Category Archives: Meet CCG

Why I am Thankful 2025

It’s Thanksgiving time again, and time to list those things for which I am thankful. As I’ve been talking to folks lately, there is a lot of angst in the industry as things are rapidly changing. But I think there are still plenty of things to be thankful for.

Broadband Networks Being Built. You couldn’t drive in rural areas this past year without seeing signs of fiber construction. A lot of neighborhoods and homes got fast broadband for the first time in 2025. We became laser-focused over the last year on BEAD and forgot that there is continuing construction funded by programs like RDOF, CAF II, ReConnect, Middle-Mile, Tribal, and State grants funded by ARPA and the Capital Project Fund. By my estimates, over $11 billion in grant and subsidy funding was scheduled to be spent on broadband networks in 2025, following $10 billion in 2024.

Digital Inclusion Marches Forward. The administration put a big dent in the digital inclusion efforts around the country by cancelling the grants from the Digital Equity Act. However, I look around and see that thousands of people have gotten on board the digital inclusion bandwagon, and there is already a lot of digital inclusion work being done that didn’t wait for federal grants. I think we’ll look up in a year and see that we’ve created a digital inclusion ecosystem that will find sustainable ways to work to help folks to get access to devices and learn how to use them.

Also, Digital Equity Act funding is not totally dead, thanks to a lawsuit from NDIA challenging the Administration’s decision to withhold the funds allocated by Congress.

Rural Competition Improving. It’s easy to be dismissive of Starlink, but the company now provides broadband to 2 million U.S. households, most of which don’t have a faster broadband option today. Over the last year, T-Mobile, Verizon, and now AT&T enabled numerous rural cell towers with FWA cellular broadband, and customers lucky enough to live within a few miles of the towers got access to new, affordable broadband.

BEAD Not a Total Bust. For a while, it looked like BEAD would be gutted for fiber construction, but a lot of states were still able to make substantial grant awards to build fiber. Hopefully, the winning ISPs get to work and get fiber to communities that have been waiting a decade or more for better broadband.

Improved Cellular. Cellular speeds continue to improve. Recently, AT&T implemented 3.45 GHz spectrum at 23,000 cell sites in just a few weeks.

Technology Marches Forward. This last year saw announcements for faster PON fiber electronics and faster DOCSIS 4.0 gear. Fixed wireless radios are improving at an astounding rate. We’re even talking about routine texting from anywhere using satellites.

Personal Thanks. Like most years, I met a lot of new clients and made new friends this year. I am particularly happy to see a lot of new, younger faces who are taking the reins in the industry. I’m always thankful for the many friends and colleagues who have provided me with support and a sounding board over the last year. I’m thankful for my family who supports me as I work to support broadband projects and write this blog every day. I’m especially thankful for the cats, squirrels, crows, chipmunks, and the other critters who make me smile every day.

 

Our Christmas Tree

I hope you and your family are having a great holiday season. Our family celebrates Christmas, and one of the best parts of the season for me is the fun we have every year with our Christmas ornaments. Every ornament on our tree has a story. Following are few of my favorite ornaments. Feel free to respond to this blog with a picture and your own ornament story.

I take good-natured grief every year when I trot out my collection of sports hero tree ornaments. This particular ornament is Muhammad Ali and I have dozens of other ones.  I mean seriously, what says Merry Christmas more than Joe Montana, Brooks Robinson, Michael Jordan, or Mickey Mantle? I’ve been threatening for years to do a tree with nothing but sports heroes. Then there will be plenty of room for Arnold Palmer, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Orr, Johnny Unitas, and the whole crew.

This next ornament is the family favorite. This ornament has a small picture frame where you can insert a picture of your family. But we liked the family that came with the ornament so much that we kept them. We greet them to our tree every year. If this family ever sees this blog, they are invited to our house for Christmas at any time.

The final ornament is our newest. If you live in our part of Appalachia, you love and admire Dolly Parton. Old style country music was king in my house growing up, and I fondly remember Dolly since she was on the Porter Wagoner Show every week in the 60s. I loved her Rockstar album from last Christmas where she was accompanied by a who’s who of rock. And if Dolly sees this blog, she’s invited too.

