Category Archives: Current News

Charter Considering RDOF Grants

Charter let the world know that it plans to pursue RDOF grant funding in its most recent 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company says that it might pursue grant funding to build to ‘multi-million passings’ involving ‘multi-billion investments’. It’s an interesting strategy. Charter already serves rural county seats and other towns across the country which puts them close to many of the areas where RDOF funding is available.

The RDOF grants cover the most rural and remote pockets of customers in the country. While there are some small rural towns included in the RDOF grant footprint, most of the customers covered by the grants are truly rural, consisting of farms and scattered homes in rural counties.

Charter will have to make some technology choices about how to serve rural America. The company can win the most money in the grant process if they file as a gigabit-speed provider. Gigabit speeds are available today with fiber technology and also with the hybrid fiber-coaxial networks operated by Charter and other cable companies. The RDOF grants can be awarded to technologies that support speeds over 25/3 Mbps. However, the grant includes incentives to favor ISPs willing to use faster technologies.

Charter could pursue slower technologies, like fixed wireless, but that funding is harder to win. To date, none of the big cable companies have ventured into wireless technology, other than a few trials. It’s always been a bit of a mystery why Charter and other cable companies haven’t erected wireless antennae at the fringes of their network to cheaply capture customers just out of reach of the HFC networks. My theory has always been that big cable companies are not nimble enough to handle drastically different technology platforms since all of their processes are designed for around coaxial and fiber technologies.

Charter is likely considering building fiber-to-the-home networks if they win RDOF grant funding. The hybrid fiber-coaxial technology that cable companies use in urban areas is poorly suited to serving scattered rural customers. The signal on an HFC network has to be boosted every two miles or so, and every time the signal is amplified some of the effective bandwidth carried on the network is lost. It would be a major challenge to maintain gigabit speeds required by the grants on a rural HFC network. It would only be possible with lots of fiber and tiny neighborhood nodes serving only a few homes. Charter has often cited the technology challenges of uses HFC technology in low-density areas as the reason it doesn’t expand outward from existing markets – and those reasons still hold true.

Charter claims to have expanded to add 1.5 million homes to its existing networks over the last two years, and in the 8-K filing says these are mostly rural customers. However, from what I’ve heard, most of these new Charter neighborhoods are in small subdivisions surrounding existing Charter markets. Charter has not been building rural networks to reach 1.5 million farms.

Charter and the other big cable companies have quietly introduced last-mile fiber technology into their networks. When cable companies build into new subdivisions today, they mostly do so with fiber technology.

It would be interesting if Charter’s strategy is to use the grant money to build fiber to farms. I know plenty of other ISPs considering the same business plan in places where there is enough RDOF grant funding available to make a business case.

There is no guarantee that Charter will ultimately win any grant funding and filing the grant short form on July 15 only gives Charter the option to participate in the auction in October. However, if the company bids in the auction, it will be good news for markets where Charter would build fiber technology. The big downside to the RDOF grant process is that in markets where no ISPs propose to build gigabit technology, the funding could end up going to satellite broadband providers – and there is no rural neighborhood that would prefer Viasat over Charter.

Will There Be a Credit Crunch?

ISPs are collectively going to be borrowing huge amounts of money over the next year as a result of the various state and local grant programs. For example, the $16.4 billion RDOF grant likely will drive ISPs to borrow many billions to match the grant awards. The federal ReConnect grants and the numerous State grant programs will also drive significant new debt.

I’ve followed the banking industry for decades and I’ve seen how banks react to economic stress. In my adult lifetime, I’ve witnessed several major economic downturns. The economy took a major downward turn in 1973-75, in 1981-82, after the dot-com crash in 2001, and most recently in 2007-09. In each of these cases, banks reacted by tightening credit, meaning that it became harder, or even impossible to borrow money.

The COVID-19 pandemic is different than these other recessions in that the reaction to the virus crashed an otherwise healthy economy. The pre-pandemic economy was showing some signs that the decade of growth was slowing, but the economy at the beginning of this year was in relatively good shape. That pre-pandemic economy should easily have been able to support the loans needed for a major expansion of broadband.

The pandemic has stressed banks in unusual ways. For example, banks have generated a huge amount of loans to small businesses to support the Paycheck Protection Program that’s part of the recent stimulus relief plans. While these loans are ultimately backed by the government, they’ve eaten severely into bank cash reserves.

