Monthly Archives: July 2025

New Proposed FCC Pole Rules

The FCC recently issued a proposed new set of rules in the ongoing pole docket that also asks for feedback for additional questions, and includes some clarification of earlier orders. The primary focus of the new rules is to define requirements for handling requests to add fiber to 3,000 or more poles at a time. This order is not approved but is included for consideration in the FCC’s July meeting. It’s likely it will be approved.

If approved, the FCC will change the following rules.

 New Rules for Large Attachment Requests. In a new rule that will affect many projects, an attacher must give written notice if it plans to request to attach to the lesser of 300 poles or 0.5 percent of the utility’s poles in a state. Attachers who don’t give the written notice lose the protection of the pole owner having to stick to the FCC timelines. For large pole attachment requests, the attacher and pole owner must meet and confer about the request.

 Change in Attachment Timeline. A pole owner must notify an attacher within 15 days if it can’t meet a survey deadline. A pole owner must notify an attacher within 15 days if it can’t meet a make-ready deadline.

The order sets the following time guidelines for orders of greater than 3,000 poles, but less than 6,000 poles.The timelines for connecting to more than 6,000 poles must be negotiated between the parties.

Self Help. An attacher is allowed to make estimates of the work required for make-ready if the pole owner is unable to do so on a timely basis.

No Limits on Applications. A pole owner can’t set a limit on the size or the frequency of requests from an attacher for pole attachments.

Improvements in the Contractor Approval Process. A pole owner must add a new contractor to its approved list within 30 days if existing contractors can’t get surveys or make-ready done.

Like always, these new rules would only apply in States that follow FCC pole rules.

The FCC also asks for comments to the following questions:

  • Should attachers be required to deploy equipment on poles within 120 days of completion of make-ready work?
  • What are the repercussions for an attacher who fails to deploy equipment within 120 days after the completion of make-ready work?
  • Should attachers make payment on an estimate for pole attachment within a specific period of time after accepting the estimate?
  • Should there be a limit on how much final make-ready costs can exceed the utility’s estimate without having to get additional prior approval from the attacher?
  • Should One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules be expanded to cover complex survey and make-ready work?

FCC Suspends Lower Prison Calling Rates

The FCC issued a surprising ruling that suspended an FCC order from 2024 that requires lower calling rates for telephone and video calls made from jails and prisons. The lower rates were approved by Congress as part of the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act. That law required lower rates to be effective between January 1 and April 1 of this year for various sizes of facilities. The FCC voted in June to put last year’s order on hold until at least April 1, 2027.

I call this a surprising ruling because the FCC has historically been required to implement laws enacted by Congress. The current FCC presumably doesn’t agree with the 2024 law and subsequent order. In delaying the rules, the FCC cited a negative financial impact on jails and prisons from the new rates. It’s been a common practice for many jails and prisons to charge a “commission” that pay a large share of calling revenues to prisons. For larger jails and prisons, the calling commissions represented a significant revenue source.

Since the FCC was created as an independent agency by Congress, it’s been assumed that the agency is required to implement any laws Congress passes. The only other time I recall the FCC having a major issue with the law was when Chairman Mark Fowler in the 1980s took exception to Congressional rules related to the Fairness Doctrine, although there might have been other instances.

The new rates approved in 2024 range from $0.06 per minute for calls made from prisons to $0.12 per minute for jails with fewer than 99 inmates. These new rates replace older FCC rates that varied between $0.14 per minute for prisons to $0.21 per minute in small jails.

The 2024 order had also set the first cap on the rates for video calls – a technology that is rapidly replacing telephone calls. The new rate caps range from $0.11 per minute in large facilities to $0.25 per minute in the smallest ones. Before the new caps, there were some jails and prisons charging more than $1 per minute for video calling. A lot of prisons and jails also have high ancillary rates for things like a billing fee per call, or families asking for a paper bill. There are still huge fees in place for placing a collect call through an operator.

