Author Archives: Doug Dawson, CCG Consulting

Canada Finally Orders Open-Access

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ordered, in August 2024, that all broadband providers in the country open their networks to competitors on a wholesale open-access network. The original unbundling order applied to broadband provided on both cable TV and fiber networks. The original ordered that open-access be implemented by February 2025.

Similar to what happens in the U.S., various aspects of the rule were appealed at the CRTC. Through orders issued in June and August, the CRTC has modified a few requirements, but largely affirmed its original order and intent to require open-access.

While the order refers to this as open-access, a better analogy for the Canadian product is akin to what we call resale in the U.S. In Canada, the underlying network owner is still configuring the speed and delivering the product, and the open-access company is rebranding the product and selling and billing it to customers. Most U.S. open-access networks require ISPs to bring the backbone Internet and to set speeds and layer on additional products. However, some open-access sellers in the U.S. are closer to the Canadian model.

In October 2024, the CRTC set interim open-access rates for the largest ISPs. The three biggest ISPs in the country are Bell Canada, Telus, and Rogers. The rates are fairly high compared to many of the open-access rates in the U.S. A few examples:

  • Buying a broadband connection on the Bell networks at speeds up to 1,500 Mbps is $68.95 Canadian ($49.91 U.S.). Speeds greater than 1,500 Mbps are $78.03 ($56.50 U.S.).
  • The connection on Telus in Quebec for all speeds is $65.25 ($47.24 U.S.) while the rate in British Columbia is $80.41 ($58.22 U.S.).
  • Connection rates for SaskTel for all speeds are $77.57 ($56.16 U.S.).
  • CRTC also set standard rates for activities like service activation, moves and changes, and site visits.

The new orders made some refinements to the open-access rules:

  • Fiber deployed by Bell Canada, SaskTel, or TELUS after August 13, 2025 will not be made available for open-access until August 13, 2029. This will give fiber builders a head start in connecting customers on new networks.
  • The largest ISPs (both fiber providers and cable companies) can’t buy wholesale access on smaller ISPs within their traditional monopoly territories. This ruling is to push the big companies to expand networks and not rely on networks already built by smaller companies.

Four ISPs – Eastlink, Cogeco, the Competitive Network Operators of Canada, and SaskTel – had petitioned the CRTC to not allow the largest three ISPs to buy wholesale access on their networks. The most recent ruling said that everybody has to open their networks to competition. Cogeco has already said that it plans to take this new decision to court. Until now, the petitions were within the CRTC.

Numerous ISPs filed comments with CRTC saying that this ruling is a disincentive to building new fiber networks. The smaller companies fear that the biggest ISPs will win most of the customers on their networks due to their marketing advantage, and they said this will force them out of the business.

CRTC says it is going to closely monitor the competitive situation. As of the date of the recent orders, there has not been a lot of wholesale activity.

Death of the Fourth Cellular Carrier

The press has been full of recent headlines saying that EchoStar is finished as the fourth facility-based cellular network. EchoStar announced that it is selling 50 MHz of low and midspan spectrum to AT&T for $23 billion, to close in mid-year 2026. The spectrum being sold includes a 20 MHz swath of 600 MHz and a 30 MHz chunk of 3.45 GHz.

Over the weekend, it was announced that EchoStar sold 50 MHz of its AWS-4 and H-block spectrum to Space X for $17 billion to use for Starlink’s direct-to-cell service that will launch with the next generation of satellites. Exchostar’s Boost cellular customers will get access to that new service when it’s launched.

As a reminder, the EchoStar merged with DISH Networks and started using the brand name EchoStar for the cellular business. DISH Networks was promoted by the FCC to become a new nationwide cell carrier when the FCC approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. DISH raised billions of dollars and started down the path of building a nationwide cell network. In doing so, DISH chose the interesting path of using open RAN electronics, which it believed would be more flexible and cost less than the electronics used by the other big cell companies.

DISH has been fighting for years to keep control of large swaths of spectrum. In addition to the spectrum being sold, the company holds 200 MHz, 700 MHz, and 1.7 GHz spectrum. The company had a hard time justifying all of the spectrum since as of May of this year, the company only had 1.25 million customers riding its own cellular network. The company was under investigation from the FCC for holding unneeded spectrum, but these sales should quiet that issues. EchoStar recently announced that it plans to launch a satellite constellation to compete for cellular service some of its AWS spectrum.