Banks are also seeing a lot of bad debt due to the pandemic. Tens of millions of people are currently out of work and many are having trouble making debt payments on mortgages, car loans, student loans, credit cards, you name it. Huge numbers of businesses have shut their doors, or even if still open have curtailed or stopped making rent or mortgage payments. I’ve read numerous predictions that there will be a business real estate crisis soon as landlords react to suddenly vacant buildings.

Banks have already started to react in ways that you would expect during any downturn. Small businesses that are still open have had lines of credit frozen. It’s gotten harder to apply for a home mortgage. Banks have already cut back on lending new money to small businesses.

During past downturns, banks also curtailed loans to larger businesses. I can remember several times when industry lenders like CoBank and RTFC either stopped lending or became far more selective in making loans. Just a decade ago there was a short period of time when even Fortune 500 companies had trouble borrowing money.

It’s really hard to predict bank behavior right now since this is not a ‘normal’ recession. Underneath all of the current ugly financial news is a hope that the economy can spring back to life if medical science develops a vaccine or effective treatment. Unfortunately, there are parts of the economy that are not likely to come back quickly, or even at all. Many of the small businesses that are still shut due to the pandemic are likely not coming back. We’ve seen a big string of major retailers fail, and that is going to cascade to kill shopping malls and shopping districts. A lot of businesses say that they intend to continue with work-from-home initiatives that were forced upon them during the pandemic – and that means a lot of empty business real estate.

What matters most to ISPs right now is what the banking industry is going to be like by the end of this year. What happens if many of the ISPs looking for matching funds for grants are unable to borrow? How might the FCC react if billions of grants fall onto the floor due to a lending crisis?

I don’t have a crystal ball and this blog is not meant as a prediction that borrowing is going to dry up. But I’ve seen enough recessions to know that lending is not going to continue unchanged. Anybody thinking about accepting large amounts of grants needs to think about a back-up plan if it becomes harder to borrow. The FCC and ISPs have all assumed that that matching funds will  be readily available for anybody that lands a large grant. It’s historically been relatively easy to borrow for projects that are funding largely by grants – but this is definitely not normal times.

Google Fiber Comes to Iowa

The City of West Des Moines recently announced a deal with Google Fiber to bring fiber to pass all 36,000 residents and businesses in the city. This is a unique business model that can best be described as open-access conduit.

The city says that the estimated cost of the construction is between $35 million and $40 million and that the construction of the network should be complete in about two-and-a-half years. The full details of the plan have not yet been released, but the press is reporting that Google Fiber will pay $2.25 per month to the city for each customer that buys service from Google Fiber.

What is most unique about this arrangement is that conduit will be built along streets and into yards and parking lots to reach every home and business. I know of many cities that lease out some empty conduit to ISPs and carriers, but the big limitation of most empty conduit is that it doesn’t provide easy access to get from the street to reach a customer. West Des Moines will be spending the money to build the conduit to serve the last hundred feet.

This business arrangement will still require Google Fiber to pull fiber throughout the entire empty conduit network – but that is far cheaper for the company than building a network from scratch. The big cost of building any fiber network is the labor needed to bring the fiber along every street – and the city has absorbed that cost. The benefit of this arrangement for Google Fiber is obvious – the company saves the cost of building a standalone fiber network in the City. It’s the cost of financing expensive networks up-front that makes ISPs hesitant to enter new markets.

From a construction perspective, I’m sure that the City is building fiber with some form of innerduct – which is a conduit with multiple interior tubes that can accommodate multiple fibers (as is shown in the picture accompanying this blog). This would allow additional ISPs to coexist in the same conduits. If the conduits built through yards also include innerduct it would make it convenient for a customer to change fiber ISPs – disconnect fiber from ISP A and connect to the fiber from ISP B.

The City is banking on other ISPs using the empty conduit because Google Fiber fees alone won’t compensate the city for the cost of the conduit. The press reported that Google Fiber has guaranteed the City a minimum payment of at least $4.5 million over 20 years. I’m sure the City is counting on Google Fiber to perform a lot better than that minimum, but even if Google Fiber connects to half of all of the customers in the City, the $2.25 monthly fee won’t repay the City’s cost of the conduit.

