained on how to use computers and broadband.
  • Lending programs to get Internet-connected devices to the public.
  • Establish telemedicine hubs.
  • Fund WiFi infrastructure for newly constructed low-income housing.

These are all great ideas, but they are all not nearly as beneficial as getting broadband directly into every home. I wrote a blog in 2020 about a study done by the Quello Center, which is part of the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State. This study was conducted in a way to isolate the results from factors such as household income and race, and it showed definitive proof of the advantages to students of having a computer and broadband in the home. One of the most stunning findings of the study was that “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.”

States rightfully still have a goal to get broadband into every home, and a handful of States are looking for ways to create a State broadband subsidy similar to the ACP. State funding such plana is expensive, but this might be one of the most beneficial ways that a State government can help low-income households.

It’s frustrating to see government programs that work die from lack of funding. Pew has been one of the strongest proponents of continuing the ACP plan. But it feels like every day that goes by, the more remote the chance of the ACP being resurrected.

Is Broadband Inflation-proof?

Inflation has returned to the historical average of around 2.5% per year, but we’ve experienced several years in a row of much higher-than-average inflation. In times of inflation and rising prices, consumers and businesses normally cut back on expenditures.

For years, I’ve believed that broadband and cellphones usage is somewhat immune to inflation, meaning that people don’t ditch these services unless they have no other choice. In a very ad hoc and non-scientific poll, I’ve been asking ISPs about the impact of inflation on customer subscription rates. Many small ISPs don’t do an exit interview with customers who are disconnecting, so they don’t always know why they lose customers. But no ISP I talked to said that they were aware of losing any significant numbers of customers who could no longer afford their broadband plan.

For a more detailed look at the question, I found a survey done by Recon Analytics in April 2023 at the height of inflation. The survey asked consumers the kinds of expenditures they expected to cut back in a time of increasing prices.

The responses were what you might expect. About 20% of households said they didn’t plan to cut spending. But most respondents said they would trim expenses. The biggest category of planned savings was to reduce dining out, and 50% of respondents said they planned to dine in-home more. Next on the list was clothing, with 39% of respondents saying they would buy fewer clothes. 19% of respondents said they would cut back on streaming video and audio services. 16% of consumers were considering cutting the cord on linear cable TV. 14% of consumers planned to cut back on driving and gas costs. 14% of consumers were going to cut back or cancel gym memberships.

Only 8% of consumers planned to cut back on home internet or cellphone expenses. A deeper dive into these customers showed that customers planned to save money without discontinuing service. Some households planned to switch to less expensive broadband or cell plans, which probably explains a lot of the success of FWA cellular broadband. Some consumers planned to downgrade broadband to a slower speed tier. I saw a different survey that showed that people were hanging onto cellphones longer before upgrading.

The survey found almost nobody willing to discontinue broadband or cellphone usage completely. This is a testament to how embedded broadband and cellphones are in our lives. The average American adult spends an average of over 7 hours per day online – which is evenly split between computer and cellphone usage.

Most of us have good reasons for not wanting to lose broadband. At the end of 2023, over 12% of U.S. employees worked remotely. A huge percentage of homes use broadband for entertainment to stream video and music. 70% of American adults use social media. Three out of four Americans plan games online. Most households now bank online. An increasing number of people use telemedicine. And who doesn’t shop online?

Since I’m in the broadband business I often talk to folks about these issues, and it’s become clear to me that people value broadband as much as they do having electricity and water in their homes.

FWA and the Urban Digital Divide

The end of ACP put the kibosh on the business plans of ISPs working to tackle the urban digital divide. I’m aware of a several ISPs working to bring broadband to neighborhoods where the majority of customers qualified for the $30 ACP discount. These business plans only made sense because a chunk of the revenue was guaranteed by ACP.

While some say that ACP is not yet dead, at this point, it looks like it will take a miracle, or at least a powerful champion in DC, to reinstate something like the ACP. I’ve been brainstorming with communities about alternatives to ACP, and I’m starting to think that perhaps FWA cellular service is the next best alternative.

