Category Archives: The Industry

My Favorite Telecom Books

One of my recent blog posts reviewed a new book, Digital Equity Ecosystems, by Colin Rhinesmith. A reader asked me about some of my other favorite telecom books. I have a personal interest in the history of telecom, so many of these books discuss major events in telecom history. I’m sure I’m missing some great books, but here is the list that first came to mind. Feed free to add others in the comments.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and The Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. I’ve always been fascinated by Bell Labs and was lucky enough to visit it in its heyday. The scientists and engineers at the lab generated more than one new patent per day for new technologies.

Fundamentals of Wireless Communication by David Tse & Pramod Viswanath. This is the only textbook on the list. This describes the fundamentals of wireless communications and a huge range of wireless technologies.

Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age by Susan P. Crawford. This is an interesting look that examines how the U.S. was poised to be the world leader in broadband, but how much of the rest of the world was able to build networks that delivered faster speeds with lower prices. This is the story about an industry hijacked by a small handful of monopolies.

Beyond Sputnik and the Space Race: The Origins of Global Satellite Communications by Hugh P. Slotten. As a kid, I was fascinated by satellites and remember tracking the path of the first communications satellites, Telstar 1 and Telstar 2, across the sky at night. This is a good history of the development of satellite communications networks.

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley with a foreword by Steve Wozniak. This book describes the history of long-distance calling and how hackers learned to exploit the weaknesses in the AT&T network to steal billions of dollars of long-distance calls.

Optical Illusions: Lucent and the Crash of Telecom by Lisa Endlich. This is a story about the 2000 telecom crash by concentrating on Lucent, the manufacturer spun off from AT&T. In a short period of time, Lucent went from the sixth largest company on the stock exchange to being in complete shambles. Great read to learn about that momentous period.

The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells & Info-Scandal by Bruce A. Kushnick. This is one of a series of books by the author that looks at how the Baby Bell companies like Bell Atlantic and BellSouth were able to gain huge concessions from regulators in return for promises to build future-looking broadband networks, and how most of those promises were broken.

Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity by Christopher Ali. This book discusses the federal broadband policies that led to the stark digital divide between urban and rural broadband. I wrote a review of this book when it first came out in 2021, and it’s still an interesting read today.

Tough Calls: AT&T And The Hard Lessons Learned From The Telecom Wars by Dick Martin. This is an interesting book written by an ex-head of public relations at AT&T that tells the story of the struggles the company faced after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the telecom market to competition.

Don’t Ignore Remediation

One of the most common tasks required when building a new fiber network, particularly when burying fiber, is fixing the damage caused during the construction process. In the industry, we refer to this work as remediation, which means, in plain English, putting everything back to the way it was before the start of construction.

There is a huge list of things that can go wrong and messes that can be made during the fiber construction process. The problem that often gets headlines is when the construction crews hit and damage other buried utilities like water, gas, electric, or other communications lines. The Common Ground Alliance (CGA) issues periodic reports that tally the reasons for damaged underground utilities, and one of their recent reports said that one-fourth of all damage to underground utilities has been coming from fiber contractors.

The more common problems that plague contractors are damages to property. The construction process can damage sidewalks and driveways, cut water system lines, cut into a buried sewer tank, or damage the utilities entering the home. I heard about a recent incident where a cut sewer line ended up filling a home with raw sewage. There are a lot of complaints made about damaged flower beds, injured shrubbery, and cut watering systems. A really common problem is the mess created from excavated dirt, particularly after it rains.

Every construction contractor is supposed to clean up any mess they made, and most do a good job. But some contracts only pay contractors for completing specific units, like the feet of fiber installed or the number of splices made, and some contractors put in only the minimal amount of effort to fix damages. Full remediation can be expensive. It might mean replacing sections of sidewalk. It might mean re-sodding grass. It definitely means carting away leftover debris.

The key to doing remediation well is to react immediately to homeowner complaints. Most ISPs understand that they will be operating the market for a long time after the contractors are gone, and don’t leave it up to the contractor to make amends. The ISPs I know who do this well have an ‘ambassador’ who immediately goes to see people who complain about problems, and who makes sure the problem gets fixed. Anybody who has worked construction knows that some homeowners get incredibly irate over any disturbance to their property, and this is not always an easy job.