Why I am Thankful in 2024

It’s Thanksgiving time again and time to list those things in our industry for which I am thankful. As I’ve been talking to folks lately there is a lot of apprehension of what might come for the industry due a change in administration, but I still expect to be able to make a list of positive things this time next year.

Broadband Networks Being Built. A whole lot of folks got fast broadband for the first time this year. We sometimes get too focused on the big national grant programs like BEAD and forget that States and local governments have been making grants for rural broadband for several years, and many of those networks came to life in 2024. By my estimates, over $10 billion in grant funding was spent on broadband networks in 2024 from programs like RDOF, ReConnect, CAF II, Capital Projects Fund, ARPA (SLFRF), Tribal grants, and State grants not associated with ARPA. These grants primarily funded fiber and fixed wireless broadband projects.

Expanding Rural Broadband Options. Additionally, a huge number of rural homes got other new broadband options during the last year. For example, T-Mobile and Verizon enabled numerous rural cell towers with FWA cellular broadband, and customers lucky enough to live within a few miles of the towers got new affordable broadband. For much of the year Starlink had no waiting list for new customers, although I recently heard that there are waiting lists again in some places. I’ve talked to customers of these new services who are ecstatic about the difference that comes with better broadband.

New Emphasis on Digital Equity. I have been awed by the huge local efforts being made to tackle digital equity issues. There have always been local programs to help folks get computers, but across the country, there are huge numbers of local efforts to help people use broadband. Here at the end of the year, there is some trepidation about rumors of cut backs in federal funding for the effort. But a lot of these efforts don’t require federal funding. For example, a coalition of volunteers in western North Carolina developed a plan to get devices to the community that isn’t reliant on federal funding.

Price Competition. While far too many areas aren’t served by multiple ISPs, competitive areas are seeing serious price competition as cable companies, fiber overbuilders, and FWA carriers are competing for market share. Sadly, for everybody else, prices seem to be rising.

Foundations Come to Broadband. I’ve worked with half a dozen foundations and large non-profits during the year that have decided to put an emphasis on broadband, mostly for the neighborhoods and towns being left behind. While the nation has been concentrating on finding a rural broadband solution, these groups are looking at neighborhoods and towns where the primary issue is affordability.

Improved Cellular. Some time during the last year the cellular carriers have made wonderful improvements to the local cellular networks. A year ago, it was obvious that call quality was getting sketchy and there were calls unexplainably dropped. But cellular speeds are way up and reliability seems to be up as well. I’ve been hearing the same story from other cities.

Personal Thanks. The last few months have been hard on Asheville and surrounding areas due to Hurricane Helene. I find things to be thankful for every day as I hear about local successes in bringing a business back to life or folks getting back to work. I’m particularly thankful for the warm outpouring of concern from my friends and colleagues in the industry.  If you find it in your heart to help our area, a great cause is the local food bank that got wiped out in the storm and is working to help feed the many folks who lost their homes.

Communications After a Disaster

Having just gone through Hurricane Hellene in Asheville, I got a bird’s eye view of the impact of losing broadband on a community.

The hurricane arrived on the evening of September 26. However, there was a big precursor to the storm, and we had over 15 inches of rain in September before the storm got here. That means the ground was fully saturated, the streams were already running at near-flood conditions, and lakes and reservoirs were already full. The power at my house went out sometime before midnight as the wind picked up and as trees started falling and cutting power lines. Practically everybody in the County lost power during the night – mostly due to downed power lines, but a few electric substations were badly damaged, and one was obliterated by floods.

On Friday morning, we awoke to find that all cellular had switched to SOS mode, meaning the only calls or texts allowed were to 911. We also discovered that water was out. Without power, broadband, and cellular, we were cut off from the outside world. The winds subsided around lunchtime and neighbors all gathered to assess the damage. My particular street was relatively okay, with one giant tree taking out several poles and other poles that were leaning ominously. But as folks started walking to nearby neighborhoods, it became obvious that the damage was bad. Two blocks from here, most of the poles were on the ground. There was no driving out of the neighborhood, with all routes blocked by downed trees.