Echostar has been struggling financially, and recently averted a Chapter 11 filing when it was late in making a scheduled debt payment on July 1, but was able to do so before the 30-day grace period.  For those not familiar with the history of DISH Network, the largest stockholder is Charlie Ergen. He’s been adept over the years at finding ways to get out of threatening financial binds.

Echostar will continue to operate its other subsidiaries which include Dish TV, online platform Sling, and Hushes high-orbit satellite.

The timing of the spectrum sales is interesting because the company was finally making some headway in the cellular industry. When EchoStar announced its 2Q 2025 financial results, the big surprise was the continued growth of new cellular customers for the Boost Mobile brand. Echostar saw net growth of 212,000 customers for the quarter, up from 150,000 in the first quarter. This back-to-back growth is surprising since the company was losing customers a year earlier. Boost Mobile had 9 million customers when the company was first purchased, and had slipped to a low of 7.4 million customers.

As the headline says, this sale means the death of the EchoStar cellular network. The company discussed how it will try to sell off or scrap the assets.

The second quarter net growth for all of the major cellular carriers is as follows:Readers who haven’t seen a chart of cellular customer growth might be surprised to see how well Comcast and Charter are doing. It seems like both companies are putting a lot of emphasis on cellular growth to help offset the continued losses of broadband customers. The Verizon numbers might look dismal, but both Charter and Comcast largely ride the Verizon cellular networks with resold MVNO arrangements.

The sale of spectrum to AT&T is not good news for cable companies since AT&T said it would use the spectrum, in part, to expand its FWA home cellular business. AT&T was late to the game in launching FWA, and had 1 million customers at the end of the second quarter, compared to 5.1 million for Verizon and 7.3 million for T-Mobile.

The Accelerating Rate of Deregulation

We’re less than eight months into the new administration, and when considering that short amount of time, there has been an unprecedented amount of deregulation coming out of the federal government related to broadband and telecom issues. Regulatory changes aren’t just coming from the FCC, but also from the White House, NTIA, Congress, and other agencies like the FTC.

The trend to deregulate under a Republican administration is not a surprise. For example, we heard a lot of deregulation rhetoric when FCC Chairman Ajit Pai took over the FCC. His FCC tackled deregulation, but at a much slower pace than the current administration. Brendan Carr hit the ground running in this new administration when he was named as Chairman soon after the inauguration.

Following is a list I made of deregulatory changes I can recall that have happened this year, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.

  • Chairman Carr came in with the intentions of killing Title II regulation of broadband and net neutrality, but was spared the effort when, in early January, the U.S Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit struck down the regulations that had been adopted by the previous FCC.
  • The FCC’s signature deregulatory thrust has been labeled as Delete, Delete, Delete, which is a streamlined way to eliminate obsolete regulations. In practice, it appears that the FCC has decided to take shortcuts and has shortened the timeline or totally eliminated the ability for public comments before regulations are eliminated.
  • The FCC canceled rules that allowed the Universal Fund to pay for WiFi on school buses. The FCC is currently killing rules that would allow the USF to fund hotspots for lending in libraries.
  • The FCC made it easier for telcos to retire copper by putting a 2-year moratorium on public notices of upcoming copper retirements. The FCC is now working to make the temporary rules permanent.
  • In perhaps the biggest change, the White House ordered NTIA to cease the implementation of the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act that was to be used for teaching people how to use computers, making sure every household had a computer or tablet, and promoting subscription to home broadband.
  • NTIA weakened the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program. The agency:
    • Watered down the assumed preference for fiber and tried to give more funding to alternative technologies like satellite.
    • Eliminated the mandate that anybody building a BEAD network had to have at least one broadband product that would be affordable for low-income households.
    • Weakened labor requirements and got rid of the preference for prevailing and union wages.
    • Perhaps the biggest long-term impact of the BEAD changes is that NTIA has seemingly defined satellite broadband as a legitimate broadband option for homes, meaning most homes can now be said to have a broadband option.
    • It looks like all of these changes might mean a $10-$20 billion reduction from the expected $42.5 billion program.
  • The FCC stopped the implementation of lower rates for telephone and video calls in jails and prisons.
  • The Federal Trade Commission halted the implementation of Click to Cancel, which would have mandated that any company that lets a customer subscribe online must make it just as easy to cancel service online.
  • While not specifically deregulation, the FCC has ignored its own timeline for kicking off the 5G for Rural America Fund, which is supposed to bring a lot more cell towers to rural America.
  • Courts continue to weaken the FCC’s authority. Several rulings in 2024 weakened the FCC. For example, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturned the Chevron Doctrine, which brings into question the ability of the FCC to enact laws that were not specifically mandated by Congress. This year, McLaughlin Chiropractic v. McKesson Corp gave District Courts more leeway to disagree with rulings made by federal agencies like the FCC.