There can be serious consequences for an ISP who bungles remediation. Bad local press can kill their marketing efforts. In the most extreme cases, ISPs have lost construction permits. There are a lot of examples of when construction remediation didn’t go well, but there are no sizable buried fiber projects that didn’t have plenty of stories. But some ISPs lose control of the construction and remediation process. The following are a few examples that were bad enough to make the press.

The City of Albuquerque, New Mexico issued a stop order on fiber construction being done by Ezee Fiber and Vexus Fiber. Construction contractors had hit multiple gas and water lines, including a broken water main that resulted in over $100,000 in residential damages. Crews routinely left open potholes, tore up sidewalks without restoring them, worked outside allowed hours, and failed to display proper identification. The City pulled the ISPs’ permits and required the ISPs to comply with strict new regulations, including stricter work area rules, a 30-day notice for residents before construction, and fines for violations of $500 per day, per event.

The Village of Orland Park, Illinois, ordered a complete freeze on Astound Broadband after the company cut an underground electrical line that knocked out power to 300 homes during freezing weather. The village also had numerous complaints about unrepaired property damage and open holes left in public sidewalks. The village required stricter rules before allowing a resumption of construction.

As expensive as mediation can be, it’s not as expensive as the lost goodwill of a community that will likely manifest in lower penetration rates.

Broadband Shorts September 2026

The following are topics I found interesting, but which don’t warrant a full blog – although the first item might still be expanded.

NTIA Announces a New Round of BEAD Funding. In a surprise announcement, NTIA told state broadband offices it is going to allow them to hold a new round of infrastructure grant awards using some of the money from the leftover non-deployment funds. I remember at one point that the agency said that BEAD has effectively solved the rural broadband problem. But this announcement acknowledges that there are still locations that won’t have good broadband after BEAD has been fully implemented. Many of the locations that will likely be part of new awards are those that current grant awardees are walking away from. ISPs have been loudly complaining that the level of funding from the Benefit of the Bargain round of BEAD pushed the awards too low to make economic sense, particularly considering the current high rate of inflation related to telecom construction. States are still eagerly awaiting news of the disposition of the rest of the non-deployment funds, which at this point represent more than half of the funding for BEAD established by Congress.

AT&T Stops Reporting Copper Customers. In its latest quarterly report, AT&T stopped reporting on the number of copper customers still using DSL. The company is still reporting on legacy revenues, and the company said that the legacy segment revenues dropped by $570 million for the quarter compared to a year earlier. I think there are likely several reasons why the company made this change. First, they are in the midst of a major effort to walk away from copper technology across the country, and it’s likely that they don’t want to highlight the number of people who are being booted from DSL. I’ve seen estimates that they will have walked away from hundreds of copper wire centers by the end of this year. Also, by only reporting on gains in fiber and FWA customers, they are painting a more positive picture of growth, without acknowledging that a lot of the customers for those two technologies are changing technology due to discontinued copper. One annoyance of not reporting copper customers is that we no longer know how many total broadband customers the company is serving.

SpaceX Continues to Lobby Against the High-Cost Fund. On several occasions over the last few months, SpaceX has told the FCC that the $4.5 billion High-Cost program that is part of the Universal Service Fund has outlived its purpose and should be phased out. In two different filings at the FCC in August, the satellite company says that the High-Cost program should be discontinued and that the federal government is now subsidizing rural companies to compete with Starlink. That’s an interesting argument that says the federal government shouldn’t be using money to overbuild satellite. Rural telcos and cooperatives counter this argument, pointing out that Starlink has major capacity issues and can’t serve everybody in rural areas, while small ISPs are still willing to serve everybody. The FCC is reconsidering every aspect of the Universal Service Fund, and we should start hearing their intentions over the next quarter.

Texas Pause of BEAD Funding is Still in Effect. Under pressure from the legislature, the Texas Broadband Development Office put the BEAD grant process on hold. The newly seated Texas Comptroller Dan Huffines, who oversees the broadband office, ordered a comprehensive review and audit of the BEAD process. This effort was the result of several elected officials claiming that too many locations were awarded to satellite broadband, and that satellite companies are also getting significant payment upfront when they sign a BEAD contract. It’s possible that the freeze won’t be lifted until the legislature returns in January.