This business model differs significantly from the typical open-access network model. In other open-access networks, the City pays for 100% of the cost of the network and the electronics up to the side of a home or business. The typical monthly fee for an ISP to reach a customer in these open access-networks ranges between $30 and $45 per month. Those high fees invariably push ISPs into cherry-picking and only pursuing customers willing to pay high monthly rates. The $2.25 fee in West Des Moines won’t push ISPs to automatically cherry-pick or charge a lot.

Any ISP willing to come to the city has a few issues to consider. They avoid the big cost of constructing the conduit network. But a new ISP will still need to pay to blow fiber through the conduit. Any new ISP will also be competing against Google Fiber. One of the most intriguing ISPs already in the market is CenturyLink. The company has shown in Springfield, Missouri that it is willing to step outside the traditional business model and use somebody else’s network. I would have to imagine that other ISPs in the Midwest perked up at this announcement.

In announcing the network, the City said that they hoped this network would bring fiber to everybody in the City. Google Fiber doesn’t typically compete on price. Earlier this year Google Fiber discontinued its 100 Mbps broadband connection for $50. Many homes are going to find the $70 gigabit product from Google Fiber to be unaffordable. It will be interesting over time to see how the city plans on getting broadband to everybody. Even municipalities that own their own fiber network are struggling with the concept of subsidizing fiber connections below cost to make them affordable.

One thing this partnership shows is that there are still new ideas to try in the marketplace. For an open-access conduit system to be effective means attracting multiple ISPs, so this idea isn’t going to work in markets much smaller than West Des Moines. But this is another idea for cities to consider if the goal is to provide world-class broadband for citizens and businesses.

Work-at-Home as a Product

Even before COVID-19, we were headed towards a future with more people working at home, at least part-time. I’ve seen estimates pre-COVID that as many as 10% of office workdays are done from home – that number has currently skyrocketed and it’s likely that working from home will never return to the old levels.

For working at home to be most effective, employees must have easy access to the same software and the same data as when they work in the office. Employers still have the same goals for data security and for protecting sensitive company data and customer data. Workers at home need to be protected from phishing, malware, and other attempts to gain access to customer data.

This all comes at a time when we’ve undergone a transition to security that is based upon building walls around sensitive data. Companies have made data more secure by restricting access to data from outside the company buildings. Twenty years ago it was common for companies to allow workers to dial-in to company servers, but over time those connections have proven to be the easiest path for hackers to gain access to company data. Companies have built data fortresses to protect data from external access, and suddenly, companies are being asked to poke holes in those walls to allow employees to gain access to company systems from home.

To complicate matters even further, in the last five years many mid-sized companies shed IT staff as they moved everything to the cloud. Many companies are not staffed or equipped to make the shift to allow working from home, meaning that opening up their networks to home-based employees has automatically opened new risks to hacking.

The question I ask today is if there is a broadband solution that smaller ISPs can offer to make it safer for companies to support employees working from home. The biggest carriers already have such solutions, at least for their largest corporate clients. For example, AT&T and Verizon have had products that allow for guaranteed secured data connections for corporate or government cell phones. Fortune 500 companies and the military have been able to buy similar products to provide for safe remote wireline broadband connections.

AT&T just announced a new product called AT&T Home Office Connectivity that will work on DSL, fiber, or AT&T wireless. The product essentially creates a carrier-class VPN between employees and a virtual gateway to connect to a company WAN. The AT&T solution makes the multitude of connections to employees in the AT&T cloud while only creating one path between AT&T and the company servers.

It’s still questionable if the big carriers can scale these kinds of products to meet the need of smaller corporations and local governments. The big intense security platforms are incredibly expensive and are out of price reach of the average business.

However, there is a real need for guaranteed safe connections between office and home. Companies have to find a way to trust that data exchanged with employees working outside the office is as safe as data moved around inside the business. I’m guessing the explosion of people working at home is going to result in some spectacular data breaches that will scare all of the companies that have sent employees home to work.

In addition to security, those working at home need easy solutions for all of the other routine functions performed at the office including things like spam filtering, and secure data backup and disaster recovery.

