Category Archives: The Industry

Filling the Sky with Satellites

The skies are quickly filling with communications satellites. Following is a short list of the many ventures that have or will soon be launching large numbers of broadband satellites.

Starlink now has over 10,000 operational satellites in orbit, with the ultimate announced goal of reaching 42,000 satellites. The company is not sitting still and will be introducing its new V3 satellites sometime this year, that promises to provide 10 times the download and 24 times the upload capacity of the current V2 satellites. That should mean a big boost in the capacity of the Starlink constellation and faster speeds. Starlink is likely to maintain a major advantage over competitors through its use of the reusable Starship rocket.

Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) currently has around 212 satellites in orbit. The company was recently granted a two-year delay by the FCC of its original commitment to have an operational network by this summer. The company also recently got approval from the FCC to increase the constellation size to 7,700 satellites. The company is working to accelerate satellite launches and launched 32 satellites in February using the Ariane 64 rocket. Amazon Leo has contracted for 18 additional launches with Arianespace.

Eutelsat OneWeb is currently operating a 648 satellite constellation in twelve polar planes that is providing broadband to enterprise, government, and maritime customers. Its key markets today are in places like Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. The company has ordered over 300 additional generation 2 satellites that should start being deployed later this year.

Blue Origin, a rocket company, plans to launch a constellation of 5,408 TeraWave satellites starting at the end of 2027. The company is promising speeds up to 6 Tbps. The constellation will be comprised of optically connected satellites using both low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). The satellites will be interconnected using optical lasers. The target market for Blue Origin will be enterprise, data center, and government customers who need a reliable primary or secondary broadband connection. They think their primary market will be in remote, rural, and suburban areas around the world, where the cost of providing diverse fiber paths is too expensive.

Telesat’s Lightspeed satellite business got its start in December 2026 with the launch of its first two satellites. It plans are to launch 157 satellites by the end of 2027, with an ultimate goal of 298. The first 156 satellites will focus on support for NATO and allied nations. After that, the company hopes to be able to provide global coverage for enterprise customers, including the aviation, maritime, energy, and government sectors.

China’s Guowang (the National Network) has launched 164 satellites and has plans to launch 12,992 satellites to compete with Starlink. The company plans to launch 310 satellites in 2026, 900 in 2027, and 3,600 per year starting in 2028. There will be two separate constellations, one at 500 to 600 kilometers and a second around 1,145 km.

Quinfan (also known as Spacesail or G60) is being developed by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST). The company currently has 108 satellites in polar orbit as part of its first constellation of 648 satellites. The company has announced long-term plans to reach over 15,000 satellites.

Meanwhile, there is another space race happening for companies wanting to provide direct-to-device cellular service. The key players are Lynk Global, Skylo, a partnership between SpaceX and T-Mobile, a partnership between AST SpaceMobile and AT&T/Verizon, and a partnership between Globalstar and Apple.

The Growing Splinternet

From FlaticonThe term splinternet refers to Internet service in a country that controls or censors content available to citizens. The best-known example of a splinternet is the Great Firewall of China. While there is a lot of different software and platforms available to Chinese citizens, many web platforms from outside the country are blocked, and citizens all understand that anything they do on the Internet can be monitored.  China is not the only splinternet. For example, the Russian government restricts Internet access to only  approved sites in a lot of the country.

Iran has always controlled the Internet to some extent, but in recent months has entered the realm of full splinternet. This started with public protests against the government. Citizens could communicate inside the country, but only through government-controlled apps. The government blocked citizens from viewing foreign websites and from sending pictures and videos outside the country.

Internet advocates are warning that the splinternet is spreading. Wired recently had an article that says that China is now exporting the technology that support their censorship techniques for the Great Firewall. The article claims the technology has been exported to multiple governments around the world. This is going to make it a lot easier for smaller countries to achieve the same control of the web as achieved by China.