For those not familiar with prison calling, there are a handful of companies that provide the service in practically every jail and prison in the country. These companies together have what is essentially the last monopoly in the telecom world.

The FCC set the first rate cap on prison calling rates in 2013. Before that, there were rates as high as $2.50 per minute for collect calls. Immediately after that first FCC ruling, a petition was filed at the FCC in 2013 to further reduce rates, and that petition eventually led to the Martha Wright-Reed Act. In full disclosure, I was a technical and cost witness on behalf of inmates in the early FCC cases.

You might wonder how prison callers can justify such high rates when most people now enjoy affordable unlimited long-distance calling. One reason for the high rates is the sizable commissions that go to jails or prisons. Prison calling companies claim they have higher costs since they have to handle penological functions like recording and archiving calls. They also have costs to bill and collect for calling, either from inmate commissary accounts or billed to families. There was a time, a few decades ago, when penological costs justified higher rates, but modern calling technologies have eliminated most of the extra costs.

The FCC order only affects interstate calling rates, and most calls made from jails and prisons stay inside the state. States have a wide variety of rules and rates for in-state calling. When writing this blog, I found a list of in-state rates from a few years ago, and the highest were Minnesota and South Dakota at $0.36 per minute. The lowest in-state rates were New Jersey at $0.06 and California at $0.07 per minute.

Prison calling rates matter because numerous experts say that allowing inmates to stay in contact with their families is one of the best ways to lower recidivism. When I worked on the FCC petitions, I heard numerous stories of prisoners, or their families, who couldn’t afford to make calls.

New Tax Rules and ISPs

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) creates some significant new benefits for building broadband networks. Following are the primary ones. Tax experts may glean some other ones out of the lengthy bill.

Bonus Depreciation is a tax incentive that allows businesses to immediately deduct a significant portion of the cost of building qualified assets, instead of spreading it out over as asset’s useful life. Before OBBB, bonus depreciation was being phased out. It was at 40% of the cost of a qualifying asset in 2025, 20% in 2026, and zero in 2027. OBB resets this back to 100%. There is also no dollar limit on newly used bonus depreciation.

Bonus depreciation can be applied to any asset with a useful life of twenty years or less. That means it can’t be applied to fiber, conduits, towers, and buildings, but can also be applied to all other components of building a new fiber or wireless network. Bonus depreciation applies to more than network assets and can be applied against vehicles, furniture, computers, and software. There are some limits on the amount that can be used for vehicles.

This is a big deal for somebody building a fiber network because it can provide tax relief at the time you are funding and building a network. Big ISPs see the value of this, and AT&T said after passage of the bill that the bonus depreciation provides an incentive for the company to accelerate construction for the 30 million planned new fiber passings.

There is one downside to note for bonus depreciation – if you sell an asset that took advantage of bonus depreciation before the end of its normal expected life, the seller forfeits the bonus depreciation and must recognize it as taxable income at the time of the sale. Note that businesses can still use normal 179 accelerated depreciation for fiber and other long-life assets.

Opportunity Zones: OBBB makes the opportunity zone program permanent. The program was set to sunset at the end of 2026. The opportunity zone program is aimed at promoting infrastructure investments in economically distressed areas. Qualified investments made in opportunity zones can generate deferred taxes and reduced capital gains. It’s been fairly easy to qualify fiber networks as eligible for opportunity zone benefits, particularly if the fiber projects were built in conjunction with other economic development initiatives.

There are maps online that show the areas where current opportunity zone investment apply. States will likely modify the maps starting in 2026 since the definition of eligible low-income communities has changed. The new rules are also friendlier for making investments in rural opportunity zones.

Interest Deductibility. OBBB permanently changes the adjusted taxable income formula used to calculate the amount of interest a business can deduct. The new formula is computed using Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA) and not the more limited EBIT.

R&D Deduction. This probably doesn’t benefit many ISPs, but OBBB restores the permanent ability to deduct research and development costs, including a one-time opportunity to deduct these expenses retroactively to January 1, 2022.