There are solutions available to solve at least some of these issues today, but again they are complicated for companies without a sizable IT staff. Some of the solutions include things like:

  • Cloud-based security software is a set of software and technologies that help companies meet regulatory compliance (like with the new California privacy laws) and that are designed to protect company and customer data in a wide variety of circumstances. This differs from traditional security software in that every transaction with the cloud can be assigned different levels of privacy and access to data. For example, this is the kind of software that allows customers to review their data and nobody else’s.
  • Microsegmentation is software that can create secure zones inside data centers and cloud deployments to enable companies to isolate different parts of their workload. For example, remote employees could be given access to more limited data than those working in the office, and everything they do remotely can be blocked from having any access to core servers.
  • Cloud SD-WAN is a technology that has been used for companies that operate multiple branches. Each remote employee can be treated as a separate branch of the business and be provided with an individual firewall and other standard security protocols.

Smaller ISPs ought to find some way to explore these kinds of products to offer to customers with remote workers. This is likely to be beyond the capability of most ISPs and might best be tackled by trade associations or other groups where ISPs collaborate.

This is a product that could be sold in large quantities today if it was ready as an off-the-shelf application that could be sold to an individual user. It’s unlikely the need for supporting working from home is going to go away, so ISPs ought to do what they’ve always done and find trustworthy solutions their customers need and want.

The Coming Year of Confusion

July 2020 Calendar

I’ve had a number of people ask me about how I think COVID-19 will impact the ISP industry over the next six months. It’s an interesting question to consider because there are both positive and negative trends that ISPs need to be concerned about. The chances are that these various trends will affect markets and ISPs differently – making it that much harder for an individual ISP to understand what they are going to see over the next six months. Following are some of the trends I think ISPs will need to deal with:

People Want Faster Broadband.  Many households came to the realization that their home broadband is inadequate when parents and students tried to work from home simultaneously. OpenVault reported that the number of households subscribing to gigabit service nearly doubled in the first quarter of this year. Clients are reporting an increased demand from first-time customers as well as customers wanting to upgrade to faster speeds.

Downturn in Small Businesses. Everything seems to indicate that a lot of small and medium businesses are not going to survive the pandemic. There have already been a number of businesses like restaurants and small retail stores that have gone under. The anchor stores at malls are failing right and left. There seems to be an expectation that travel-related businesses are going to take a long time to come back. Everything I read says that there is a coming crisis in the fall for business landlords when the finally digest that business tenants are either disappearing or will want to negotiate cheaper rent. That’s likely to have a secondary ripple effect as strip malls and other business landlords start declaring bankruptcy. Over time, new businesses will grow to fill many of the voids, but there has been a huge shift to shopping online that will likely not retreat to pre-COVID levels.

People Will Continue to Work from Home. Every day I read about businesses that say that working from home, at least part time, will become the new normal in many industries. The latest was a survey of law firms that said that a lot of lawyers are not going to return to the office full time when the pandemic is over. This is good news for ISPs that provide residential broadband, because people working from home are going to demand speeds and latency that will support their work. OpenVault just reported that as of the end of the first quarter of 2020 that the percentage of homes subscribing to gigabit broadband doubled over the last year and is now at 3.75% of all homes and growing rapidly. This is not such great news for ISPs that serve law offices.

The Big Unknown is the Impact of Unemployment. As businesses fail or downsize a lot of people are not going to be returning to their original job. ISPs are already reporting that people are ditching telecom products like landlines. The cord cutting in the last month of the first quarter of this year was record-setting. The big unknown will be the number of households that can no longer afford to buy landline broadband. Obviously, unemployment isn’t going to stay at the current 40 million people, but it’s not quickly going to return to pre-COVID levels. A secondary impact of a degraded economy will be a surge in bad debt as customers hang onto to home broadband as long as they can. We’re likely to see a big impact when the Keep America Connected pledge ends. If ISPs present a bill for multiple back months of billing we ought to see a lot of customers forced to default and cancel broadband.

The Pandemic is the Dagger That Will Finally Kill DSL. Homes that have an option of using DSL or something faster like cable broadband or fiber are going to be bailing on DSL in big numbers. Many people in towns have stuck with DSL because it is priced cheaper than cable broadband. However, for a lot of homes, the most important factor in broadband has become speed and performance.

The Rural Broadband Gap Will Keep Getting Headlines. COVID-19 made it clear to elected officials at all levels of government that the rural broadband gap is badly hurting the economy. Even if schools return to normal, businesses in rural areas are not going to have the same flexibility to send employees home, and unemployed people in rural area are not going to easily be able to accept at-home jobs. That’s going to keep a sizable slice of the economy from fully participating in any recovery. Almost everybody I talk to is hopeful that this might translate to increased grant money for rural broadband – but that’s no guarantee.