Broadband Adoption to Drop? Several national witnesses told a Pennsylvania House committee in an August hearing that the State’s next big challenge with broadband will be keeping households connected. They warned that the changes in 2027 coming from the One Big Beautiful Bill, like another big increase in healthcare costs, are going to make it a lot harder for homes to afford a broadband connection. One witness estimated that 233,000 Pennsylvanians in the lowest income quintile are in danger of not being able to afford broadband.

Stock Buybacks Instead of Expansion. Elliott Investment Management has been pressuring Deutsche Telekom to pursue stock buybacks rather than pursue the major merger with T-Mobile. Elliott is a large hedge fund that is known for activism and putting pressure on companies it has an ownership share in to stress short-term returns over long-term strategies. The company is known for pushing through cost-cutting and similar actions at companies like Crown Castle, Southwest Airlines, and Salesforce. Customers of the big companies would rather see companies roll profits back into infrastructure, technology, and customer service rather than using profits to buy back stock to benefit stockholders.

Telephone Numbers

Somebody recently asked me about the origins of telephone numbers. I told them to search my blog, assuming I must have written about numbering some time over the years – but I hadn’t.

The original purpose of a telephone number was to identify a specific customer. When telephones first came into use, they could only be used to call people in the immediate area who could be connected by the local neighborhood operator. Callers identified who they wanted to talk to by name. The idea of using telephone numbers started in 1879 in Lowell, Massachusetts, when the town was suffering from a measles epidemic. Dr. Moses Greeley Parker suggested that the operators assign a number to each of the 200 subscribers so that substitute operators would be able to complete calls if the normal operators became ill. Dr. Parker was so impressed by the telephone’s potential that he began buying stock and became one of the early largest shareholders in the American Telephone Company and New England Telephone and Telegraph.

In the early days, telephone numbers were short, with just enough digits to have a number for every customer. Some rural telephone switchboards only needed one or two digits. When telephone wires were strung in larger towns and cities, the exchanges needed to have more digits. New York City was the first place to use the seven-digit dial code, which consisted of two letters and five digits. The most famous example is Murray Hill (MU) 5-9975, the number for the Ricardos’ on I Love Lucy. The show was so popular that New York Bell Telephone created the fictitious number just for the show. The phone company assigned the two-letter code to represent a neighborhood, with Murray Hill being the east side of midtown Manhattan. For youngsters who have never used an old dial phone, the letters corresponded to numbers, and the letters were printed on the phone dial pad. The MU in Murray Hill translates to 68.

In 1947, AT&T introduced the North American Numbering Plan that mandated 7-digit dialing across 25 regions in twenty countries that covered the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. This plan used the country code of ‘1+’, which is why you can still dial a Caribbean island today using only the leading 1+, while calls outside of North America require a different country code. It took until the early 1960s for the numbering plan to be implemented everywhere in North America.

The current 10-digit dialing scheme was first introduced in 1951 as a way to help automate long-distance calls. Area codes were assigned geographically, with major metropolitan areas getting the easiest codes to dial, like the 212 for New York City. For many years, calls could still be made within a region using 7-digit dialing, and the extra 3-digits for the area code were only required to make a long-distance call outside a region. The first place to mandate 10-digit calling for local calling was Atlanta, Georgia, which implemented 10-digit dialing ahead of the 1996 Olympics. This stopped visitors from other parts of the country from making local calls when they intended to dial somebody in their home state. The transition to mandatory 10-digit calling was implemented across the country over the next several decades, as adopted by State Regulatory Commissions. Full mandatory 10-digit dialing wasn’t implemented everywhere until 2021, when the FCC mandated the 988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline number.

Telephone numbers stopped representing specific neighborhoods when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandated local telephone competition and number portability, meaning that a customer could change carriers and keep the same number. In 1998, the FCC mandated number portability to the top 100 metropolitan areas. I remember asking for a new telephone number in the DC suburbs around that time and being offered a number from different towns as far away as Annapolis. If you moved outside the metropolitan area, you had to get a new number.