To be fair, there are some new regulations to go along with the deregulation effort:

  • The FCC adopted some new regulations for poles related mostly to how pole owners must react to large orders for getting onto poles.
  • Congress reinstituted the spectrum auction for the FCC. However, that new law may reclaim some WiFi and CBRS spectrum for auction, which is key for rural and home broadband.
  • Tariffs on most imported goods have increased the cost of building broadband networks, particularly for electronics.
  • The FCC is suddenly opining on the content on network television and has threatened the broadcast licenses of the large broadcasters.

I couldn’t decide how to categorize the recent issue where the FCC said it was going to examine and try to kill any state regulation of AI. Should that be categorized as more deregulation, or an increase in federal regulation?

This is a huge number of changes for only an eight-month period, and I have to wonder how far the deregulation effort will go over the next few years.

FCC Examines Environmental Rules

The FCC recently released a Notice of Proposed Rule Making where the agency is looking to relax some of the rules related to NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act), mostly related to wireless infrastructure. The NEPA rules were created in 1970 as a reaction to air pollution and acid rain. The Act created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that oversees the implementation of the NEPA rules. I have to warn you that this order is chock-fully of jargon and not easy to understand for those not familiar with environmental regulations.

The NEPA rules are being examined in light of Executive Order 14154, signed in January and titled “Unleashing American Energy”, which rescinded Executive Order 11911 from 1977 that required CEQ to issue regulations for federal agencies regarding the implementation of NEPA.

This particular docket examines environmental rules that apply to locating wireless equipment. In a related effort, NTIA has told State Broadband Offices that it will be relaxing the need for expensive environmental studies for winners of most BEAD grants. For now, environmental studies are still needed for other grants like ReConnect. The FCC says this docket applies to commercial spectrum license holders, utilities, public safety entities, railroads, mining companies, and tower owners.

The FCC adopted rules in the past that make it easy to do normal broadband construction of all types without jumping through a lot of paperwork hoops. The existing FCC rules say that extra NEPA compliance doesn’t broadly apply to projects that “individually and cumulatively to have no significant effect on the quality of the human environment and are categorically excluded from environmental processing.” In practical terms, that has meant that projects like building privately-funded fiber in existing rights-of-way doesn’t need an environmental study.

However, the current FCC regulations recognize that there are circumstances, which are defined by a NEPA Checklist, where additional environmental study is justified. One event that triggers the exception is communications projects constructed on federal lands or projects funded with federal or state grant money. Such projects typically require full NEPA compliance. Those who have had to go through the environmental studies complain that they are costly and can delay projects by as much as a year. Construction can’t proceed until an exhaustive environmental review has been completed, at a cost as high as several hundred thousand dollars.

The FCC NPRM is also exploring whether any changes should be considered for compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA). Those rules have often been invoked by localities to restrict placing wireless towers adjacent to historic sites.

The NPRM was initiated due to a petition from CTIA, the Wireless Association, that represents the largest cellular companies, that asked to modify the rules by imposing short deadlines on environmental and historic preservation reviews.

The NPRM asks when it is appropriate for the FCC to invoke NEPA rules for wireless tower placement. The FCC suggests that it is not responsible for invoking NEPA rules for wireless licenses that cover large geographic areas, and that local regulations would suffice for specific choices of where to put towers. The FCC suggests that NEPA still applies to wireless licenses that are site-specific.

