Author Archives: Doug Dawson, CCG Consulting

A Troublesome Right-of-Way Dispute

The Virginia Supreme Court issued a ruling against Cox Communications that should trouble anybody building a fiber network that must cross railroad tracks. The case involves a dispute brought by the Norfolk Southern Railroad that challenged a new right-of-way law related to railroads.

The disputed law was unanimously passed in the General Assembly in 2023. The law requires that railroads respond and approve requests for fiber crossings across railroad tracks within 35 days or else file a dispute with the State Corporation Commission. The law sets the maximum fee for a right-of-way at $2,000 plus up to $5,000 to compensate a railroad for implementation costs.

Cox Communications invoked the new law in the spring of 2024 by requesting three underground railroad crossings in New Kent County. Norfolk Southern asked for a fee that exceeds the State’s cap and Cox refused to pay more than the amount established by law. Norfolk Southern appealed at the SCC, which declined to hear the case.

Norfolk Southern appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court. They claimed that the low rates established by the State equate to a taking of property for the benefit of Cox Communications, a for-profit corporation.

The Supreme Court agreed with Norfolk Southern. The Court said that the law violated the application of Code § 56-16.3 and violated Article I, Section 11 of the Constitution of Virginia. This part of the Constitution provides that property can only be taken for ‘public use’ and the party asking to take the property must prove the public use. The Court said that economic development and Cox’s private benefit do not justify a taking.

An article in the Cardinal News quotes Senator Bill Stanley, the lead proponent of the bill in the Senate, who called the decision wrong and disappointing. He says the State gave the land to railroads for the public benefit, but that railroads now seek to protect it as their own property against public benefit.

For those not familiar with legal language, the real dispute is about the fee. The railroad was ready to grant Cox a right-of-way for a fee higher than $7,000, and the railroad says it is a ‘taking’ for it to be required to the lower fee determined by the legislature.

This is an issue that plays out daily across the country where railroads charge high fees to allow fiber or other utilities to cross a railroad right-of-way. The Virginia law was trying to put a dollar limit on the cost of such rights-of-way and also trying to speed up the process. The Virginia court ruling made it clear that the legislature doesn’t have the right to put a cap on railroad fees.

Hopefully, this doesn’t make the entire law invalid and the 35-day response time will stay in place. If not, the legislature ought to act to close that gap.

The other issue that is not mentioned in the dispute is that Cox wants to place a buried conduit under the railroad tracks. From a practical perspective it’s impossible to believe that a conduit can in any way diminish the railroad’s property or operations. I can better understand why a fiber owner needs an easement to bury conduit on private land because the landowner might someday want to build something on that location. But railroad rights-of-ways are almost entirely for the purpose of laying track, and a buried conduit doesn’t stop that purpose. I know every lawyer reading this will give me several reasons why property laws are structured this way, but I also know that every fiber network owner is as perplexed by this as I am.

Broadband Usage 1Q 2025

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the first quarter of 2025. OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the first quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.The average U.S. broadband customer used 50 more downloaded gigabytes and 7 more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. The interesting trend to note is that average download usage has grown roughly 50 gigabits each year since 2021.

This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 6.9 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than a year earlier.

The report this quarter concentrated on the growth of upload usage. As can be seen in the table above, the rate of growth of average upload usage grew at 8% in 2022, with the rate of growth increasing each year. OpenVault credits the 18% growth of upload usage between 2024 and 2025 to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses.

This growth in upload usage highlights the increasing value in having adequate upload speeds for both residences and businesses. To put the 7-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading 5 standard definition movie files or 2 high definition movie files every month. I think the average household would be surprised about how much data they are uploading.

Another interesting statistic from OpenVault is the change over time in broadband subscriptions. For years, the trend has been growth in the percentage of broadband customers subscribing to faster speeds. The following table documents a big increase in the percentage of people from 2024 and 2025 subscribing to speeds faster than 500 Mbps. The big shift in the last year is customers upgrading to speeds of at least 500 Mbps. OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • 9% of broadband subscribers now use more than 2 terabytes of data per month. 0.16% of homes now use more than 5 terabytes per month.
  • Business peak usage has been growing at a faster rate than residential usage. The peak usage measures the busiest hour of the day. Business peak upload usage grew 103%, and peak download by 105% since 2021. During that same time, residential peak upload grew 76%, and peak download by 59%.