AI is making it a lot easier for governments to track what people are doing on the web. AI can also be an effective tool for blocking websites and can help a government to identify people using any software that does an end run around web restrictions. In the past, people found ways around government restrictions. I recall that protesters in Hong Kong became adept at coordinating and communicating by setting up ad hoc networks that bypassed government monitoring.

While not exactly a splinternet movement, there is a significant effort in Europe to create telecom and cloud infrastructure that is purely European. There is a lot of demand from businesses for cloud solutions that are independent and fully within European control. As much as anything, this movement is an attempt to avoid the large U.S. software companies that largely control the web around the world.

An example of this new direction is the consortium recently announced by Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, TIM, and Vodafone, They have launched the European Edge Continuum, which allows customers to deploy applications that are restricted to only use the networks of the five providers. This is nearly the opposite of the approach being taken in the U.S., where ISPs hand traffic to hyperscalers that route traffic in ways that are unknown to the ISPs and users.

It’s becoming obvious that there is a downside in this country to a web that relies on a handful of hyperscalers. Corporations are increasingly frustrated when they experience major outages due to software problems in distant data centers that are out of their reach and control.

The trends are not encouraging. It’s hard to think there won’t be an increase in splinternet-like activities from governments around the world. When that’s coupled with people and corporations that want to minimize the use of giant hyperscalers, it looks like a further segmentation of the concept of an open web.

Broadband Subscribers 4Q 2025

I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs for the end of 2025. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. The table below looks at the change in subscribers for the fourth quarter and also for the whole year of 2025.

The story hasn’t changed a lot during the year. FWA cellular ISPs still dominate new net customer gains in the industry. Cable companies continue to lose customers. Telcos are growing by adding more fiber customers than they are losing copper customers.

There are a few interesting stories in these numbers. There were a lot of industry predictions that FWA cellular sales had peaked and would be slowing. However, the fourth quarter is the largest net customer gain ever for the market segment.

The additions for the telcos mask that growth in fiber customers is being diluted by continued losses of copper customers.

Breezeline says that it has turned around losses. The company had been losing 7,000 customers per quarter, and for the fourth quarter, it was down only 1,000. The company has hopes of getting back to net growth.

I don’t know how much longer making this table will make any sense. Just in the last quarter, Ziply Fiber and Consolidated Communications fell off the table when they went private. In the first quarter, Frontier will merge with Verizon and Lumen’s fiber customers will shift to AT&T. A little later this year, Cox, which is currently privately held, will be added to the Charter numbers. There are a number of aggressive fiber overbuilders that are privately held and not included in the table.

Closing the Senior Broadband Gap

An article in Telecompetitor cites statistics from AARP that show there is still a substantial broadband gap among seniors. According to data from the Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) organization that is part of AARP, 19 million seniors didn’t have a home broadband connection in 2023. That’s not a big improvement over the 22 million seniors who didn’t have home broadband in 2018. The article cites a statistic from AARP that only 61% of seniors over 75 have a home broadband connection.

AARP notes that the reasons seniors don’t have home broadband are similar to the reasons affecting other demographics. For example, only 53% of seniors with less than a high school education have broadband compared to 68% of seniors with a high school or higher education. Incomes also matter, and seniors with incomes under $25,000 struggle to afford broadband. AARP notes some improvement in senior use of broadband from 2018 to 2023. They noted that more seniors are using large-screen devices in 2023. The biggest improvement for seniors was an improvement in the use of smartphones and mobile services.

Interestingly, the AARP statistics didn’t consider 5G home internet or 5G mobile plans as broadband access. AARP believes that 5G has issues like unreliable service, data caps, and other problems, which means that a 5G connection isn’t reliable for some of the services that seniors need, like medical monitoring. 5G capabilities are improving.