The NPRM also asks what rules should apply for the location of satellite earth stations, which are currently not specifically covered by regulation. The NPRM asks if the FCC should continue to ask tower owners to register with the FCC. The NPRM also asks if there should be any environmental regulations that apply in space –  a fitting question for the ever-more crowded low-orbit paths.

Access to Rights-of-Way

There is an interesting docket at the FCC that is examining the ability of a City to sign an exclusive agreement with an ISP that keeps other new ISPs out of the market. The case involves Cottage Grove, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul with a population of around 43,000. The City of Cottage Grove signed an agreement with Gateway Fiber to build fiber throughout the City. The City’s agreement with Gateway provides a three-year period during which the City would not issue new permits to any other fiber builders in some parts of the City, and five-years elsewhere.

An ISP, Intrepid(2), filed a petition with the FCC asking the agency to overturn that City’s action. My first reaction was that the FCC would probably rule in favor of Intrepid(2), but it turns out that laws in this area are a lot more nuanced than I understood.

The City had already explored its legal rights in this area before issuing the RFP and choosing Gateway to build a fiber network. The City addressed the rights-of-way issue in the following response to a question during the RFP process:

 The City of Cottage Grove is not attempting to restrict or prohibit access to public rights-of-way for broadband companies. The City has simply implemented a fair and efficient manner in which to regulate and manage the installation and maintenance of broadband services through their Request for Proposals. The City’s primary goal is to provide sufficient broadband to each area of the City in an efficient and orderly manner – taking into account the limited space within the public rights-of-ways and the access needs of the community during construction.

 Under Minn. Stat. 237.163, a local government is specifically authorized to manage and regulate the use of public rights of way. . . a local government may exercise the option to regulate the use of public rights-of-way so long as the regulation is carried out in a fair, efficient, competitively neutral, and substantially uniform manner. The City of Cottage Grove has chosen to exercise this option and manage the public rights-of-way pursuant to Cottage Grove City Code § 7-6-2.

The FCC has some jurisdiction in this area. Section 224 of the FCC code was created by the Pole Attachment Act of 1978 and further amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. These laws require utilities to provide access to poles, ducts, conduits, and rights-of-way to telecommunications carriers on fair and nondiscriminatory terms. It’s not fully clear the degree to which these provisions apply to local communities.

Cities have routinely entered into agreements with electric companies, gas companies, water companies, cable companies, and telecommunications companies to use public rights-of-way. Such agreements are often referred to as franchise agreements when the facility owner pays a fee to the government for continued use of the rights-of-way. But there are agreements that don’t include compensation.

Many of these agreements have been exclusive, and local governments agreed to not let in another similar provider. Many local governments are concerned about the consequences and problems that come from having too many buried utilities using the same public rights-of-way.

There have been many lawsuits over the years related to exclusive access to rights-of-way. Many such lawsuits centered on the fact that the right-of-way owner didn’t have a clear reason to insist on exclusive access. In this case, Cottage Grove fully researched the issue before granting an exclusive right-of-way. I’m sure the City wasn’t looking for a fight and hoped not to be sued over the issue. But the City has several issues in its favor. The City didn’t want to inconvenience citizens by having multiple companies constructing networks on the same streets. The restriction is also temporary, for up to five years in parts of the City. The City also doesn’t have an absolute prohibition against other fiber builders and will consider applications for right-of-way.

It gets even muddier in that the FCC’s authority to preempt local rules is not absolute. The FCC only has authority to preempt state laws if the FCC asserts jurisdiction over the disputed service. This is where it gets sticky for the FCC. The FCC has gone out of its way in recent years to declare that broadband is not telecommunications but is a service. That throws some doubt on the FCC’s ability to preempt a local law concerning construction of a broadband network. The FCC can’t pick and choose when it wants broadband to be considered telecommunications versus a service.

Past FCC’s have been cautious about overturning the local right to control rights-of-ways, and the FCC may not want to take on all local and state governments based on the facts in this case. Even if the FCC rules against the City, which is not a clear thing, the City could probably appeal the case and tie it up in court long enough to give Gateway a chance to construct the network unimpeded.

AT&T’s Landline Alternative

AT&T announced at the end of 2024 that it plans to retire all copper networks by the end of 2029. The FCC noted in a recent filing that the use of traditional telephone service has decreased rapidly over time. At the peak in 2003, incumbent telcos had 181 landline telephone customers. By the middle of 2024 that had reduced to 18 million traditional landlines along with 64 million voice-over-IP voice customers.