FCC Lack of Quorum

When FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington recently announced his resignation and quickly departed, the FCC was left in an unprecedented situation where there are only two remaining Commissioners – Chairman Brendan Carr and Commissioner Anna Gomez. The consequence of the sudden vacancy is that the FCC no longer has a quorum.

Commissioner Simington’s departure was a surprise because even a week before the announcement, he was suggesting new areas of regulation the FCC might want to tackle. For example, he suggested that streaming TV services ought to be regulated the same as traditional cable companies. He had also just hired a new Chief of Staff. Commissioner Simington ended up leaving on the same day as Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, a departure that’s been known for months.

The sudden lack of quorum creates some interesting problems for the agency. The legislation that created the FCC clearly states that three Commissioners must be present to have a quorum. And a quorum is needed to vote on anything important like a rulemaking, petitions, applications, or major initiatives from the various FCC Bureaus.

The solution might be on the way since Olivia Trusty is in the midst of the Senate confirmation process to become the next FCC Commissioner. However, the Senate has a lot bigger issues on its plate right now, and there is no guarantee they will vote on that nomination soon. The Senate has also been sitting for months on the nomination of Arielle Roth as the new head of the NTIA – along with many other open positions around the government.

There is no easy answer of what happens if the Senate takes a while to fill a third Commissioner slot. A lot of the FCC’s work is done by the various Bureaus. These are the folks who approve that new wireless devices meet standards. These folks issue routine licenses for microwave links. The Bureaus issue renewals of the various licenses required by companies operating in the industry. The agencies gather data like the FCC maps.

Harold Feld wrote a detailed article about the legal specifics of what happens next. He expects that Commissioner Carr will direct the Bureaus to conduct business as usual, although there is a possibility that anybody harmed by an action of the Bureaus while there is no FCC quorum might be able to successfully claim that Bureaus have no authority when the FCC itself has no authority.

According to statute, the remaining two FCC Commissioners are largely powerless to do anything other than administrative functions. There are a lot of issues on the plate at the FCC right now. The Supreme Court could decide at any time that the Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional, and without a Quorum, the FCC couldn’t take a stab at fixing whatever faults the Court might find with the USF. That means the many things the USF does would come to an immediate halt.

The FCC is in the middle of its streamlining effort it has labeled Delete, Delete, Delete. The FCC is expecting to get authority from Congress soon to begin the process of auctioning spectrum. The FCC is considering a big merger between Paramount and Skydance. The FCC recently got an emergency petition from Echostar to try to stop the cancellation of its spectrum. Until a quorum is reestablished, the agency can’t take action on these, and many other actions.

It’s hard to believe that with a normal complement of five Commissioners we’d end up without a quorum – but here we are, in uncharted legal waters.

BEAD and the Rural Public

The last two days I wrote about the impact of the changes to the BEAD program on County Governments and on State Broadband Offices. As important as those impacts are, the real impact from changing BEAD is on the public living in the rural areas that are covered by BEAD.

Let me start with BEAD eligibility. The new rules include a provision that wireless ISPs (WISPS) that claim speeds to the FCC of 100/20 Mbps using unlicensed spectrum can certify their capability to State Broadband Offices and have those areas removed from BEAD eligibility. That means people living in the removed areas will not be seeing a new broadband alternative. It doesn’t matter if the WISP actually has speed far slower than 100/20 Mbps. It doesn’t matter homes have a line-of-sight issue and can’t be served by the WISP. It doesn’t matter if the WISP wants to charge $100 a month for 25 Mbps service. NTIA will have declared that these areas are served and deserve no federal funding for broadband upgrades. My guess is that millions of homes will be removed from the BEAD map and will be declared as already being served – which will be a huge surprise to the people living in these areas.

The biggest change in the new BEAD rules is that there will be a lot less fiber built with BEAD funds. Various States have been expecting anywhere from 60% to 95% of BEAD funding to go to build fiber. The revised rules will eliminate most of that fiber. BEAD grants will now be awarded to the ISP that asks for the lowest amount of funding for each location. Satellite and fixed wireless providers can easily underbid fiber ISPs if they want to serve a given market. This is going to save the federal government a lot of money, and a large portion of the $42.5 billion allocated to BEAD will not be spent.