The big cell carriers have been adding spectrum and making electronics upgrades, which are bringing faster and more reliable speeds. However, one of the issues that isn’t discussed enough is that fast cellular broadband speeds are only good within about two miles of a cell tower. Most urban households are within a mile of a cell tower and can receive download 5G speeds over 100 Mbps, and often much faster. But in rural areas, a lot of people live more than two miles from a cell tower. In rural areas, there are still large swaths of areas with little or no cellular broadband coverage. Cellular service is also engineered by the big three carriers to have relatively slow upload speeds, and it’s not unusual, even in urban areas, for upload speeds to be under the 20 Mbps definition of broadband set by the FCC. It’s possible that AARP will eventually bless 5G as acceptable broadband, but even then, only for customers within a few miles of a cell tower.

The senior broadband gap is significant since seniors are increasingly reliant on broadband. Seniors are like the rest of us and are seeing essential services moving online. Money and banking have largely moved online. Local, state, and federal governments are moving forms and portals online, and often as the only way to communicate. Homebound seniors need access to online shopping. Businesses everywhere are converting to online portals. For example, portals are being used to communicate with mortgage companies, veterinarians, dentists, plumbers, etc.

The biggest need for home broadband for seniors is increasingly becoming health care. Healthcare providers are almost universally shifting to the use of online portals to communicate with patients. The portals are used to schedule visits, communicate results of medical tests, and answer patient questions. Anybody without the skill or ability to access medical portals is at a major disadvantage.

Seniors are also increasingly reliant on telemedicine, where they can have virtual visits with physicians without having to make an office visit. Broadband is also needed for monitoring medical devices that are increasingly used to track at-risk patients who suffer from diabetes or heart issues, and for general monitoring after patients are released from surgery.

I’ve talked to a lot of digital equity folks in the last year, and a lot of them are focused on seniors. These groups help seniors find affordable broadband connections and take advantage of any discounts or subsidies that can help pay for a connection. Digital equity folks are helping seniors obtain computers, tablets, and smartphones and teaching them how to use them. I find myself repeatedly ruing that the federal government decided to nix a lot of the grant funding to help with this effort. Luckily, a lot of the folks engaged in this work are finding ways to continue the effort without the federal funding assistance.

Broadband Shorts March 2026

The following are a few topics I found interesting but which are two short to need a full blog.

Acquisitions Changing the Broadband Landscape. We’ve recently seen the closing of a number of major mergers and sales that are changing the broadband landscape.

  • On January 20, the sale of Frontier to Verizon closed. This $20 billion blockbuster sale brought 2.2 million fiber subscribers and eight million passings. Long-time followers of the industry are somewhat amused to see Verizon buy back millions of passings it sold to Frontier in the past.
  • On February 2, AT&T closed the sale of over 1 million fiber customers from Lumen, which brought four million fiber passings. This included customers in major markets like Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, and Phoenix.
  • On March 10, the sale of Starry to Verizon closed. While bringing only 100,000 customers, the acquisition also brings Starry’s proprietary technology that uses 28/39 GHz millimeter wave spectrum to deliver wireless broadband, mostly to MDUs. The speculation is that Verizon will use the technology to expand to MDUs outside of its fiber footprint.
  • The huge merger between Charter and Cox Communications is still pending. The merger recently got approved by the FCC and still needs approval from several states. Cox would bring around 6 million broadband customers and 12 million passing to Charter, making the combined company the largest ISP in the country.
  • GFiber just announced a merger with Astound Broadband that would spin GFiber from Google Alphabet.

Action in the NDIA Suit. The U.S. Department of Justice sought to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) that challenged the administration’s refusal to disperse the grant funding approved by Congress from the Digital Equity Act. These grants were aimed at tackling digital inclusion efforts that included bringing broadband devices to those that need them, training people how to use computers and broadband, and training for broadband-related jobs. The NDIA suit was first filed in early October 2025. I note the DOJ motion since the agency has had a low success rate in defending executive actions that killed various other federal grants. I think there is still a chance that this funding will eventually be awarded as intended.