FEMA and ISPs

One big change coming from the current administration is that the federal government is shoving payments from FEMA down to States. The administration talked about completely closing FEMA, but just recently said that they would keep the agency open in the future. But with the budget cuts that came out of the OBBB, it’s clear that the federal share for paying for disasters will go down, meaning the State share will increase.

Depending on the state, this transfer of funding responsibility could have a huge impact on an electric utility or a telecom provider with an extensive network. FEMA has quietly helped to pay for damages to networks caused by major storms, fires, floods, or other disasters.

FEMA was created in 1979 by combining several emergency response efforts in the federal government. FEMA became part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and has the dual mission of providing disaster relief and educating the public on disaster awareness.

FEMA was busy in 2024 and responded to 90 disaster events that included numerous fires, several major hurricanes, including Milton and Helene, floods, landslides, and tornadoes.

FEMA has served as a financial backstop when disasters cause widespread damage to infrastructure of all kinds. FEMA has shown up in the past when a governor and the President both declared a disaster event. FEMA typically has paid for a portion of storm damage, with additional help coming from a State.

FEMA isn’t the only source of federal funding, and Congress can directly approve funding to go to a state that has a disaster. However, all of the experts I’ve been reading expect that the federal funding for disasters will drop significantly, meaning States will be expected to fund a significant portion of storm damages.

A diminished FEMA is going to create havoc. States do not have the extensive disaster teams that swarm a disaster area for up to a year after a disaster. States may not have mechanisms in place to easily fund damages to infrastructure and may need to pass legislation to be able to reimburse an electric company, cable company, or other network owner.

I’ve witnessed numerous occasions when disasters cause extensive damage to networks. I worked with a client a few years ago who had large stretches of fiber burned from an extensive wildfire. There was a hurricane in the U.S. Virgin Islands a few years ago that snapped almost every utility pole on one island. Hurricane Helene last year not only knocked down poles in Appalachia, but in many cases, the ensuing floods washed away entire roads and the networks along them.

You might wonder why network owners don’t buy commercial insurance to protect networks. I suppose they could, but such a policy would be extremely expensive and would drive up the cost of the services supported. I’m not aware of any affordable network replacement insurance available in the market.

There are things that telecom network owners and utility owners might want to consider doing in reaction to a weakened FEMA. It’s important for network owners to work with states to make sure they are ready to help them after a disaster. With FEMA as the financial backstop, network owners have felt able to begin repairs immediately since they understood that the funding to cover repairs would eventually show up. It’s scarier to begin spending money without understanding how disaster reimbursement will work.

It’s not unrealistic to picture disasters where a state will be unable to cover the full cost of damages. It’s not hard to imagine network owners who can’t afford to make repairs without a guarantee of at least partial reimbursement. This could result in electric or broadband networks that sit unrepaired and customers unconnected to vital services, magnifying the negative impact of disasters.

Free-space Quantum Optics

In a joint effort by Yale University, Stony Brook University, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have been working on a project using free-space optics to transmit quantum signals through the air using lasers. The specific project is called Q-LATS for Quantum Laser Across the Sound, where signals are being transmitted 27 miles from a tower at Yale across Long Island Sound to a tower at Stony Brook University.

Quantum computers are used to create qubits, which have the ability to exist as both a one and a zero simultaneously. This allows a quantum computer to explore multiple scenarios at the same time. Qubits can be created using trapped ions or photons. Quantum communications function by generating entangled photon pairs. One photon is retained and used for calculations, while the other is sent to a distance location. Anything done with the retained photon is sensed at the distant end, thus transmitting the details of the computations.

The project is looking for alternatives to using fiber cables. It turns out to be very challenging to transmit quantum signals through fiber since some of the qubits are lost during the transmission. Fiber cables used to transmit quantum signals work best when heavily shielded and buried, making it costly to establish paths for future quantum communications.

The Q-LATS project hopes to show a reasonable alternate to fiber in places where costly fiber routes are impractical, such as across the Sound. Free-space optics can be used to transmit quantum signals in urban locations, across water, and even into space.