Households in BEAD areas are likely to see BEAD money going to a WISP or Starlink – and on paper, that will be their fast ISP option. To be fair, WISPs who install the latest radios might deliver speeds up to 500 Mbps to many customers. But because of the line-of-sight issues with fixed wireless, some homes won’t be able to get service at all. But BEAD winners will not have to spend the extra money for the newest radios – technology capable of 100/20 Mbps is considered to be okay.

Unless they change their pricing philosophy, some WISPs have very high prices. Where fiber providers who won BEAD were likely going to charge $70 per month, some of the WISPs are already charging more than $100 for slower speeds. Starlink is already expensive – the company now has an $80 product in some markets, but its normal price is $120 per month.

Rural residents already feel like they’ve been jerked around for years. The FCC held a reverse auction for RDOF in 2010, and many of the networks promised by that funding are still not built – and might not be for 3 more years. Somebody promised a new solution from a BEAD grant might not see a solution until 2029. Many rural residents who have been told they have faster broadband coming are so cynical that they’ve stopped believing anything they hear about broadband. Certainly, many who have been told for the last few years that BEAD was going to bring them fiber are now going to be disappointed again.

I could write a dozen blogs about what good broadband meets for rural households – and I’ve written about this often over the years. Good broadband means kids can do homework and not have to sit in the parking lot of a library in the evening to do school work. Good broadband means rural residents can find online work that pays better than jobs available in their rural county. Good rural broadband means farmers can participate in the latest technology. Good broadband means houses for sale that somebody is willing to buy.

I’m picturing a resident who is told later this year that the federal government and their State Broadband Office is making a grant to Starlink to bring them faster broadband. They’ve already been able to buy Starlink for several years. They might already have rejected it for being too expensive. They might have already tried it and rejected it because of interference with trees or hills. If they’ve already heard through local politicians that better broadband is coming, can they conclude anything other than the government at all levels has screwed them on broadband while handing money to a company that doesn’t need it?

The consensus has been that BEAD was going to bring fiber to thousands of counties. Unless public pressure reverses some or all of the NTIA Notice, there will be many millions of rural homes after BEAD that still won’t have adequate broadband. I guess this means that States and local governments will have to regroup and get back to tackling the rural broadband gap  a little bit at a time.

Related Blogs

Updating My BEAD Bingo Card

County Governments and BEAD

BEAD and State Broadband Offices

BEAD and State Broadband Offices

I’ve been saying for the last few years that the hardest job in the industry has been the folks who head State Broadband Offices. These folks took these positions because they knew they could do a lot of public good by tackling the rural broadband gap and the overall digital divide. A lot of the hard work these folks did over the last three years was erased when NTIA first eliminated the Digital Equity grants and then recently eviscerated the BEAD grants.

SBOs were handed a giant mess with the BEAD grants. I’ve always said the biggest problem with BEAD was the Congressional staffers or ISP lobbyists who wrote the BEAD legislation. They made the process cumbersome and ridiculously complicated. In my opinion, NTIA made it even worse by being overly cautious from day one. It was clear that the agency did not want to be blamed for repeating the FCC’s disasters in the RDOF and CAF II subsidy programs.

SBOs knew the BEAD grant process didn’t have to be so complicated because they have processed and awarded almost $10 billion dollars of broadband grants from the Capital Projects Fund. Those grants came with some common sense rules, but they mostly trusted the States to be good shepherds of the funding. States did an overall great job. It’s not talked about enough, but this is easily the most successful broadband grant program we’ve ever had.

But SBOs accepted the BEAD complications and slogged through the many required steps of the BEAD process. While doing this, SBOs were widely blamed for being slow and not deploying needed broadband – and most of the delays were not their fault.

Some of the steps were so ridiculous that it would be comical if so much money wasn’t riding on the grant process. For example, the NTIA guidelines for the map challenge were overly complicated and largely impossible to comply with.

This last month has been massively disappointing for SBOs. The industry has talked about solving the digital divide for at least twenty years, and SBOs finally had a chance to do something about it. The Digital Equity grants would not solely solve the digital divide, but SBOs were working to create sustainable programs that would outlive the influx of initial funding. This all went for naught when the grant program was completely killed. There are a few states where the legislature contributed some funding for digital equity, but for the most part, this effort is dead.