We’re Going to Have Unexpected Shortages in the Supply Chain. The best way to describe the supply chain right now is spotty. Manufacturers of telecom electronics are going to suddenly find they can’t buy one or two components, and manufacturing will come to unexpected halts. Anybody building a broadband network needs to expect delays, and if history is a good teacher, the delays will last longer than expected. This is going to play havoc with anybody that has financed a new network and needs to install customers to meet debt payments.

Banks Are Going to Tighten Lending. It’s inevitable that as banks digest bad loans from failing businesses that they are going to get more cautious about making new loans. Even if interest rates don’t rise, banks will do what they always do under stress and get more conservative. Some local banks are likely to get into real trouble and will fail if their portfolio was heavily invested  into businesses that are failing.

This all makes for an interesting short-term future. There will be more people yelling for faster broadband at the same time there will be more customers unable to afford broadband. There will be grants awarded for rural markets at a time when banks might not provide the matching funds. All in all, it’s going to be a mess for most ISPs who will see both good and bad things affecting them at the same time.

 

 

 

 

Privacy in the Age of COVID-19

The Washington Post reports that a recent poll they conducted shows that 3 out of 5 Americans are unable or unwilling to use an infection-alerting app that is being developed jointly by Google and Apple. About 1 in 6 adults can’t use the app because they don’t own a smartphone – with the lowest ownership levels for those 65 and older. People with smartphones evenly split between those willing versus unwilling to use such an app.

The major concern among those not willing to use such an app comes from the distrust people have about the ability or willingness of those two tech companies to protect the privacy of their health data. This unwillingness to use such an app, particularly after already seeing the impact that the virus is having on the economy is disturbing to scientists who have said that 60% or more of the public would need to use such an app for it to be effective.

This distrust of tech companies is nothing new. In November the Pew Research Center published the results of the survey that showed how Americans feel about online privacy. That study’s preliminary finding was that more than 60% of Americans think it’s impossible to go through daily life without being tracked by tech companies or the government.

To make that finding worse, almost 70% of adults think that tech companies will use their data in ways they are uncomfortable with. Almost 80% believe that tech companies won’t publicly admit guilt if they are caught misusing people’s data. People don’t feel that data collected about them is secure and 70% believe data is less secure now than it was five years ago.

Almost 80% of people are concerned about what social media sites and advertisers know about them. Probably the most damning result of the survey is that 80% of Americans feel that they have no control over how data is collected about them.

Almost 97% of respondents to the poll said they have been asked to agree to a company’s privacy policy. But only 9% say they always read the privacy policies and 36% have never read them. This is not surprising since the legalese included in most privacy policies requires reading comprehension at a college level.

There is no mystery about why people are worried about the collection of personal data. There have been headlines for several years talking about how personal data has been misused. The Facebook / Cambridge Analytica data scandal showed a giant tech company selling personal data that was used to sway voters. The big cellular companies were caught several times selling customer location data that lets whoever buy it understand where people travel throughout each day. Phone apps of all sorts report back location data, web browsing data, and shopping habits and nobody seems to be able to tell us where that data is sold. Even the supposed privacy advocate Apple lets contractors listen to Siri recordings.

It’s not a surprise that with the level of distrust of tech companies that it’s becoming common for politicians to react to privacy breaches. For example, a bill was introduced into the House last year that would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to fine tech companies to as much as 4% of their gross revenues for privacy violations.

California recently enacted a new privacy law with strict requirements on web companies that mimic the regulations used in Europe. Web companies must provide California consumers the ability to opt-out from having their personal information sold to others. Consumers must be given the option to have their data deleted from the site. Consumes must be provided the opportunity to view the data collected about them. Consumers also must be shown the identity of third parties that have purchased their data.

The unwillingness to use the COVID-tracking app is probably the societal signal that the hands-off approach we’ve had for regulating the Internet needs to come to an end. Most hands-off policies were developed twenty years ago when AOL was conquering the business world and legislators didn’t want to tamp down on a nascent industry. The tech companies are among the biggest and richest companies in the world and there is no reason to not regulate some of their worst practices. This won’t be an easy genie to put back in the bottle, but we have to try.