Luckily, one neighbor had a battery-operated AM/FM radio. At 4:00 PM on Friday we were able to gather around and hear the first local press briefing from the County, which let us find out about the extensive damage across the city, county, and region. We cooked communal meals these first days to use up some of the food that was quickly going bad in our freezers. Unfortunately, most food went bad, and we worried about the bears coming by for a smorgasbord – the floods had chased the bears out of their habitat near streams.

Cellphones stayed in SOS mode for three days. AT&T cellphones, which I have, were the first to come back, but with only one bar. I was able to sporadically text, but I couldn’t open emails or websites. A few calls made it out, but it seemed nobody could call me. It was several more days for Verizon cellphones, and a few more after that for T-Mobile phones. I got a nice text from AT&T that said, “If you are impacted by the hurricane, don’t worry about going over your talk, text, and data limits on this line. To help you stay safe, we won’t charge you for overages for 30 days.”

We got power back near midnight on day seven. By then, I was up to 3 bars of 5G, and the next day I was able to tether to my computer. The connection was tenuous and kept dropping, but that was a small price to pay to be able to reach the Internet and emails. That same day, some nearby homes that have AT&T fiber got their broadband back. In an interesting aside, a few days after power came on I received a huge batch of texts that were sent to me from family and friends at the start of the storm. I didn’t know that texts could be stored to be delivered later.

We heard nothing from my ISP Charter during this time. When we were finally able to reach the web, the Charter site would only concur that our address was out of service – nothing else. We got the first communications from Charter on the 17th day after the hurricane when we got an automated voicemail that said that every Charter customer with power would get broadband by October 19. I am fully sympathetic of the time needed to repair the network – Charter couldn’t get to wires until after the electric company. But I am not happy about the total lack of communication with customers. Duke Energy stayed in touch with us with updates from the start. Charter is a big nationwide company, and they must experience several catastrophes in communities every year. It’s mind-boggling that they don’t have a process for letting customers know what is going on. I would have been happy early on to get a message that broadband would be out for several weeks so I could plan for alternatives. Zero communications for 17 days is pretty poor for a company that has Communications in its name.

Now, returning to my AT&T cellular. Speeds kept improving, and at one point I did a speed test at over 200 Mbps. However, one morning the data stopped working. I soon received a text that I had reached my 20-gigabyte data limit – it turned out that I was now throttled to a speed of 0.1 Mbps. The text gave me a website to contact to buy more data, but I couldn’t connect to a website at that slow speed. My wife had left Asheville, and she was able to buy 10 gigabytes of extra data. A few days later, I had used the extra data, and it turns out that AT&T wouldn’t sell me anything past that first 10 gigabytes. We had to shift to an AT&T hotspot plan to get more data. That worked, but speeds were significantly slower than full 5G cellular. It turns out that the nice text I got at the beginning of the storm was not true, and AT&T charged me for extra usage. I had misread the original text to also mean I would have unlimited usage – and I still think that’s what the text implied. I’m not sure why they sent that text.

While AT&T fiber had been the first broadband to come online, folks were complaining that they repeatedly lost and regained service and speeds. I think I might have had a better experience with my AT&T cellphone.

The bottom line from the experience is that ISPs and cellular companies are terrible at communications. I contrast them with the electric company which gave us regular neighborhood-specific updates. Charter was totally silent for well over two weeks. AT&T sent me a text early on that led me to believe something that wasn’t true.

I was able to see firsthand the impact of the loss of communications. For the first week, the biggest issue was letting family members know we were still alive. Folks walked all over the city to find rumored WiFi hotspots – most which weren’t there. About half the people on my street work from home, and that came to a screeching halt. Even now, things are not back to normal. Water is starting to come back into the system, but our reservoir is a mess. The water might not be drinkable for a long time. Of course, I am still one of the lucky ones and my story pales compared to the many folks who died from the hurricane and the many others who lost homes and businesses. This storm was our Katrina and it’s going to be a long time before we get back to normal.

Our Hidden Angels

As a proud father, I had the great pleasure and honor of attending my daughter’s hooding ceremony as she and her cohort earned their doctorates in Occupational Therapy. As part of the ceremony each graduate talked briefly about their final capstone project, and as I listened to them, I was struck by the realization that occupational therapists and those in similar professions are some of the hidden angels around us.