Now, SBOs have seen all their hard work on BEAD upended completely. States were given a fair amount of latitude to design state-specific rules for awarding BEAD grants, and it’s fair to say that every state came up with its own solution. SBOs listened to state politicians, ISPs, and the public and did their best to create a grant program that fit the specific circumstances in their state

What is probably the most disturbing about the sudden change in the rules is that BEAD was finally working. A large majority of states have started the broadband award process and have been reviewing grant applications. States like Louisiana and Nevada made it through the award process and were ready to award a lot of money to build a lot of fiber while staying within the budget that BEAD gave them. Many states that are partway through the process report that they are getting grant requests to build fiber coming in lower than their expectations.

The revised BEAD grants are nothing more than a one-round RDOF auction by State, where the ISP that asks for the least amount of funding wins. There is a slight amount of wiggle in that a grant request that is less than 15% greater than the lowest bid can be considered. But BEAD is largely now low bid takes all. The one improvement over RDOF is that ISPs must meet financial, technical, and managerial criteria before participating. But even RDOF had an important fiber preference.

I’ve read a few opinions from folks who still think that a lot of the BEAD money can now go to fiber, and I hope they are right. But I remember the shenanigans played during the RDOF auction when ISPs were vying for $9 billion in funding. What are we going to see with a much larger pile of money at stake? What’s to stop a satellite company or large WISP from bidding $2,000 or less per passing to win a whole state?

One thing is for sure. It’s a lot less enjoyable to be a State Broadband Director now, because the NTIA took away one big set of funding and took all the decision making out of the BEAD grant funding. All of the work to create unique State solutions went completely out the door.

Related Blogs:

Updating my BEAD Bingo Card

County Governments and BEAD

County Governments and BEAD

Today’s blog talks about the big disappointment being felt by elected officials in Counties all over the Country as word of the NTIA’s new rules for BEAD filters down to them.

I’ve worked across the country with dozens of Counties that committed time and resources to the BEAD process. Many Counties put a lot of effort into the map challenge process. Many Counties carefully interviewed ISPs and chose their favorites – because State BEAD grant rules told them that ISPs would get more grant points with local support. Many Counties went further and made local matching grants to ISPs to support a BEAD application. Some of these grants came out of the general coffers, but many were from ARPA funding. Unfortunately, most of those matching ARPA grants are now lost, and the money will fall to the floor.

Counties made the effort for BEAD because their constituents told them to. I have been in numerous Counties where the elected officials say that fixing broadband is the number one issue they hear about. They can’t stop and pump gas or go to the grocery store without somebody talking to them about poor broadband.

That’s all gone now. Broadband equity grants were completely killed in May. BEAD grants for fiber are all but killed. Almost every County official I talked to wanted BEAD to be used in their County to build fiber. They learned how fiber networks would be good for many decades to come, and they want broadband in rural areas that is as good as in larger towns and cities.

County officials understand better than anybody that better broadband is economic development. They understand that fiber means people will have enough upload speeds to work from home and how higher-paying jobs uplift a local economy. They understand that rural fiber networks are the first step for providing backhaul for rural cell towers – because rural cellular coverage is often even worse than rural broadband coverage.

They were looking at BEAD as a tool that would bolster the future of their County. A large majority of rural Counties are aging and losing population, and they saw fiber as a way to bring good jobs that might stop young folks from leaving the County after they turn eighteen.

County officials that put a lot of time and money into the BEAD process are not going to be happy with the NTIA’s ruling that effectively guts their chance to get fiber. Until this NTIA Notice, broadband has been a non-partisan issue. I remember being in a County Board meeting where Commissioners from both parties joked that getting better broadband is the one issue everybody could agree on. Unfortunately, the NTIA order is completely partisan and seems to be part of a larger effort of the new administration to undo the infrastructure program implemented by the last administration.

County officials don’t understand the need for the big change in BEAD. State Broadband Offices are already in the process this year of awarding grants so that fiber construction could be started soon. Everybody wishes BEAD had moved faster, but they are glad to see it finally moving forward.

The most disheartening thing about the NTIA Notice is seeing all of the effort local folks have made to get better broadband fall by the wayside. I was disappointed the day the BEAD grants were announced because Congress made it too complicated. I’ve written many blogs complaining about the rules and the process. But I never complained about the BEAD goals – because this was the chance to bring fiber infrastructure to thousands of rural counties.