Transmitting light signals through the air has limitations due to rain, fog, and atmospheric turbulence, but the scientists believe these shortcomings can be more easily overcome than finding the funding to build specialty fiber routes.

For now, quantum transmissions are mostly of interest in academia to transmit signals between universities. But quantum computing holds some interesting properties that should eventually make it of use for data centers, large businesses, the military, and others. Quantum signals are seemingly nearly impossible to intercept or hack because the effort to do so instantly interferes with the transmission of qubits. That’s even more so with free-space optics, where a hacker would have to somehow intercept a line-of-sight transmission through the air.

Quantum communications might eventually become the standard for sending highly confidential or sensitive information. It’s not hard to imagine using free-space lasers to transmit quantum signals between Wall Street firms, between large businesses and data centers, and between government and military locations that require a secure path.

The Industrial Metaverse

When Facebook changed the company name to Meta in 2021, it looked like the company would be taking the lead to bring virtual reality into everyday life. The company promised in 2021 that it would create an interconnected and immersive digital world where users could engage in socializing, working, learning and creating. Meta invested over $60 billion since then to create metaverse technologies.

In the market, Meta released a series of Quest virtual reality headsets that were popular with some gamers but never got wide acceptance. The most successful product is Ray-Ban smart glasses, which are largely a phone you wear as glasses and that don’t include VR technology.

This month, Meta announced its new priorities for the future, which don’t include more exploration of the metaverse. The company laid off 100 workers from Reality Labs, and there are industry predictions that Meta will back out of metaverse research by the end of the year.

At least for now, this kills the idea of having virtual reality meetings at work and of taking virtual vacations. There were predictions in 2021 that this would be the new killer app for broadband usage and that home VR would finally be able to fully utilize home gigabit connections.

However, virtual reality has not been a total bust. A recent article in Wired describes how virtual reality has been embraced by manufacturers. There are some major advantages to being able to build a virtual version of a factory to try new ideas.

Cited in the article is report from the World Economic Forum that believes that industrial virtual reality will be a $100 billion business by 2030. This new industry might best be described as spatial computing. This combined virtual reality and augmented reality to benefit industrial applications.

The purpose of industrial VR is to create simulations of large industrial settings. The article says that Amazon uses a virtual simulation of its warehouses to train the robots that move and retrieve packages. Lowe’s uses the technology to consider its options before changing store layouts. There is a long discussion of how BMW uses the technology to improve efficiency in its auto factories.

Virtual reality for gaming is far from dead, and a dozen companies are making headsets for gaming. But the idea that we’ll all create avatars of ourselves that will navigate in a virtual world is going to go on the shelf for a while – maybe forever.

Broadband and Rural Real Estate

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America. They universally tell me that it’s gotten exceedingly hard to sell rural homes that don’t have good broadband.

I’ve also written a few blogs over the years about people who moved to a rural home and were shocked to find they couldn’t buy broadband. They probably moved from a place where broadband is ubiquitously available, and they never imagined that there were places without broadband. The most famous such story in my neck of the woods involves Brian Rathbone, who owns the broadband consulting company Broadband Catalyst. When he found his new home didn’t have fiber, he undertook nearly a decade-long effort to get it, including building the fiber to reach from the road to his remote home.

The Brattle Group released a study late last year that concluded that bringing fiber to a home might add as much as 14% to the value of the home. They undertook the study by comparing the prices for homes in 2023 that didn’t have fiber to prices in the same neighborhoods in 2024 after getting fiber. This was a time period with some significant inflation, so the increase can’t be attributed entirely to fiber, but there is no doubt that getting fiber added significant value to homes. Over the last decade, I recall estimates made by others that estimated the increase in home value for getting fiber of 6% to 8%.