There is something beyond special about people who dedicate their lives to helping others. The hidden angels among us get up every day and work with people with the direst of needs. OTs help stroke victims relearn how to feed themselves or button a shirt. They help children with autism learn sensory processing skills to filter out extraneous stimuli. They help people with Parkinson’s disease or cerebral palsy learn ways to remain functional. They help people with behavioral disorders learn to cope when interacting with other people. They help the weakest among us take part in everyday life – and in doing so, they create small miracles every day.

There are many other hidden angels around us who quietly work to make people’s lives better every day. Social workers help people cope with life’s problems. Nurses help us when we’re ailing. Hospice workers ease us when we’re dying.

We also have hidden angels in the broadband industry. This includes the people who have been working tirelessly to enroll people into the ACP low-income broadband plan so they can finally afford broadband. This includes folks who retrofit smartphones and computers so that people who can’t afford them have a way to connect to needed broadband. This includes those who teach people one-on-one or in small classes how to use computers. There are hidden angels working tirelessly to bring functional broadband to the poorest urban neighborhoods, where connectivity is badly needed. There are volunteers who have been working for years to get broadband to remote rural towns and communities that feel cut off from the modern world.

This has led me to think about how everybody concerned with improving broadband also has a little bit of angel in them. This covers a lot of people in the industry. It includes the technician who climbs a pole in the rain to fix a downed fiber line. It includes the policy people who read through reams of FCC filings to make sure that big ISPs and regulators don’t make changes that harm the public. It includes the local ISP manager who works all night to diagnose and repair an electronics problem. It includes the customer service rep who goes the extra mile to help a customer with a problem.

We can also find broadband angels in unexpected places. A lot of ISPs spent a lot of time, energy, and money during the pandemic to get the best broadband they could to those who were forced to work and school from home. There are even broadband angels at the biggest ISPs, which we automatically assume are big impersonal corporations. The low-income programs from companies like Charter and Comcast help a lot of families, and somebody inside the companies had to fight hard to get these plans approved and to make them work.

Thinking about our hidden angels also made me realize that we can all do a little better. It’s easy to forget that the things we do every day in the broadband industry affect real people and real lives. It’s worth taking a little time to remember the impact our jobs have in helping people. Maybe doing that will make it a little easier for each of us to bring out our inner angel a little more often. You should take a little time today to notice the hidden angels around you. Most aren’t looking for thanks – but thank them anyway for making all of our lives better.

Ten Years

Today is the tenth anniversary of writing this blog every day. That equates to 2,527 blogs, and that got me thinking about why I write this blog. It also got me thinking about the things I have gotten right and wrong over the years in my daily musings about the broadband industry.

I give full credit for this blog to my wife Julie. Ten years ago, I told her that I was having trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in the industry. Julie suggested that I start writing a daily blog as a way to force myself to read and think about the industry. Writing a blog every day was incredibly difficult at first. I struggled to find topics, and I struggled to condense my thoughts into 700-word essays. But I stuck with it until writing became a habit. I now can’t imagine not writing a blog, and I usually have a longer list of potential topics than there are days to write about them.

Before writing this blog, I went back and read some of my blogs over the years to see what I got right and wrong. One thing about having a public blog is that you can’t escape what you’ve said in the past – it’s all still out there to read.

One of the first things I got wrong happened in the first year of writing the blog. I was highly skeptical of Tom Wheeler being named Chairman of the FCC. Mr. Wheeler had an interesting career as CEO of several high-tech companies but had also served as the President of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). I assumed that his experience in lobbying for the biggest companies in the industry meant that he was going to bring a bias to the FCC strongly in favor of big companies over everybody else. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tom Wheeler ended up being one of the most even-handed heads of the FCC during my career. He sometimes sided with large corporations, but he also was a champion of consumers and municipal broadband – something that I think surprised everybody in the industry. He was what you want to see in an FCC Chairman – somebody who independently supported what he thought was right instead of what was wanted by corporate lobbyists.

Another thing I got wrong was something I wrote near the end of 2019. By that time, I had heard for years from rural communities that despaired that they had no broadband and were being left behind. I wrote that I sadly didn’t see any real hope on the horizon and that rural communities were on their own to get creative and find a way to fund broadband – even though I knew that the financial lift was beyond most communities. There was no way to know that we were only a few months away from a pandemic that would change everything. We sent students and workers home to somehow cope with school and work without broadband, and the cry for better broadband could no longer be ignored. We’re now awash in broadband grant funding. It’s going to take a few years to see if the grant funding is enough to serve everybody, but broadband solutions are on the way for most rural communities that were unimaginable in 2019.