To rub salt in the wound, the NTIA Notice also eliminates the local preference where local governments could give their favorite ISP extra grant points with an exclusive letter of support, and even more points by awarding a local grant.

I hope that a large number of rural elected officials are voicing their unhappiness to federal politicians this week. I doubt there are many members of Congress who haven’t supported BEAD grant applicants with letters of support. And most of them who visit rural areas always mention that better broadband is coming. Congress created the BEAD rules, and at this point they are the only ones who can insist that the NTIA lets the BEAD grant program play out as planned.

Related blogs:

Updating My BEAD Bingo Card

BEAD and State Broadband Offices

Updating My BEAD Bingo Card

When the NTIA made it clear that it was going to change the BEAD rules, I wrote a blog that I called, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the BEAD Bingo Card. That blog listed a range of options for how NTIA might modify BEAD – from canceling the program to leaving it largely intact.

On June 6, NTIA issued a BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice that defines how BEAD is going to work, and wouldn’t you know it – NTIA went with an option I had not considered. I would classify the NTIA’s solution as “RDOFing the BEAD process.” By that, I think NTIA adopted the worst features of RDOF. The Notice makes the following major changes to the process of choosing BEAD grant winners:

  • Any technology that can deliver 100/20 Mbps broadband today is now eligible to win a BEAD grant. While there is a caveat that a winning technology must have the capability over time to scale to support rural 5G and other wireless needs, there is no specific commitment required by a grant winner to make future upgrades.
  • The new process requires State Broadband Offices to consider eliminating any BEAD locations that are already served by unlicensed fixed wireless. If a WISP already claims a speed of at least 100/20 Mbps in the FCC maps for a BEAD location, the WISP can certify that it is providing served speeds and these locations are removed from BEAD. This could conceivably eliminate millions of BEAD locations from BEAD grants.
  • The primary criteria for picking a winner is the requested BEAD funds per eligible location. Whoever asks for the least amount of money wins. Broadband Grant Offices can consider speed to deployment and broadband speeds, but only if a grant application is within 15% of the lowest bid. This feels like a one-round reverse auction.

Recall that RDOF included a fiber preference, and that preference resulted in a lot of electric cooperatives and others winning RDOF funding to build fiber. Since BEAD will now allow fixed wireless, LEO satellite, and FWA cellular wireless to compete head-to-head with fiber, it seems likely that fiber only wins in places where no other technology is seeking funding. We can only guess how many fiber grant requests that will kill – but it’s not hard to imagine these rules killing 80%  or 90% of fiber awards. It’s going to boil down to how much BEAD funding the wireless ISPs and satellite companies will pursue. The more interesting dynamic will be the bidding battle between fixed wireless and satellite – because both can easily underbid fiber projects.

State Broadband Offices can require wireless and satellite providers to swear they will have the capacity to serve everybody, but every ISP that decides to pursue BEAD will make this promise. They know there will be no realistic consequences of not meeting the commitment five years down the road – there has never been any serious enforcement of federal grant performance in the past, and there is no reason to believe that will change. The BEAD grant will be awarded and built, and everybody will forget about the original intent – except the households who still don’t have good broadband.

This completely tosses away the idea that BEAD would be used to build networks that will last for the rest of the century – some of the winning BEAD projects will be behind the rest of the country the second they are built.

This Notice also ignores the second big purpose of the BEAD grant program – it was a jobs program which was to provide a lot of good jobs to build and operate networks. It’s clear to me that the NTIA wants to spend as little as possible of the $42.5 billion money. The U.S. Department of Commerce wants to take credit for saving money and doesn’t care about getting good broadband to rural areas. This Notice has a clear message: Congress said we have to build broadband everywhere, so we’ll build what is barely adequate for today and ignore what’s needed for the future. This Notice punts the rural broadband gap down the road for the next generation to solve.

There will be lots of articles published today talking about the mechanics and timing of the revised BEAD, and I might write about that in a future blog. The bottom line is that every State that already started the BEAD grant selection process has to start over with a grant round that allows every technology to compete head-to-head.

There are a lot of different issues to unwrap inside this Notice, and I plan to to write a series of blogs looking at the ramifications of this Notice for different national stakeholders. So stay tuned.