I’ve had access over this past year to large volumes of Ookla speed tests in different markets, and what I’ve seen is that FWA cellular carriers are successfully delivering speeds of 100 – 300 Mbps within a mile or two of a cell site. I’ve seen neighborhoods on the FCC map where Verizon is now claiming gigabit capability, but I haven’t seen any speed tests yet in those areas to see what that means in real life. However, wireless broadband speeds get a bit wonky in cities where small dead zones pop up in the shadow of hills or buildings that block the signal.

FWA cellular is often the most price-competitive broadband alternative now that ACP is gone. Prices of $50 and $60 per month for unlimited broadband are a lot more attractive that the prices of the big cable companies.

There are network issues with using FWA on any mass scale. Carriers aren’t talking about the network management side of FWA in any detail, but from various corporate announcements it seems like FWA is mostly intended to monetize excess bandwidth capacity at towers. That means that in any given neighborhood, there is some natural cap on the number of customers an FWA carrier is willing to serve to not harm normal cellphone traffic. While carriers don’t want to talk about it, there is a lot of evidence that the wireless broadband signal varies in strength and is not nearly as stable as landline broadband. FWA is not a great technical solution for dense MDU properties and is probably best used for single-family homes and small businesses.

Deploying FWA on a significant scale means making new investments. I can’t imagine that cellular carriers are interested in making investments in infrastructure and marketing costs to sell FWA broadband in low-income neighborhoods. Expanding an FWA network means constructing new cell sites, probably small cell sites, and involves getting fiber backbone to new sites.

But I can picture various kinds of partnerships between a City and cellular carriers that might work. One kind of partnership would be on the infrastructure side. I can picture a City or an ISP looking for a low-income broadband solution and willing to invest in small cell sites and fiber to feed them as part of bringing a more affordable broadband solution to selected neighborhoods.

I can also envision various partnerships on the customer/marketing side. For example, cellular carriers today are involved in numerous wholesale arrangements with companies that repackage and resell services on their network. I can envision a city or ISP willing to buy thousands of bulk FWA connections a month – and with a wholesale discount, they could offer lower prices to low-income homes. I have to think there are many variations of these themes and a slew of possible partnership arrangements.

This is all reliant on cellular carriers willing to enter into a discussion of partnerships. Such partnerships would be obviously good for low-income residents and could help to increase broadband adoption in low-income neighborhoods. This would be good for cities that will benefit by having more residents connected to broadband. This could also benefit the cellular carriers by bringing them new customers and revenues, with somebody else tackling the marketing effort on their behalf.

FCC Investigating Data Caps

In June 2023, FCC Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel announced that the FCC was going to investigate the impact of data caps imposed by ISPs on broadband usage. For those who don’t know what a data cap is, it is an arbitrary cap on the amount of home broadband usage in a given month. Most ISPs with data caps charge extra for exceeding a data cap – and customers who won’t pay more typically get throttled to very slow speeds.

Most ISPs don’t use data caps, and most home broadband usage is unlimited. But there are still ISPs that enforce data caps. Here are a few of the larger ISPs that use the practice – there are numerous smaller ones:

  • Comcast imposes data caps in some, but not all markets. The data cap is 1.2 terabytes per month, and extra usage is billed at $10 for an extra 50 gigabytes.
  • Cox has a data cap of 1.28 terabytes per month, and extra usage is billed at $10 for an extra 50 gigabytes.
  • Mediacom has data caps that differ by product. Their smallest data cap is 350 gigabytes per month and largest is 1 terabyte. Extra usage is $20 for 50 gigabytes.
  • Sparklight has a data cap on some products. On their slowest products the data cap is 700 gigabytes. Other products have a cap of 1 terabyte. All plans get throttled to very slow speeds if monthly usage hits 5 terabytes.
  • Viasat and HugesNet have severely small data caps.
  • Cellular hotspots also have small data caps, but FWA cellular doesn’t seem to have a cap.
  • Practically all cellphone plans have a data cap, with a separate cap for overall usage and tethering.