I also got some things right. From the first time that I heard about the supposed wonders of 5G, I was extremely skeptical because I couldn’t find a business case for the technology. Almost everybody in the country already had a cellphone, and it was hard to imagine that people would be willing to spend more to get the rather obscure benefits promised by 5G. If anything, the trend seemed to be in the opposite direction, with competition driving cellular prices lower. I watched in amazement as the power of large corporate lobbying invented a fervor for 5G out of thin air. The public and politicians were sold on the idea that 5G meant a broadband revolution, and the 5G message was suddenly everywhere. There is still no great business case for 5G and there has been very little actual 5G technology introduced into networks. Yet even today, I keep reading about how 5G will soon change everything.

I also got it right in predicting that broadband demand would continue to grow. Akamai reported in 2013, when this blog started, that the average broadband download speed in the U.S. was 8.6 Mbps. Pew said that 2013 was the year when home broadband connections hit a 70% market penetration. The digital divide was already evident in 2013 when 90% of homes that included a college graduate had broadband compared to only 37% for homes where the adults didn’t have a high school degree. From the beginning of writing my blog, I predicted that home broadband consumption would double every three years – and it has grown even faster. Amazingly, politicians and policymakers still act like broadband demand is static. In 2015, the FCC amazingly handed out $1.5 billion annually for six years of CAF II funding to support the rural DSL provided by the largest telcos. Even today, policymakers are ignoring the broadband growth trends by allowing BEAD grants to be given to technologies as slow as 100/20 Mbps. We embarrassingly still have a national definition of broadband of only 25/3 Mbps at a time when a large majority of folks are able to buy gigabit speeds.

People often ask me how long I’ll keep writing this blog, and my answer is easy. I’ll keep writing for as long as there are interesting topics to talk about – and for as long as it’s fun.

A New Way to Follow This Blog

Many of my readers subscribe to the blog and receive it every day as an email. I also have a few thousand followers on both Twitter and LinkedIn. I appreciate you all and I hope you have a great 2023.

I’m not planning on leaving Twitter, but like many of you, I wonder if it will implode. It felt like the right time to stretch my wings and try something different.

I recently created a presence on Mastodon and can be found at:

@DougDawson_CCG@fosstodon.org

If you’re already on Mastodon I’d love to connect. For those who haven’t tried this platform yet, it’s an interesting alternative. I’ve found that the platform leads to longer and more detailed discussions of issues than other sites. Be warned that there is a bit of a learning curve, but nothing that can’t be figured out.

I personally use social media platforms to find new ideas, and the quality of the content on Mastodon is impressive. It’s also nice to have a platform that is not cluttered with the advertising on Twitter or the site self-promotion and other clutter on LinkedIn. At least in the corner of the Mastodon that I’ve joined, the clutter is mostly nerdy, which suits me just fine.

Doug

 

New Member of the CCG Team

I’m happy to announce that Chris Rozycki has joined the CCG team.

Chris’s last position was as the Broadband Projects Administrator for the State of South Carolina. In that positioned Chris created, authored, and implemented a complete broadband grant program and plan that included creating the draft plan, dramatically improving State broadband mapping, creating a grant application process and forms, and a grant scoring methodology. He then worked to implement the grant program that included reviewing and scoring grant applications, refereeing challenges, conducting onsite reviews and approvals, and establishing a broadband demonstration project in an unserved rural black community. The grant program brought faster broadband, mostly fiber, to nearly 25,000 homes and businesses.

Before that, Chris has a long history in telecom policy, planning, and strategy, and worked for ISPs of all sizes. He has extensive experience in testifying with state PUCs and PSCs covering topics like inter-company compensation, industry performance standards, pricing and ratemaking, and interconnection agreement issues

If you think Chris’s talents might be on interest, you can contact him at chris@equitybroadband.com Or reach him through CCG.