Related Blogs:

County Governments and BEAD

BEAD and State Broadband Offices

The Gigabit App Challenge

A discussion I was having recently made me remember the gigabit challenge held by the City of Chattanooga in 2012. Advertised as the Gig Tank challenge, the City offered a prize for anybody who could develop an application that required gigabit speeds. The City held this challenge as a way to promote the idea that the City’s fiber network offered gigabit speeds to the public. At the time, the City’s EPB was one of a handful of ISPs, along with Google and a few other municipal networks and small ISPs that offered residential gigabit. The gig challenge had a second goal of attracting young tech entrepreneurs to the City.

The winner of the $100,000 Gig Tank prize was Banyan, a tech start-up from Tampa that showed how gigabit speeds could enable science researchers to work at home with large data sets. It’s been thirteen years since the challenge, and large data is still the only realistic way to take full advantage of the gigabit connections being purchased by millions of homes.

Over that time, we have developed many commercial and industrial applications that use gigabit and faster speeds in data centers, factories, and banks. But we’ve never found a killer app for homes that use even a reasonable fraction of a gigabit.

About the fastest application that uses a constant 100 Mbps+ of bandwidth is 8K video. Millions of TVs have been sold that include the 8K capability, but programming is still not widely available online except for some minor programming on YouTube and similar sites. It’s never become popular because a viewer needs a huge TV to see the difference between 8K and 4K video.

Immersive online gaming can also consume up to 100 Mbps of bandwidth, but most games use far less, from 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps. Game companies constantly strive to find ways to improve visualization while reducing bandwidth needs.

Even after the thirteen years since the challenge, there are not a whole lot of ways to use gigabit speeds other than sending large data files. I recall that the first two customers who bought gigabit speeds from the municipal utility in Lafayette, Louisiana, were doctors who wanted to view MRI scans and related large files without having to run into the office.

With the proliferation of people who work from home, there are a lot of people who routinely send and receive big data files. Content providers send non-compressed video files to be edited. Engineers, researchers, and scientists routinely work with giant files.

ISPs will tell you that if they find a resident using gigabit speeds routinely, the odds are high the customer is operating a server at home. This could be an ecommerce site, but more likely is related to pornography or pirate video sharing. I’ve been contacted by ISPs many time over the years asking what to do about such customers. (Simple answer, treat them like a large data user, and most won’t pay the higher rates. Those that do can be a great customer).

I’m sure that industry folks are as flabbergasted as I am why people are buying home speeds faster than one gigabit. A lot of ISPs tell me they are getting respectable penetration rates for two, three, or five gigabit home products.

If you asked me in 2012 if there would be gigabit applications by 2025, I’m positive I would have said yes. But in the ensuing years, we’ve developed compression codices that allow the transmission of huge amounts of data without needed huge amounts of bandwidth.

With that said, I still want my home holodeck. Maybe in the next thirteen years?

The Growing Risk of Space Debris

Low orbit space is growing increasingly crowded. Starlink has over 7,100 satellites in orbit and has plans to grow to 30,000. Project Kuiper has plans for a constellation of 3,232 satellites. One Web’s first-generation constellation has 648 satellites, with plans to grow to over 6,300 satellites. The Thousand Sails (Qianfan) constellation is planning for up to 15,000 satellites. Numerous countries and businesses are launching or planning for smaller constellations for a wide variety of purposes.

The European Space Agency issued a recent report that looks at the debris issue. Low-orbit space is already full of debris. Space scientists worry that collisions between satellites will create a lot more debris. NASA scientist Don Kessler warned about this years ago, and the Kessler effect describes a scenario where a major satellite collision can lead to a chain reaction that will lead to more collisions until an altitude of space becomes unusable.

NASA released a comprehensive financial analysis on space debris in 2023.  The report says there may already be 170 million pieces of space debris, and we’re only able to track around 55,000 objects today that include live and dead satellites, dead rocket boosters, and relatively large pieces of debris. It’s already becoming routine for operators to have to move satellites to avoid collisions. In one scary incident, Starlink satellite 44 was on a collision course with the European Space Agency (ESA) Aeolus satellite. ESA was able to make a last-minute course correction, but ESA reported that it was unable to make contact with Starlink during the incident.

The only real solution is to have a comprehensive effort to remove debris. There are now worldwide conferences of space scientists who are concentrating on the debris issue.