The FCC opened a Notice of Inquiry on October 15 to examine data caps. This is an interesting document that talks about the ever-increasing amount of home broadband usage. I’ve written a number of blogs about this issue over the years. OpenVault reported at the end of 2023 that the average broadband customer in the country uses 561 gigabytes per month of broadband – which is download and upload usage combined.

In the NOI, the FCC wants to understand more about the impact that data caps have on customers. This might be from seeing increased costs for exceeding the data cap limit or having speeds reduced. There are different practices that fall under the FCC investigation, including hard data caps, like the ones listed above, soft data caps that ISPs sometimes selectively invoke, de-prioritization where customers that reach a cap may be knocked out of service in times of heavy demand, and throttling where speeds are severely decreased when the data cap is reached.

When the FCC decided to investigate data caps in 2023, the agency opened a portal and asked consumers to tell them stories of the impact of data caps. Consumers can still provide their experiences with data caps at this link.

Consumers almost universally hate data caps. A household that uses more data than the cap can pay as much as $50 more per month for broadband. This is a severe penalty if you consider that every network engineer I know scoffs at the idea that there is an incremental cost from using reasonable amount of extra broadband in a month. If there is a cost, it is pennies, not the large fees charged for exceeding data caps. It’s clear that data caps are a way to increase revenues, not to protect networks.

It’s even more painful for customers who hit a data cap and can’t afford to buy more data. Speeds can be curtailed to dial-up speeds, which in today’s online world means it’s nearly impossible to connect to websites.

The investigation is interesting, because the FCC doesn’t currently have the authority to do anything about data caps. They would have gained that authority from their decision to implement Title II authority over broadband. But that order is sitting in a court and the FCC is only going to be able to do anything about broadband and data caps if and when they win that court dispute.

FTC Orders Click to Cancel

The Federal Trade Commission adopted new rules in what is being called the Click to Cancel order. The new rules require companies to make it easier for customers to cancel services. The ruling will be effective 180 days after being published in the Federal Register, which means it will likely be in place sometime in April 2025.

The premise of the ruling is that if consumers can buy a service online with a single click, it should be just as easy to cancel the service. This will affect any ISP or cable company that allows customers to sign up for new services online.

There is a long history of merchants that have made it exceedingly difficult to cancel service. I remember years ago that I used to joke with my friends that once you signed up with AOL that you would be a customer for life. The only way to cancel AOL was to call a customer service number. I once called the number and was on hold for eight hours before finally giving up. I was only able to finally cancel AOL when I got rid of the credit card it was charged to.

There are still a lot of merchants that make customers jump through a lot of hoops to cancel service. It’s often hard to find the cancellation process on a website. Even when your find it, the calculation process can put you through multiple confusing screens that can be hard to navigate. There are still many services you can buy online that can only be canceled by making a phone call – this probably sounds familiar to most ISPs.

Some of the players in our industry are notorious for making it painful for customers trying to cancel service. There are plenty of documented stories of folks who tried to cancel Comcast cable service and had to spend hours on the phone being handed from department to department, each which tried to win them back.

There are two major aspects of the new rules. First, companies that sell online have to be truthful and clear with customers about what they are buying. For instance, if customers are subscribing to a free trial, the instructions must make it clear about how long the trial lasts, how a customer can change their mind, and what happens at the end of the trial period. A seller needs to be able to show that people know what they are agreeing to, which means not putting important facts into fine print.

One of the major new rules is that the process for cancelling service has to be as easy as it was to buy service. It’s hard to think of a website that doesn’t have a ‘Buy Now’ button, and if they keep that, they’ll likely need an equally visible “Cancel Now’ button. That means no multiple screens to cancel – just one click to cancel.

The rules go further. If an ISP allows some customers to subscribe online but also sells through other channels like knocking on doors, the ISP must still have the online cancel process. For ISPs that don’t sell online, customers must be able to cancel by phone and not have to travel to a business office to cancel.