 

I’m Looking to Hire a New Consultant

I’m looking to hire an Associate Consultant. This is a starting consulting position that will work directly with me. I spend interesting days on a wide variety of projects. My primary work is helping communities and ISPs look at opening new broadband markets. I also help ISPs find funding. I work with states and foundations in developing broadband policies. And I work on a number of interesting projects each year that are hard to categorize – I help clients solve problems. I also spend a lot of time responding to RFPs or writing proposals to provide consulting services.

This is a position with big growth potential in both knowledge and earnings. I’m looking for somebody who is willing to learn the intricacies of the broadband industry – you’ll be working with an industry insider and pro who knows a lot about almost all aspects of the industry.

The two traits I value the most are the ability to write clearly and the ability to tackle complex spreadsheets. I realize that’s an uncommon pair of talents for one person, but I run an uncommon business. I promise the right individual an interesting workday.

You’ll find a more detailed job description here.

2,000 Blogs and Counting

Doug Dawson, 2017

I’m taking a short pause from broadband issues because today is blog number 2,000. I look at that number and I have no idea how it happened. I’ve published almost every business day since March 2013 – only missing a few days when I was sick and a few times due to technical snafus. If you told me in 2013 that I’d still be doing this every day in 2021 I would have laughed at such a crazy idea.

I started writing the blog at the urging of my wife Julie. Back in 2013, I told her that I was having trouble keeping up with everything that was going on in the industry. That’s something most people can sympathize with – there are multiple headlines in our industry every day. Julie  knew I was an okay writer and suggested the blog as a way to force myself to keep up with industry events.

In the beginning, I was writing only to myself, and the blog was a resource for me to store my interpretation of industry news as a resource for later use. But somehow, I started to pick up readers. I’ve never advertised the blog other than to refer to it at the end of my emails, but month after month and year after year the daily readers have grown.

Once in a while, a blog goes viral. The most readers I got was over 40,000 in a day when I wrote an article wondering how well Starlink would perform. The blog ended up on Reddit and I got a huge number of comments from Elon Musk fans who made rude references about my lineage. The silly thing about the reader reactions was that most comments were based strictly on the headline and it was clear that few commenters had actually read the blog – I agreed with most of the comments except the parts about my lineage. I pulled that blog down to cut off the nonsense, but it gave me an appreciation of what it must be like to be an actual journalist. My second most popular blog talked about how squirrels and gophers chew through fiber – the comments were a lot nicer!

I still write the blog as a way to force myself to keep up. It’s a busy time to be a broadband consultant and I could easily get lost in work and ignore the industry around me. To some extent I’m still writing to myself, which is why you’ll sometimes see blogs full of statistics – these blogs help me store facts I know I’m going to want to use later.

I think my favorite aspect of the blog is that it has led to meeting some of the most interesting people in the industry. I seem to meet somebody new through the blog almost weekly.

Readers often make my life easier because they often send me links to interesting things that I would never see otherwise. I get links to small-town newspaper articles or whitepapers published overseas that would never otherwise come to my attention.

Another interesting aspect of the blog is that I have readers worldwide. Just yesterday I had readers in India, Canada, the UAE, the UK, South Africa, Oman, Australia, Kenya, the Philippines, South Korea, Germany, Ukraine, Portugal, Turkey, and Mauritius. My blogs on the nuances of US regulations or FCC actions are probably baffling to these readers, but a lot of my blogs talk about the problems suffered by lack of good broadband – a problem all around the globe.

I’m also read by few college students who want to know more about the broadband industry. They often send me great questions, which I try to answer when I can.

Probably the biggest change in the blog is that over time I’ve found a voice. As interesting as the industry is, we have a lot of problems. The pandemic made it clear that there are still far too many people without good broadband. The biggest ISPs could do a lot better and often do more harm than good. Regulators often do puzzling things. I no longer shy away from giving my opinion on such topics. I don’t think for a second that I am moving the meter on any topic, but I hope that it’s valuable for readers to hear a perspective that’s not published in many other places. The things I say in the blog mirror the conversations I have with clients and peers. Mostly I hope that I am helping to inform people who live in places that need better broadband and encouraging them that there are solutions if they keep plugging away.

I don’t know how much longer I will keep writing every day. But I still enjoy the daily break to write a blog, and starting tomorrow I’m aiming at blog number 3,000!