AI Fueling Surge in Deepfake Spam. Hiya, a service that provides apps to block spam calls, released its State of the Call 2026 report, which says that AI is fueling an increase in spam calls. A survey of over 12,000 consumers across the  U.S., UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Spain showed a rise of deepfake calls, which use AI to mimic voices that are familiar to those being called. One in four Americans said they received a deepfake voice call in the last year. Americans said by nearly 2-to-1 that spammers are winning the battle over the FCC, which is trying to squelch spam calls.

AT&T Partnership with Amazon. AT&T, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Amazon Leo announced a broadband collaboration this week that integrates AT&T into the AI and cloud capabilities of AWS. AT&T will become the preferred vendor to provide connectivity to AWS data centers. Amazon LEO has an existing arrangement with Verizon to bring fiber to ground stations, and it will be interesting over time to see if that business shifts to AT&T.

AT&T will partner with Amazon Leo to provide satellite broadband connectivity to some AT&T broadband customers. This is an interesting solution that could help AT&T more easily walk away from rural copper networks. AT&T also wants to bring satellite backup broadband to AT&T business customers.

Where’s the Growth?

I work for a few ISPs that are lucky enough to be working in counties that are seeing explosive population and new housing growth. Growth has always been uneven across the country, and I decided to take a look at the parts of the country with the fastest growth.

One of the best ways to understand housing growth is to look at permits to build new homes. Historically, 99% of permits to build new single-family homes results in a new home. About 80% of permits for multifamily homes turn into a condominium or apartment.

According to the Census Bureau’s Building Permit Survey, the top five states for permits for single-family homes in 2025, as measured in permits per 100,000 residents, were South Carolina (56), North Carolina (48), Florida (45), Idaho (45), and Delaware (43). At the bottom of the list were New York (4), Connecticut (5), Illinois (6), Rhode Island (6), and Massachusetts (6).

The states with the most permits for multi-family homes, as measured by permits per 100,000 residents, were Washington DC (60), South Dakota (33), Colorado (28), Florida (27), Arizona (27), and Idaho (26). The states at the bottom of this list were Mississippi (2), Rhode Island (3), Michigan (4), Alaska (4), and New Mexico (5).

Since my state of North Carolina had the second-fastest growth in single family-home permits per 100,000 residents, I thought I’d look deeper at the statistics in the state by county. As you might imagine, in most states, there is a wide variance between the counties with the fastest housing growth and the slowest. The following statistics for North Carolina are for total housing permits per 100,000 residents for 2023. The counties with the fastest new housing permits per 100,000 were Brunswick (254), Iredell (115), Warren (110), Pender (100), and Franklin (97). There were 8 counties with fewer than 10 new permits per 100,000 population, all in the eastern part of the state.

North Carolina has less variance in counties from top to bottom than most states, and there is healthy growth happening across most of the state. Other states that have growth in most parts of the state include Washington, Arizona, Florida, Utah, Virginia, and New Hampshire.

None of these statistics says anything about 2026, because the housing industry is infamous for seeing cycles of big booms and busts. The biggest booms since 1970 have been in 1972, 1977, 1984, 2005, and 2021. Some of the worst years for new housing were 1975, 1981, 1990, and 2009.

The housing industry had high hopes that 2026 could be a high-growth year since mortgage interest rates at the end of 2025. Realtors report pent-up demand for people who would like to move or buy a new home. But other factors like the tariffs that affect lumber prices, stagnant new job growth, labor shortages in parts of the country, and overall inflation could also result in a bad year for new housing.

One of the biggest mysteries in the housing industry is understanding the relationship between new housing growth and population growth. The two issues clearly are related, but which comes first? Does building new homes attract new residents, or do developers react to people who were coming anyway?

ISPs that find themselves in the middle of housing booms should count themselves as lucky. It’s something that can disappear almost as quickly as it appeared, but taking advantage of growth is one of the easiest business plans.

The Human Touch

Fierce Network recently had an interesting article about Consumer Cellular. This is a cellular MVNO that you might not have heard of. For those not familiar with the term, an MVNO is a cellular company that buys wholesale minutes and data from one of the large cellular carriers and markets the cellular product under its own brand name. Consumer Cellular operates on the AT&T network.

