The U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee recently approved 17 bipartisan bills, and a few of them impact the broadband industry. Since these have bipartisan support, it seems like they will have a decent chance of becoming law.
The first is S.98 – Rural Broadband Protection Act, sponsored by Senator Shelley Moore of West Virginia. This law requires the FCC to vet candidates before awarding any funding that comes from the Universal Service Fund, and that is the result of an application made to the FCC for funding.
The new law requires that the FCC to pre-qualify grant applicants to provide proof that they possess “the technical, financial, and operational capabilities, and has a reasonable business plan, to deploy the proposed network and deliver services with the relevant performance characteristics and requirements defined by the Commission and as pledged by the applicant.” Applicants also need to demonstrate that they have complied with the requirements for previous grant awards.
It’s an interesting law that is five years too late because this is what was needed before RDOF was awarded in 2020. That grant program ended up with some large winners who would not have made it through a pre-qualification process. The timing of this is interesting because I’ve heard no rumors of the FCC getting ready to find broadband infrastructure. There is still a decent chance that the FCC will pursue the 5G for Rural America fund this year, but that funding will go entirely to established cellular companies that will easily meet all of the needed requirements. The requirement that applicants must have complied with previous awards means that anybody that defaulted on RDOF or other grants need not bother applying for new federal funding.
This law is particularly interesting since the future of Universal Service Fund is under question and is in the hands of the Supreme Court. It seems odd to be tightening the rules for USF when the entire program might have to be revamped soon.
The second law that’s interesting is S.278 – Kids Off Social Media Act sponsored by Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. This law would prohibit social media platforms from allowing access to any kids under thirteen years old. The law also prohibits the use of personalized recommendation systems for kids. The interesting aspect of the law is that schools have to limit access to social media when using school computers.
A huge number of school systems provide laptops or tablets for students, and they will face a challenge in somehow making sure that kids don’t use those devices to reach social media. I’ve talked to some schools who already deal with this issue by limiting devices to only being able to connect to a school server and nowhere else. However, even those schools have a problem since their school servers let students research topics on the web to do homework. I don’t want to be insulting to school IT folks, but I suspect that the twelve-year-olds in any school system are collectively far more creative and smarter than whoever tries to limit them from finding a backdoor to reach the Internet. I hope this requirement doesn’t result in schools deciding to not issue computers.
The first law congress should consider – require the FCC and NTIA to revise the National Fabric Data – removing barns, outbuildings, detached garages, shipping containers and thousands of other structures that are not Broadband Serviceable Locations (BSL). Relying on “challenge phases” by the BEAD Program Applicants, grantees, and subgrantees has wasted millions of dollars by awarding “per passing” funds to service providers based on bad data.
You can add dozens or hundreds of rules to ‘per passing’ funding and still not get remotely close, or you could switch to a rebate program so that only passings that sign up for service pay out and solve all of this.
If you get rid of these fake BSL locations, you likely make the build too expensive to do even with a large percent of free money.
Fiber to farms is rediculously expensive.
“Fiber to farms is rediculously expensive”
What is the biggest cost driver?
“What is the biggest cost driver?”
Every single part of it? Miles of boring/trenching/overhead fiber and the labor for it.
Rural areas are often $5-30/ft to plow or trench in. 1 mile is $26k-$100k of cost *conservatively* and could be much more in bad soil conditions where you can’t plow and have to trench or bore.
Also, longer fiber runs means less light/signal budget so far fewer customers per PON port as well, though those costs really pale in comparison to the cost to install. hand holds, peds, OLTs, ONUs, all unaccounted for.
This doesn’t even factor in repair costs. splice trailers and crew aren’t cheap.
Where does this ever pay off? Even if the distance between farm ‘driveways’ is 1/4 mile and each farm is just 1/4 mile off the highway, it’s still $13k on the low end for the drop.
$100/m is 130 months = nearly 11 years to pay down the install. >21 years at $50/m. And all of the bandwidth and network management over that time is completely unaccounted for.
You can google up these numbers, I’ve been conservative. This is completely economical unviable.
And the cost driver?
expensive equipment (1/4-1/2 million) good for a few thousand hours before needing replaced.
fiber itself.
3-5 person crews taking between 4 and 24 hours per mile depending on soil, bore crossings, etc.
and that doesn’t touch permitting and environmental studies etc etc.
This is expensive business. It makes sense in higher density environments, but burning this money to rural areas is insanity.
What about with subsidization of those costs?