The value of bringing fiber to a rural home has to be greater than for an urban home. How do you quantify the value of adding fiber to a rural home if it suddenly makes the home marketable? In my mind, a house that is put up for sale and gets no offers can be said to have no value. Some rural real estate agents have told me stories of homes without broadband that sat vacant for years after the owners left the home for some reason.

Of course, fiber isn’t the only form of rural broadband. When real estate agents talk about homes without broadband, they include homes served by rural DSL, cellular hotspots, or high orbit satellite broadband. In rural areas, I’ve run across numerous residents who tried and abandoned each of these options as inadequate and not worth the cost.

The rural broadband landscape has gotten more complicated in recent years. For example, most counties now have a few cell towers that provide FWA home cellular broadband. But the coverage areas for decent broadband from towers are small, perhaps two miles, and in the counties I’ve examined, FWA typically covers 20% or less of the area.

WISPs have been stepping up their game in many markets with new radios and better backhaul. It wasn’t unusual three or four years ago to find counties where all WISP customers saw speeds of 10 Mbps or slower. WISPs are often now delivering much faster speeds in these same places.

The big wildcard is Starlink. There are rural customers who rave about it, particularly those for whom Starlink brought the first really workable broadband. But I’ve talked to Starlink customers who complain that the quality of broadband varies throughout the day, making it a challenge to work from home. Many people moving from a cable company or fiber connection are likely to be skeptical of satellite broadband.

Of course, the advantages of bringing better broadband to rural homes go far beyond just the value added to the real estate. The counties I know that have worked hard to get better broadband have several other major goals. They understand the boost to the local economy when rural folks can make good incomes working from home. Counties are universally desperate to keep young residents from leaving the County to find jobs, and they hope that better broadband opens up local opportunities. Good broadband is also key to attracting retirees to move from cities. It’s nearly impossible to put a dollar value on these benefits.

OBBB and Spectrum

The cellular industry is taking a victory lap after passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). The law reinstates the FCC’s authority to hold spectrum auctions and sets goals for the FCC to raise as much as $85 billion from selling spectrum. The following are the key provisions of the new law.

The bill instructs the FCC and the Assistant Secretary of Commerce (NTIA) to identify at least 800 megahertz of spectrum to be auctioned – between 1.3 GHz and 10.5 GHz. The law largely leaves it up to the two parties to determine the spectrum that will be up for sale. It will be interesting to how the FCC and NTIA coordinate on this.

The FCC is ordered to auction at least 300 megahertz of spectrum within two years, which must include at least 100 megahertz of the C-Band spectrum between 3.98-4.2 GHz. The FCC and NTIA must then identify 500 megahertz of spectrum that will support full-power commercial licensed use cases. That’s been a major goal for years for CTIA, the lobbyist for the cellular industry.

The bill carves out two bands of spectrum that cannot be considered for auction or relocation. The 3.1-3.25 GHz spectrum has been used by the military for many years. Also excluded is spectrum between 7.4-8.4 GHz, which is part of the X-Band spectrum that is used for military satellites.

The new law does not protect CBRS spectrum, which sits at 3-55 – 3.7 GHz. This spectrum is being used by today by over 1,000 entities today such as WISPs, private networks, ports, schools, sports venues, hospitals, airports, and the DOD. Part of this spectrum band is available for use by anybody, but subject to a system that shares bandwidth among users. AT&T had proposed late in 2024 that the FCC auction CBRS, which led to a letter signed by 23 ISPs from Texas and WISPA and sent a letter to Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas.

The bigger controversy comes from considering auctioning all or part of the 6 GHz spectrum that is used today for WiFi. The FCC approved this as public spectrum in April 2020, and the bandwidth available in this spectrum band has enabled the development of WiFi 6 and WiFi 7. Critics of the legislation point out that WiFi is by far the most valuable spectrum in the country. A study published by NCTA said the value of WiFi to the U.S. economy is $1.6 trillion in 2025, and the value is growing rapidly and will be 33% more by 2027.