The company was founded over thirty years ago, aligns with AARP, and has always marketed to older cellular customers. Consumer Cellular stresses affordable cell plans, and its average revenue per customer is around $30 per month. The most interesting thing about the company is that it is growing while many other MNVOs are shrinking. The company has grown to over 4.4 million customers and is still seeing continued customer growth.

Consumer Cellular credits its success to the fact that it doesn’t use AI chatbots to answer online customer inquiries, as is being done with most other cellular companies. Consumer Cellular answers all customer calls with a live person.

The company is also rapidly expanding retail stores at a time when some of the bigger companies have been closing retail stores. Consumer Cellular opened its first retail store in Florida in 2022 and now has over 70 locations. The company has plans to expand to between 200 and 300 stores. The company sees big benefits from the retail stores. Customers who enroll at the stores have lower churn. The company says that people who visit a store also tend to buy higher-end phones and subscribe to larger monthly plans after they can see the options in person compared to online.

Most ISPs can’t duplicate Consumer Cellular’s success. The company is unique because of its older demographic. Consumer Cellular has embraced something that many smaller ISPs have known for years. Small ISPs universally tell me that one of the key secrets to success is that they know their customers. Smaller ISPs have thrived on having customer service calls answered live and having knowledgeable technicians. I know ISPs competing against big cable companies who say their live and responsive customer service is one of their primary advantages when competing against a big cable company.

However, this is changing, even for many smaller ISPs. Not all customers want to talk to a person. Consumer Cellular is unique because of its older demographic, but ISPs serve customers of all ages. Many customers would rather communicate using chat, text, social media, or email. I see many of my clients expanding the ways that customers can communicate with them. The ultimate customer service platform would give each customer the choice of how to communicate. But that can be expensive for ISPs that don’t have a lot of customers.

At least one big ISP went to the opposite extreme. For a long time, Starlink had no live customer service reps, and customers were expected to interface through an AI chatbot. The web is full of reviews from Starlink customers who got frustrated because they couldn’t talk to a person and walked away from the company. However, the company now has some live customer service reps based in Latin America that can be reached after customers start with a chatbot. Starlink has an unusual customer service challenge since it operates worldwide across a huge range of languages.

Some of the biggest ISPs are already experimenting with AI bots on customer service websites, meaning customers are chatting with a computer instead of a person. If they are not already being approached, I expect smaller ISPs will be seeing salespeople offering to integrate AI into their processes. I would caution smaller companies about taking this plunge. There is a lot of rumbling from large companies that AI customer service isn’t acting the way they were hoping for. The AI industry is still young, and there is likely going to be a shakeout at some point where a lot of the companies offering services using somebody else’s AI platform could disappear overnight. Small ISPs should think hard before giving up their local advantage and letting computers talk to their customers.

The AI Boom and Broadband

I’ve written several blogs recently about the impact of AI on broadband. For example, it’s becoming clear that a lot of AI applications will require better upload broadband speeds. ISPs that haven’t yet upgraded upload speeds will likely find themselves at a competitive disadvantage, similar to what happened to cable companies during the pandemic, when it became clear that upload speeds were inadequate to support multiple folks working and schooling from home. I also wrote a blog that discussed the big increase in web traffic that has sprung up from AI web crawlers that constantly search the web for new content.

There are other, more subtle, impacts from the AI boom. One of the unexpected issues is the sudden shortage of electricians in regions where AI data centers are being constructed. Electricians are needed during the massive effort to wire a new data center used for AI. What was unexpected is that data centers permanently employ multiple electricians to maintain the cooling systems and other ongoing needs at an AI data center. Data centers are offering attractive salaries and benefits and luring electricians who would otherwise have been busy building new houses or maintaining existing ones.