The FTC has promised that violators will face fines and civil penalties for not implementing the new rules. Little ISPs might think they are immune from being caught, but the FTC is famous for making an example of some small companies when it goes after big ones. You don’t want to be a poster child for being difficult for customers.

If you sell online, you have six months to develop and implement your online cancellation.

How’s Your Cellular Coverage?

The FCC recently announced that it is ready to launch its 5G Fund, which will provide $9 billion to bring better 5G cellular coverage to rural America. The FCC will be choosing the areas that are eligible for the 5G Fund using mapping data it collects from cellular carriers of where they claim to serve. An area is considered as served for purposes of the 5G Fund if at least one carrier is providing 5G cellular coverage with a speed of at least 7/1 Mbps.

That requirement for a specific speed should sound familiar, because for broadband grants, an area is considered covered if at least one ISP offers a speed of 100/20 Mbps.  But there is one big difference between broadband coverage and cellular coverage – the mobility issue.

If the FCC broadband maps are accurate and one ISP really can deliver a broadband speed of at least 100/20 Mbps – then the FCC has deemed that customers to have an option to buy broadband. But cellular coverage is very different. People don’t necessarily choose a cellular carrier because the speeds are good at their home. They also care about the coverage when they are commuting, shopping, going to school, etc.

Most rural county seats or other sizable towns have several cellular carriers with good coverage in and around the towns. When I hear complaints about lack of rural cellular coverage, this often translates to mean that people who live in towns lose coverage when they drive into rural areas. When I look in detail at specific counties, I find many examples where the carriers that claim coverage in the rural areas are not the same carriers that most people in the towns are using.

When I look at the FCC cellular maps in my county, I find large areas where only one carrier claims coverage. The FCC maps show that in my county, there are pockets where only T-Mobile, UScellular, or Verizon claim service. If I cross a little further into the next county, I find large rural areas where the only carrier with claimed coverage is Dish.

This creates a dilemma that is not recognized in the FCC’s definition of cellular coverage. The reality is that delivery drivers, real estate agents, commuters, and anybody else who regularly moves between the city and rural areas must subscribe to multiple carriers to guarantee a working cellular signal. I subscribe to AT&T since, in my hilly city, Verizon and others have a dead zone at my house. But AT&T has the least amount of rural coverage in the county, and so my AT&T phone gets no signal when I travel outside the city. And when I say outside, I usually lose coverage with AT&T within a few short miles outside of town.

Earlier this year I interviewed a real estate agent who works in a rural county in Illinois. She has to carry phones subscribed to four different carriers in order to be able to have coverage at the various homes she is trying to sell. I’ve heard similar stories from many people who travel during the day such as delivery drivers and social workers.

This creates a big real life conundrum. According to the FCC maps there are no large areas of my county that don’t have at least one cellular carrier that claims coverage. This county is not going to get any new cell towers from the 5G fund. And yet everybody I know says they have poor cell coverage outside the city. No matter which carrier they use at their home, they quickly drive to areas outside the city where that carrier doesn’t work.

I understand that this issue is probably worse in hilly Appalachia where I live since there are dead zones everywhere caused by the hills. But this issue appears everywhere. I was working in a rural Minnesota County in a flat farming area where half the county can only get AT&T at home and the other half can get Verizon. This means a hassle and havoc for anybody who travels between the two areas.

What I am describing is the natural consequence of cellular signals that only carry for a limited distance from any tower. In my county, somebody who works around my county needs to be able to connect at times to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Uscellular. The only way to do that is to have four phones or else pay huge fees for roaming.

I love the idea of the FCC’s 5G Plan since it will bring cellular coverage to areas where no carrier serves. But the 5G Plan is not going to solve the general public feeling that rural cellular coverage is terrible. I think that what is needed is for the FCC to implement roaming fees and policies that make it reasonably affordable to use your cellphone when you drive into an area served by somebody other than your home carrier.