There are a number of possible solutions for removing space debris. The most important step is to make sure that every object that is launched has the ability to be intentionally deorbited. Starlink has done a good job of this, but not every satellite has this ability. Deorbiting has it’s own risks to the planet, and scientists warn that aluminum oxide from deorbiting satellites can kill the ozone layer.

Another tactic being explored is to repurpose existing satellites by visiting them to refuel and to swap components to modernize as needed. This would save on expensive new launches and the problems from deorbiting materials. Scientists are envisioning robotic satellites that service other satellites.

Because of the huge volume of existing debris, there also needs to be some method of scrubbing the sky of debris. Active debris removal would involve satellites that snag debris using robotic arms, tethers, nets, or space tugs for large debris. Scientists think it’s possible to use space-based lasers to zap and evaporate small debris. There is also the possibility of using ground-based large lasers to nudge larger debris into deorbiting.

But like with most issues, the question is who is going to pay? The only worldwide agreement on the issue is the Outer Space Treaty signed by multiple parties in 1967. This treaty says the country responsible for making debris is responsible for removing it. This treaty is far out of date since the large majority of space objects are being launched by commercial companies and not governments.

Somebody will have to start the effort to pay for this before it’s too late and big swaths of orbits become unusable. Governments could chip in to do this. There could somehow be requirements for commercial operators to pay for this – increasing the cost of operating satellite constellations. Scientists believe that satellite companies have an incentive to see this done, but we’ve seen too many other industries that have pawned off their environmental costs to others.

What’s Going on With Boost Mobile?

Boost Mobile added 90,000 net new cellular customers in the first quarter of 2025, increasing customers to 7.1 million. That’s a big turnaround from recent quarters with customer losses. Reaching net additions might mean the company is finally turning the corner to become successful.

Boost Mobile was acquired by Dish Networks as a result of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. One of the FCC requirements was that Sprint would be replaced in the market with a new nationwide carrier, and the FCC took steps to enable Dish to be the new nationwide carrier.

When Dish acquired Boost Mobile for $1.4 billion in 2021, the company had over 9 million customers, but customers slowly leaked away since then. During those years, Dish has been deploying a new 5G SA (standalone) network and now claims to be able to cover 80% of the people in the country from it’s own cell sites. Boost is deploying with open RAN technology, meaning the company isn’t locked into the specific hardware and software from the big cellular vendors.

Boost met its first buildout requirements and was able to reach 70% of the U.S. population by June 2023. However, Boost asked for and received a delay for deploying four spectrum blocks (AWS-4, lower 700 MHz E, 600 MHz, and AWS H) until December 14, 2026 instead of June 14, 2025.

Boost Mobile still has a way to go to activate traffic on its newly built network. Most of its customers are still roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile. In the 4Q 2024 earnings call for parent Echostar, executives from Boost Mobile admitted that only 1 million customers were riding the Boost network.

A recent article from Ookla documents that the Boost Mobile networks are getting faster but are still not up on average to the speeds of T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T. However, speeds are improving, and Boost says it will have the fastest network in some major markets this year. Near the end of last year, Boost was named as the fastest cellular provider in New York City. I have to wonder how much of that speed is due to having a largely empty network?

Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be relevant. At the end of the first quarter of this year, Verizon claimed 146 million customers, T-Mobile 131 million, and AT&T 118 million. Boost is also behind the two big cable companies, with Charter having 10.4 million cellular customers and Comcast 8.2 million.

It’s interesting how customers have not moved to Boost Mobile. The company is offering competitive prices. One would have to think that its networks are relatively empty and nearly pristine. Dish made a public relations blunder when it opened cell sites a few years ago before the open RAN technology was working well. If Boost is now on solid technical footing, there is opportunity for growth. There has been a lot of press and speculation over the last year that T-Mobile and Verizon might be overstressing their networks due to the proliferation of FWA home cellular broadband.

To add to the drama. Echostar, the parent of Boost announced last week that it is electing to miss a $326 million interest payment on its 2029 maturity debt. If the company doesn’t make the payment by the end of June it will be forced into chapter 11 bankruptcy. Echostar may be playing chicken with the FCC and is blaming the default on the FCC not resolving some of the open spectrum issues for the company

One thing is for sure. Assuming it survives, Boost Mobile has a long way to go to be a serious nationwide carrier. The company may never reach the size of Sprint which it is supposedly replacing. It will be interesting to watch if the company can reach solvency and justify the big investment made in the new nationwide network.