I’ve been reading stories about parts of the country where there is a sudden shortage of electricians. This can impact any ISP or other business that wants to build or upgrade a building. Folks might be surprised to know that ISPs use electricians regularly when they add new equipment or build new outdoor huts, cabinets, and repeater sites.

A more subtle impact of an electrician shortage is that it makes it harder to train new electricians. Most new electricians begin their career by being an apprentice to a licensed electrician, and if those electricians are taking full-time jobs at data centers, they are no longer working with new apprentices. Admittedly, a shortage of electricians is mostly a local issue, but it can be a real concern to ISPs who are trying to quickly expand networks.

Of more consequence is the impact that rapid data center expansion is having on the global market for memory chips. The memory market is under huge stress. While this market has historically seen boom-and-bust cycles, this time is different.

AI servers require far more memory per system than consumer devices, so the AI build-out is snagging a disproportionate share of global chip capacity and creating shortages, as suppliers prioritize orders for hyperscalers and vendors specializing in AI servers. This sudden market shift means fewer memory chips for consumer devices. For now, that is triggering higher prices for smartphones, computers, automobiles, and other consumer electronics.

But industry experts say this is not a cyclical shortage caused by a temporary mismatch in supply and demand. This is instead a permanent reallocation of the world’s silicon wafer capacity. For decades, the companies that made DRAM and NAND Flash for smartphones and PCs were the primary drivers for chip production. Today, the huge demand from hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon has flipped the market. In the last year, we’ve seen companies like Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology leave the consumer chip market. These manufacturers, and others, have pivoted to making higher-margin enterprise-grade components. Every wafer allocated to Nvidia is no longer available for a smartphone or consumer laptop.

Manufacturers of consumer electronics live on thin margins. This includes vendors like TCL, Transsion, Realme, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Oppo, Vivo, Honor, and Huawei. There are already rumors of these companies discontinuing lines of electronics that they don’t think are marketable at higher prices. Anything they continue to make will be sold at a much higher price since memory is 15% to 20% of the bill of materials for most electronics. Worst are the stories leaking out from these vendors that they are being asked to pre-pay for multiple years of chips to even be included in the supply chain.

Telecom companies need a lot of memory devices. The electronics used in networks are packed with chips. A more subtle impact over time will be the many broadband customers who find themselves unable to afford a new computer or tablet. This is also going to puta huge crimp on firms who have been refurbishing computers to support low-income homes. We’re just starting to see the impact of this change today, and chip experts say the full impact won’t be felt by the end of this year.

A New Voice Feature

T-Mobile is currently beta testing a real-time translation service for T-Mobile cellular customers. The service will offer translations between fifty languages. The company is touting this as the first real-time agentic AI platform used on a wireless network.

There are already a lot of translator services available today like Google Translate, JotMe, Wordly.ai, Maestro AI, and others. The advantage of the T-Mobile offering is that it would a built-in feature that comes embedded with cellular service – a device that billions of people carry around all day.

It will be interesting to see how the beta test goes, because the biggest challenge of any translation service is to be able to translate quickly enough not to introduce big pauses into a conversation. Failure to do that makes a conversation feel robotic. Meeting that kind of real-time requirement will require low latency on the network as well as software that can translate quickly somewhere in the backend.

This is the first significant new voice feature I can remember that has been introduced since talk-to-text was introduced by Apple Siri in 2011. This is an amazing use of AI. For Star Trek nerds like me, this is the first baby step towards a universal translator. This feature, if it works as promised, will make it lot easier for people around the world to communicate.

One of the best parts of this feature is that it’s not tied to having a T-Mobile smartphone that requires specific software. The translations are done in the cloud, and T-Mobile says this can be made to work on any phone used by a T-Mobile customer, including flip-phones.

I keep hearing that the telecom companies are integrating AI into their businesses. It’s easy to see the AI agents that are popping up on customer service screens. Most of the articles and reviews I read say that a lot of people are unwilling to interact with AI agents, and it’s going to be interesting to see how big companies react if their customers won’t use the AI tools the companies prefer.