Cord Cutting Accelerates in 1Q 2020

The largest traditional cable providers collectively lost over 1.7 million customers in the first quarter of 2020 – an overall loss of 2.2% in customers. This is the biggest overall drop in customers ever in a quarter. To put this loss into perspective, the big cable providers lost 18,800 customers every day.

The numbers below come from Leichtman Research Group which compiles these numbers from reports made to investors, except for Cox which is estimated. The numbers reported are for the largest cable providers, and Leichtman estimates that these companies represent 95% of all cable customers in the country.

Following is a comparison of the first quarter subscriber numbers compared to the end of 2019:

1Q 2020 4Q 2019 Change % Change
Comcast 20,845,000 21,254,000 (409,000) -1.9%
Charter 16,074,000 16,144,000 (70,000) -0.4%
DirecTV 15,136,000 16,033,000 (897,000) -5.6%
Dish Networks 9,012,000 9,144,000 (132,000) -1.4%
Verizon 4,145,000 4,229,000 (84,000) -2.0%
Cox 3,820,000 3,865,000 (45,000) -1.2%
AT&T U-verse 3,440,000 3,440,000 0 0.0%
Altice 3,137,500 3,179,200 (41,700) -1.3%
Mediacom 693,000 710,000 (17,000) -2.4%
Frontier 621,000 660,000 (39,000) -5.9%
Atlantic Broadband 306,252 308,638 (2,386) -0.8%
Cable One 303,000 314,000 (11,000) -3.5%
Total 77,532,752 79,280,838 (1,748,086) -2.2%
Total Cable 45,178,752 45,774,838 (596,086) -1.3%
Total Satellite 24,148,000 25,427,000 (1,029,000 -4.1%
Total Telco 8,206,000 8,639,000 (123,000) -1.5%

Some observations of the numbers:

  • Note that AT&T no longer reports customers by division, so Leichtman has reflected all of their losses as DirecTV and shown no losses for AT&T U-verse.
  • The big loser is AT&T, which lost nearly 897,000 traditional video customers between DirecTV and AT&T U-verse.
  • The big percentage loser is Frontier that lost almost 6% of its cable customers in the quarter.
  • The big cable companies fared the best, but still lost 1.3% of their customer base in the quarter.
  • Satellite TV continues to dive and lost more than 4% of customers in the quarter.

Leitchman speculated that the magnitude of the losses could be due to the impact of COVID-19. However, the story seems to be a bit more complex than that. Several of the big companies reported about the same level of disconnects as in recent quarters but saw a big drop-off in new customers buying service. It’s worth noting that the above losses were experienced even while these same companies saw an increase of over 1 million new broadband customers in the same quarter- the best growth in broadband since 2015.

The full impact of COVID-19 will likely be seen in the next quarter. There has to be an impact from over 23 million newly unemployed people this year, as of mid-May. Cutting cable is one of the most obvious ways for a household to save money.

There may be evidence that COVID-19 had an impact by the end of March. Leichtman also tracks the subscribers of the online TV services that are owned by the above companies. Collectively, there was a loss of 319,000 customers by Hulu Live, Sling TV, and DirecTV Now. Additionally, Paystation Vue exited the market in the first quarter. However, YouTube TV is reported to be growing and had over 2 million customers by the end of February.

Losses of this magnitude have to be rolling downhill in the industry. These losses mean a lot lower revenues for cable TV networks. It means a lot less franchise revenues for local governments. It means lower advertising revenues from loss of eyeballs.

Is Teleworking Here to Stay?

Broadband networks are stretched thin today due to the large numbers of adults and students working from home. There are a lot of stories on the web that indicate that a lot of employees are not going to be going back to the office when the pandemic is over.

Here are two stories about a trend towards more teleworking from the dozens that a Google search uncovered. The government in Travis County, TX says that as many as 3,000 of their 5,000 employees might be asked to work from home at the end of the pandemic. This is a large county that includes Austin and the surrounding suburbs. There are about 2,000 employees who can’t work from home including law enforcement, medical examiners, and offices that work with the public like the County Clerk’s office – but the government will consider sending everybody else home to work. The County says that productivity has gone up since employees went home and the County is pleased with the noticeable difference in air pollution from fewer commuters.