The transition away from copper is going largely unnoticed in urban areas since customers typically have good alternatives to a landline. Surveys have shown that practically everybody has a cellphone, and in cities, except for dead zones in cellular coverage, the cellular network provides a good alternative to landlines.

However, there are still a lot of rural customers for whom a landline is the only reliable communications path to the world. AT&T was catching a lot of public grief when it started to tear down rural copper networks in areas where customers were told the only alternative was cellular service. Because of spotty or nonexistent rural cellular coverage, many rural residents never purchased an expensive cellphone. While a cellphone can be used to make voice calls, a cellphone is not an alternative for connecting medical devices, analog burglar alarms, and other technologies that had relied on the landline connection.

In 2024, AT&T conducted a test of a new technology it labeled as AT&T Phone – Advanced (AP-A). The service relies on an in-home cellular receiver that provides VoIP that can be plugged into existing telephone wiring to provide connections to existing telephone sets and devices connected to the customer’s copper.

The technology worked as planned, and the FCC approved the new technology as a landline replacement. The FCC’s initial approval only concerned a small test conducted of the device in Oklahoma. It’s not clear how widely AT&T is marketing this product, but the company touted the trial to the FCC as being a robust replacement product for rural landlines.

You might wonder about how the product replaces DSL, and it doesn’t. This product is for the rural home that wants to maintain only a landline. It’s worth noting that now that the FCC has labeled broadband as a service, not regulated under Title II, the FCC has no rules that require telcos to offer an alternative to eliminating DSL broadband. This was made explicitly clear in July when the FCC created a 2-year moratorium on having to notify the public about copper replacements.

Rural DSL has rarely been an adequate product due to the fact that customers are typically too far from the DSL hub to get any appreciable speed. But AT&T does have a rural DSL replacement in places where the company has enabled rural cell sites to provide FWA cellular home broadband. As of the second quarter of this year, AT&T has installed over 1 million customers on the FWA product. The FWA product is only effective within a few miles of cell sites that have been FWA-enabled.

It looks like AT&T will be able to expand its FWA footprint after the announcement that the company purchased a pile of spectrum from Echostar. Analysts are already speculating that the primary benefit of the new spectrum is to greatly expand the FWA broadband product.

Big ISPs and BEAD

I remember that within a month after BEAD was announced, there were a lot of predictions that the program was going to be a huge giveaway to the largest telcos and cable companies. There was some reason for that outlook since there had been huge giveaways to large telcos in the past, such as the $10 billion CAF II fiasco.

I felt optimistic from the beginning that BEAD would not all go to big companies due to the fact that BEAD was being driven by States, and not by federal grant programs. I expected that States would have widely varying ideas on how to award the grants. States lost a lot of the flexibility in choosing different types of winners after the NTIA revised the BEAD grants to basically be a one-round reverse auction.

We’re now starting to see some of the preliminary BEAD results, and it’s a mixed bag – with some states favoring large companies and others not. I call the awards preliminary because every grant award made by the States still has to be approved by NTIA, and nobody knows what they are going to do with the proposed grants. NTIA could go along with State recommendations or could force States to award more money to ISPs with the lowest bids for funding, like the satellite companies. That’s something that we may not know for months.

The following is an analysis of the 29 states that announced BEAD awards by August 29. My analysis only looks at the 23 states that have made BEAD awards of over $100 million. In the following analysis, I consider the following as large companies: AT&T, Brightspeed, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated Communications, Frontier, Mediacom, and Windstream.

There are seven states so far that have awarded 5% or less of the funding to large ISPs, led by Kansas, with no BEAD awards to large companies.There are five states that have awarded 50% or more of awards to large companies, led by North Carolina at 85.9%.Following are the amounts of awards to large companies in the 23 states that are awarding more than $100 million.The biggest surprise in that list is AT&T. Just a year ago, the company said it was still thinking about participating in BEAD. A little surprising is the relatively small size of BEAD awards to Charter, which had been so aggressive in winning RDOF. Note, however, that this list is far from final since some large states like Texas, California, Illinois, Missouri, and Florida have yet to announce BEAD grants.