The potential raid on the 6 GHz spectrum has raised alarm bells worldwide. This spectrum has been earmarked around the world for WiFi and unlicensed and shared spectrum use. The fear is that carving out some of U.S. 6 GHz spectrum will threaten WiFi innovation, and would make it harder to develop interoperable hardware and chip sets.

Trade groups such as the Wi-Fi Alliance and NCTA have filed objections with the FCC that suggested that any value generated by cellular use would pale against the huge benefits of expanded WiFi.

The FCC is going to have a major battle to auction 6 GHz spectrum that will pit the biggest cellular carriers against ISPs and the many other industries that benefit from WiFi. I remember a quote in an article a few years ago that resonated with me, which said that most people use WiFi from waking until bedtime, making it the most valuable spectrum.

Final BEAD Rules Released

The guessing game is over since NTIA has released the final rules about how the new BEAD grant process will work. Unfortunately, it’s still impossible to make any guesses about the percentage of BEAD that will be awarded to fiber or other technologies. There have been both optimistic and pessimistic predictions of awards for fiber written in the last few weeks, and as you’ll see below, there is still no way to guess who is right.

There are a few things we know. It’s clear that a lot of State Broadband Offices (SBOs) still want to maximize the amount of awards made to fiber. We also know that overall eligible BEAD locations are being reduced by allowing a map challenge from WISPs that use unlicensed spectrum. Preliminary estimates are that as many as 15% of BEAD passings might be removed from the grant process, but we’ll have to wait and see if WISPs use this challenge.

NTIA has specified the process for SBOs to make proposed grant awards. The highlight of that process is as follows:

  • SBOs must start over, and all ISPs will be invited to bid in a single Benefit of the Bargain grant round (this is probably the dumbest new industry term I can recall).
  • SBOS can designate a project as a Priority Broadband Projects, meaning projects that get the first crack at funding (see more below). In areas where more than one priority project is eligible for funding, the ISP asking for the lowest amount of grant funding per passing wins, with the caveat that an SBO can award the grant to a project that is no more than 15% higher than the lowest bidder.
  • Areas with no priority projects are directly awarded to the ISP asking for the lowest amount of funding.
  • SBOs are given a number of options to find ISPs willing to serve locations that nobody has requested to serve.

Priority Broadband Projects. An SBO gets to decide if a given grant application is going to be designated as a Priority Broadband Project. To meet this requirement, a proposed project has to 1) be able to deliver 100/20 Mbps service today with a latency under 100 milliseconds, 2) be able to scale over time to meet evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses, and 3) support the deployment of 5G and successor wireless technologies and other advanced services.

The second requirement implies that an SBO can determine some future goal faster than 100/20 Mbps that applicants must agree to eventually meet. The new rules don’t specify how to do this. I’ve already seen a few SBOs suggesting ultimate speeds between 200 and 300 Mbps download. Faster future speed requirements might be a reason for not giving satellite a priority designation, but WISPs would likely qualify.

The last test for supporting 5G is a harder hurdle to satisfy. It’s clear that building last-mile fiber supports 5G and future wireless technologies, because new 5G towers or repeaters can be placed anywhere in a last-mile fiber network. This will be harder for a WISP to guarantee. A WISP might be able to meet this requirement if they are building a BEAD network that includes fiber backhaul to towers instead of using wireless backhaul. A WISP that isn’t proposing to build some fiber is going to have a challenge to meet this requirement.

The bottom line is that it should be easy to designate last-mile fiber projects as priority. WISPs have more of a challenge in being designated as a priority project, and I expect some WISPs will achieve this designation and others won’t, depending on the proposed network and specific technology. It seems to be easy to exclude satellite service from the priority designation.

NTIA Taking an Active Role in BEAD Awards. There is a new surprise rule that means that tentative grants awarded using the above rules might still not be final. NTIA has made it clear to SBOs that it must be kept in the loop during the entire grant process. The ultimate touchpoint is that NTIA wants to see and approve every proposed grant award.

There is no end to the ways that NTIA could exercise this power. The folks making optimistic predictions for fiber awards could be right and NTIA could elect to let SBOs call the shots and could rubber-stamp most proposed grants.