An article in Marketwatch had interviews with the CEOs of six tech companies and all thought that a significant portion of the workforce would never be brought back to the office after the end of the pandemic. For example, Stewart Butterfield of Slack recently told investors that he would expect 20% to 40% of the company’s workforce to remain at home. The other CEOs voiced similar opinions. They also said their companies are also likely to permanently dial-back on travel and attendance at conferences. The CEOs were excited about the options created by being able to hire talented employees from across the country.

There are some obvious impacts if companies everywhere adopt this kind of thinking. It bodes poorly for expensive office space in downtown areas. There would be a big downturn in all of the businesses that serve commuters, like restaurants and parking garages if a significant portion of workers never returns to the big city centers. There would be a drop in transit revenues and road tolls.

It also has long-term implications for broadband. While the big ISPs are all telling the world that their networks are handling the increased traffic that’s pouring into and out of neighborhoods today, those working at home know better. By now everybody has experienced video calls where some callers are pixelating or disappearing in the middle of a call. Everybody probably also has friends who are telling them the stories of wresting with poor broadband outside of cities – where only one family member at a time can use the broadband.

ISPs have seen a one-time spike in usage that may never fully go away. Most of the increased usage comes from people doing office work or schoolwork over the broadband network that would formerly have been done inside of a school or office server environment. People are teleconferencing now for conversations that would have happened in a conference room or cubicle.

One of the most likely outcomes of people working from home is going to be a big outcry from folks demanding faster upload connection speeds. A lot of the problems experienced from working at home during COVID-19 comes from the miserly upload speeds that broadband technologies other than fiber provide to a home. Cable companies, in particular, are likely to increase upload speeds – something they’ve purposefully kept small in order to provide as much download speed as possible. But there is a world of difference between a 100/5 Mbps connection and a 90/15 Mbps connection.

ISPs are also going to have to get used to a different demand curve. Residential broadband networks have always been busiest in the evenings when everybody is at home using the Internet for videos and gaming. During COVID we’ve seen some interesting shifts in broadband usage by time of day. Daytime usage is up significantly, while evening usage has not grown, and many ISPs say evening usage has decreased. The busy hour in a neighborhood may no longer be 8:00 PM.

This also means that we need to get used to the idea of Zoom and Go-to-Meeting because a lot of the people we deal with will be working from home. There are likely to be many societal changes that evolve from this pandemic, but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that working from home is going to be a lot more prevalent than before.

COVID-19 Boosts 1Q 2020 Broadband Subscribers

Leichtman Research Group recently released the broadband customer statistics for the end of the first quarter of 2020 for the largest cable and telephone companies. Leichtman compiles most of these numbers from the statistics provided to stockholders other than Cox, which is estimated. Leichtman says this group of companies represents 96% of all US landline broadband customers.

The big news is that additions in the first quarter were up nearly 85% over the number of customers added in the fourth quarter of 2019.  For the quarter, these large ISPs collectively saw growth that annualizes to 4.8%. This was the biggest quarterly overall subscriber growth since early 2015.

3/31/20 1Q Change % Change 4Q 19 Adds
Comcast 29,106,000 477,000 1.7% 443,000
Charter 27,246,000 582,000 2.2% 339.000
AT&T 15,315,000 (74,000) -0.5% (186,000)
Verizon 6,982,000 26,000 0.4% (5,000)
Cox 5,230,000 60,000 1.2% 25,000
CenturyLink 4,667,000 (11,000) -0.2% (36,000)
Altice 4,237,300 50,100 1.2% 7,000
Frontier 3,480,000 (33,000) -0.9% (55,000)
Mediacom 1,349,000 21,000 1.6% 12,000
Windstream 1,067,300 18,000 1.7% 9,300
WOW 797,600 16,100 2.1% 7,600
Cable ONE 793,000 20,000 2.6% 83,862
Consolidated 786,125 1,960 0.2% 14
TDS 460,000 4,800 1.1% 17,500
Atlantic Broadband 457,233 5,770 1.3% 5,326
Cincinnati Bell 427,500 1,800 0.4% 1,600
Total 102,401,158 1,166,530 1.2% 669,788
Total Cable 69,216,233 1,231,970 1.8% 922,788
Total Telco 33,184,925 (65,440) -0.2% (253,586)

We know that a lot of the growth was due to COVID-19, which drove employees and students to work from homes. A lot of homes likely purchased broadband for this purpose. These big ISPs also pledged to the FCC that they wouldn’t disconnect customers for non-payment during the pandemic. However, the real impact of that policy won’t show up until the second quarter.