Our Attachment to the Cellphone

Here on a holiday I’m posting a more light-hearted blog, but one that shows the degree to which people have become attached to their cellphone.

D30, a manufacturer of hard cases for cellphones, conducted a survey across the U.S. and the U.K. asking about how people feel about their cellphone. Some of the questions were silly, but the responses demonstrate how important cellphones have become to people.

Here are the responses to the survey listed in the press release of the survey:

  • 58% of respondents would dive fully clothed into a pool at a wedding to retrieve a cellphone.
  • 56% would climb into a dumpster
  • 54% would retrieve a dropped phone from a festival toilet.
  • 51% would miss an international flight to retrieve a phone.
  • 38% of respondents would skip food for an entire day to keep their phone safe. (Would that mean somebody is holding their phone hostage?)
  • In perhaps the most intense response, one in five people would climb onto subway tracks to retrieve a dropped phone.

In the survey, people described what losing a cellphone would mean to them:

  • 25% said breaking or losing their phone would be more upsetting than crashing a car or losing their child in a supermarket. (That last comment makes me fear for parenting).
  • Nearly a third of respondents have cried when they lost their phone.
  • 38% would rather lose their wallet than their phone.
  • 74% said a broken phone leaves them anxious and frustrated.

As a counterbalance to a story of people being attached to their phones, I’ve been reading a number of articles in the last week that describe the experience in schools that have banned student cellphones during the school day. Students and parents were upset at first, but within a month, most had grown happy with the change. Not having phones meant that students have to actually talk to each other. Lunch rooms are again full of student interaction instead of everybody staring at screens.

I’ve never lost my phone in a terrible place, but the survey does make me wonder if I would retrieve my phone from a festival toilet. There is a huge chance that I wouldn’t have my phone at a festival, but if I did, I might retrieve it – after reading this survey, I can see it would make a good story.

Flood Sensors and Broadband

I’ve been increasingly hearing about local governments installing flood sensors as a way to alert the public about high-water situations. There seems to be an increasing number of major flooding events in the news, like Hurricane Hellene last year and the Guadalupe River floods earlier this summer.

But there are numerous smaller flooding events all of the time that result from heavy rains. In Appalachia, where I live, and in places like the Ozarks and the Rocky Mountains, floods can spring up quickly along roads after a rain event, often from upstream rain outside the flooded area. Flood sensors are badly needed in some parts of the country.

The danger from local flooding is that roads suddenly go underwater and people drive into the flooded area, particularly at night. I heard from one County that said that residents blindly drive into flooded areas every year. Historically, local governments blocked off roads after local flooding, but doing so is a delayed response after somebody notifies officials that a road is flooded.

The ideal flood sensor system uses a sensor that can detect rising water levels. One company that makes these sensors is HyFi. These sensors can detect rising water before a full flood situation occurs. The ideal flooding system also includes a way to alert the public. In my County, there are text alerts issued when roads flood. The ultimate safety solution is a system that blocks off roads, using technologies like dropping a crossing gate, like those used at railroad tracks. Flood alerts can also use electronic signboards that warn drivers of a flood ahead on a road.

The ideal flood sensor system also includes some kind of broadband connectivity. Local public safety staff want to know when a flood is underway to be able to alert the public. In urban areas with great cell coverage, flood sensors can be connected via cellular technology. But in rural areas, a lot of areas have poor or no cell coverage, and the best solution is to connect flood sensors to a fiber network.

Flood sensor systems are a great safety measure along roads that quickly and routinely flood. It’s a lot harder to develop a flood sensor system that works during catastrophic flooding. In Hurricane Helene, the flooding was so severe that entire roadways and even whole towns were washed away in the floodwaters. Early during the hurricane, the cellular networks went dark after winds affected microwave dishes, and when floods washed away the fiber backbone lines that served all of the ISPs and cell carriers in the region. In areas with the worst flooding, the electric substations were also put out of service. There is a lot of speculation that many who died in the hurricane didn’t get any notice that the floods were of historical proportions.

But catastrophic floods are rare, while smaller floods are routine in some places. Flood sensors, along with the broadband backup, ought to be on the wish list of any locale that routinely floods. A lot of the people who die in floods drive into the rushing waters – something that could be avoided with good flood detection and alert systems.