However, there has been a lot of speculation that Commerce wants to significantly reduce the size of the $42.5 billion program, and having the final approval might be the mechanism for lowering grant outlays. NTIA might set an arbitrary cap on the amount if BEAD per passing for fiber awards. NTIA might veto grants made for fiber if a WISP or satellite provider offers a lower price for the same area, which would largely undo the priority areas designation. NTIA might override proposed grant awards in blue states but not red states, in large states but not small ones, or for small ISPs but not big ones. NTIA could decide that Starlink gets no grants, if we are to believe the current spat between Elon Musk and the administration.

Unless somebody has inside knowledge of NTIA’s intentions for awarding grants, it’s impossible to guess what NTIA might do with its power to approve grant awards. I’m done guessing the amount of fiber that will be built by BEAD. At this point, I think we’ll have to wait until September to see what pops out of the BEAD award process.

Seasonal Broadband

The 4th of July is a good day to talk about seasonality, as millions of folks visit their second homes for the holiday. A lot of ISPs operate in seasonal markets where customers regularly spend many months away from the market. Northern states are familiar with the annual migration of snowbirds who flee to somewhere warmer in the winter. These same states often see visitors coming in the summer to visit lakes and rural cabins to beat the southern heat. Any community close to the ocean understands the huge difference between the tourism season and the off-season. One of the most challenging seasonal markets is a small college town where residents leave in the summer to often be replaced in the fall with a new wave of students.

Seasonal visitors are a challenge for ISPs. A lot of seasonal visitors won’t buy broadband if they have to pay full price all year. Selling to seasonal customers has gotten more complicated since some bring a portable Starlink unit with them when they travel.

But seasonal visitors increasingly need broadband. A lot of seasonal visitors want to work remotely while moving between residences. Broadband brings access to video and to the many parts of daily life that are now conducted online. Many seasonal communities also have poor cellular service, particularly during tourist season when cell towers get overwhelmed.

Seasonal customers aren’t all the same. Some want to visit their seasonal property occasionally in the off-season for maintenance or for holidays. Many seasonal customers want to maintain security cameras and perhaps indoor sensors when they are away from the property but hate to pay a full rate for broadband for the months they aren’t there.

I’ve seen a wide range of ways that ISPs deal with seasonal customers.

  • The harshest solution is to bill for every month of service at full rates. This is the general treatment of seasonal customers by some of the largest ISPs.
  • Some ISPs let customers turn off service when they leave the market. There might be a reconnection charge to reestablish service when the customer returns for the next season. But that means no cameras or sensors or broadband when visiting the property in the off-season.
  • It’s also common to charge a reduced rate for the off-season. This allows customers to maintain security cameras and leak detectors without paying a full rate.

Some ISPs are getting more creative.

  • I know an ISP that reduces the fee to an off-season rate but automatically bills for a full month if the customer uses broadband in a significant way more than two days in a month during the off-season. They can do that because of the ability to track customer usage by location on their fiber network.
  • I know several ISPs who offer an off-season safety package. The ISP installs security cameras, burglar alarms, and leak detectors and monitors the devices for activity. They will alert the police if the burglar alarm is triggered. They will send a technician to investigate if a leak detector is triggered. They provide easy access to the owner of stored video camera recordings.
  • I know ISPs that have special rates for rental properties to encourage property owners to offer good broadband as an amenity while making it affordable for the whole year.
  • I know an ISP who has mastered the challenges of operating in a small college town. They swarm the campus when classes start each semester to make sure that students and parents know that they are a cheaper alternative to the cable company. They market a reduced rate for each semester for parents who will pre-pay for the semester. This is popular and saves students from being disconnected for non-payment in the final month of each semester when they often run out of funds.

The goal with seasonal packages is to maximize ISP revenue while not making customers feel like they are being overcharged. An ISP who finds the right package or products for their market will have loyal seasonal customers for years.