Much of the AI being introduced by telecom companies is being done out of sight. Industry technical news keeps describing initiatives for network owners to use AI to better manage networks. I’ve written a few blogs about this topic, and I suspect that reliance on AI instead of experienced technicians is a contributing factor to the big national network and service outages and contributes to it taking longer than suspected to diagnose and clear problems.

If AI is going to win over a lot of people if it can be used for features that people want to use. In today’s world, a lot of people know people who aren’t conversant in English. An easy real-time translator service would quickly broaden the horizon for a lot of us.

It’s certainly a marketing coup for T-Mobile if this works and if it takes others a while to offer a competitive alternative.The most interesting question for me is what’s next – what other AI features are on the way?

Rising Costs of Broadband Construction

The Fiber Broadband Association, along with its consultant, Cartesian, published its annual report on the cost of fiber deployment. The report was compiled from online surveys and phone interviews conducted in September and October 2025.

The report includes a lot of interesting statistics and trends for anybody getting ready to build fiber.

  • FBA believes that 60% of the homes in the country are now passed with fiber. There were 11.8 million fiber passings built in 2025, including 8.1 million to new locations.
  • The median price of fiber construction that was garnered from the survey was $18.00 per foot for buried construction and $8.00 per foot for aerial construction. That was a 3% increase in cost for buried construction and a 14% increase for aerial construction.
  • Labor is still the largest component of cost. Labor represented 72% of the cost of buried construction and 64% of the cost of buried construction.
  • The method of underground construction matters. It cost 40% less to directly bury fiber compared to the cost of putting fiber into new conduit. Trenching had the highest cost, at 60% more than plowing and 6% more than directional boring.
  • 92% of survey respondents saw higher costs for fiber construction in 2025 compared to 2024.

The most relevant news from the report is that 88% of the respondents expect a cost increase for construction in 2026. 62% of respondents expect a ‘slight’ cost increase of less than 10%. 26% expect a cost increase of more than 10%. 9% expect costs to stay the same, and 3% expect costs to decrease by less than 10%.

Nearly two-thirds (62%) of respondents said they expect fiber deployment costs to rise “slightly” (less than 10%) compared to 26% who expect a “significant” increase of 10% or more. About 9% expect costs to stay the same, and 3% expect costs to decrease by 10% or less. Considering all responses, 88% of respondents expect costs to increase again in 2026.

Note that the cost increases experienced in 2025 and the expected increases expected for 2026 are national averages. Responses to the survey came from 38 different states, and there was a fairly even split between urban, suburban, and rural fiber builders. National averages blur the significant differences in the cost of labor in different parts of the country. National averages also even out the differences between the big fiber builders who build huge numbers of miles of fibers, and smaller ISPs building smaller projects. The labor costs in a national survey also include projects built with prevailing wages, projects built at union wages, and projects built at market non-union wages. The averages also blend the costs from ISPs that build with employees versus those using contractors.

I have to wonder if all of the folks who plan to build fiber with BEAD grants have built in a possible cost increase for fiber construction of 10% per year. That would mean that fiber built in the fourth year might be 33% more expensive than what was built in the first year.

The report is well worth reading for anybody planning to build fiber because it’s full of interesting statistics. For example, an interesting statistic is that a buried construction crew of 3 can build around 1,000 feet per day, while a crew of 7 can build 1,585 feet per day. A crew of 3 can build 1,800 feet of aerial fiber per day, while a crew of 6 can build 4,000 feet per day. These statistics show there isn’t a big benefit from using large crews compared to using multiple smaller crews.

Another interesting statistic was drop costs. The average cost for a buried drop under 100 feet was $556, while the cost for a 500+ foot drop was $675. The average cost for an aerial drop under 100 feet was $338, while the cost for a 500+ foot drop was $400. These numbers also blend the cost of ISPs that build drops using in-house staff versus those using all contract labor.