Comcast and Charter continue to dominate the rest of industry, and accounted for 86% of total net growth for the quarter. The large cable companies collectively gained over 922,000 subscribers, which their biggest quarterly growth since 2007. The telcos collectively still lost customers for the quarter, but losses are significantly less than in 2019. The biggest telco loser was AT&T which lost 186,000 customers for the quarter. Frontier continued to lose the biggest percentage of its customer base and lost nearly 1% of its broadband customer base during the quarter.

This growth is impressive, and much of the boost has to be due to an increased need for home broadband. We’ll have to wait until later in the year to see the impact of having over 36 million people file for unemployment and for potentially millions of small businesses to close. There has been a long-running debate in the industry about whether broadband is recession-proof. Arguments can be made that homes out of work will hang onto broadband as long as they can in the hopes it can help them find work. In a few quarters, we’ll find out.

Is it Time to Tax the Internet?

There is a law advancing in the Maryland legislature that would tax Internet advertising. The law, if enacted would collect taxes from online advertising done by Google, Facebook, and others. The tax would immediately be challenged in court due to our history of not taxing things related to the Internet.

The idea of not taxing the Internet began with the Internet Tax Freedom Act in 1998. That law grandfathered taxes imposed in 13 states on Internet access but prohibited it elsewhere. The law also prohibited local governments from imposing taxes on electronic commerce. The law imposed a 3-year moratorium on such taxes and was extended eight times until the tax prohibition was made permanent in the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act in 2015.

There are other precedents for not taxing electronics commerce. For example, the Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that requiring remote vendors to collect sales taxes would impose an undue constraint on interstate commerce. The prohibition against sales taxes for out-of-state sellers was strengthened in 1992 in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Quill Corporation v. North Dakota that prohibited a state from collecting sales taxes unless a business has a physical presence in a state. These prohibitions were assumed to also apply to sales made over the Internet if the seller lived in a different state than the buyer.

However, such rulings change over time and the Supreme Court reversed the older decisions in 2018 in the case of South Dakota v Wayfair, Inc. The Court effectively ruled that states can require remote sellers of any kind, including online sellers to collect state sales taxes. Since that ruling, many states have imposed sales taxes on Internet sales.

Opponents of the tax on advertising say that the proposed law would violate the intent of the Internet Freedom Act to not tax electronic commerce. The application of a tax to advertising is different enough from a sales tax that the Supreme Court ruling won’t automatically apply. If the law is passed it will likely have to go to the Supreme Court. To a non-lawyer like me, it seems the issue is similar enough to sales taxes that there is a good chance that at tax on advertising would be allowed. Even if it allowed, such a tax has the significant challenge of identifying the advertising revenue that applies to a given state. For example, what portion of nationwide advertising for Ford trucks would apply to Maryland?

The Maryland law does freshly raise the question of whether it’s time to tax the Internet. The original Internet Tax Freedom Act was an attempt by Congress to protect the fledgling broadband business. It’s debatable if the growth of the Internet would have been slowed had there been a few dollars of taxes applied to broadband bills like were applied to landline telephone bills. But the new Internet companies were the darlings of Wall Street, and Congress decided to keep broadband products free from taxation.

The broadband tax that’s most needed is a surcharge on broadband to help fund the FCC’s Universal Service Fund. Many states also have similar funds. The USF is currently being funded by fees charged to landlines and cellphones. The purpose of the fund is currently to promote broadband for places that don’t have it. The fund will be paying for the $20.4 billion RDOF grants for rural broadband and the $9 billion 5G Fund grants to improve rural cellular coverage. It’s silly that we aren’t charging a small fee onbroadband users to help pay for rural broadband – everybody in the country benefits when there is broadband everywhere. I can’t fathom a justification for having landlines users pay for rural broadband but not broadband customers.

Congress is often mystifying. I can understand the initial ban against Internet taxes, although I don’t believe such taxes would have hampered the explosive growth of broadband. But I can’t think of any justification in 2015 for making the ban on Internet taxes permanent. Considering the huge problems that lack of rural broadband just caused during the COVID-19 crisis, there is no justification for not increasing the funding for the Universal Service Fund, and the easiest way to do so is to tax broadband customers.