In 2003, the FCC ordered Wireless Local Number Portability, which fully decoupled the telephone number from a location. From that point forward, a person could keep their cellular number anywhere within the North American numbering plan.

Landline numbers became fully portable with the introduction of Voice over IP. VoIP providers like Skype and Vonage hit the market in 2003, and States and the FCC began allowing VoIP numbers to be used from anywhere.

Is Optimum Imploding?

I noticed an article that said that Optimum (Altice USA) was in danger of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. NYSE automatically issues a warning to any stock when the average share price over thirty days is below $1.00. This warning was given to Optimum on August 13, and the company has until February 13, 2027, to get the 30-day average stock price above $1.00 to remain listed on the exchange.

The company’s stock has  plummeted over the last year. A year ago, the stock was trading at $2.33 per share. Five years ago, the stock traded at more than $28 per share. As I wrote this blog, the share price was $0.89. The lowest price this year was $0.60 per share. Optimum stock is considered extremely volatile by analysts because the company had almost 50 days during the last year when the stock rose or fell by more than 5%. The changes aren’t always downward. In early June, the stock price rose more than 9% in one day on news that the company had grown to have 700,000 cellular customers.

On the surface, the stock price seems out of line for an ISP that had over four million customers at the end of the second quarter of this year. At the end of the second quarter of this year, the company had over four million broadband customers, but had lost 40,000 customers in the second quarter. The company is profitable. Second quarter EBITDA was $785.7 million, which was 2.2% lower than the previous quarter due to the customer losses. However, the company has trimmed operating expenses and capital expenditures to maximize cash flow. Unfortunately, those earnings are not enough for the company to get out of its current problems.

Optimum’s biggest problem is its debt load of $25.3 billion, with a debt payment of more than $6 billion coming due in 2027. The company is being prohibited from restructuring the debt due to a group of current Optimum lenders that have banded together and have an agreement among them that will not allow the company to restructure debt without supermajority approval from lenders. Optimum claims this is illegal price fixing and sued major investors including Ares Management, Apollo Global Management, and BlackRock. The suit, filed in New York federal court, accuses the companies of antitrust violations by creating an illegal cartel through the cooperative credit agreement.

The Dutch investment firm Next Alt S.à r.l, which is owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi, owns a majority interest in the company, with the remaining shares publicly traded. In June, Drahi tried to shake the bondholders loose from the consortium action by telling them that the company faced a $4 billion tax liability if it went to bankruptcy, a move that would greatly reduce any value to the bondholders in a bankruptcy process.

If the company is forced into bankruptcy, there is a growing circle of possible buyers for the company. At the end of the second quarter, the company had 3.1 million fiber passings out of 10.1 million total passings. The company has also convinced 9% of customers to bundle broadband with cellular service – the new convergence goal for ISPs.

But Patrick Drahi has been successful in the past in working his companies out of tight spots. But this seems like a situation that he probably can’t easily resolve.

Starlink’s Interesting Approach to Cellular

There was an announcement on SpaceX’s first-ever earnings call that got the attention of the wireless industry. SpaceX said on the call that StarLink would enter the terrestrial cellular business by building a large number of cell sites provisioned with satellite backhaul. The company would leverage the power of its next-generation V3 satellites along with an increasingly larger fleet of satellites to provide the backhaul to feed cell sites.

It’s impossible to know if the company is serious about this. Elon Musk has always made exaggerated claims of what he will be doing in the future, and many of his claims never came to fruition. On the same call, Elon also said that the company plans to build factories on the moon.

There are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of SpaceX pulling this off. First is the basic question of why anybody would wade into the U.S. cellular market that has become increasingly competitive. Starlink could probably only gain significant numbers of customers by lowering prices, and that brings into question how profitable this might be.

Cellular networks in cities have already boosted cellular data speeds to 300 Mbps or faster, so Starlink wouldn’t have any technological advantage. Perhaps the real goal of the company is not the U.S. market, but populous countries like Nigeria, which have inferior cellular networks and a population that relies on cellular much more than on landline broadband.

At least for now, Starlink doesn’t have enough spectrum to pull this off. They are acquiring 65 MHz of spectrum from EchoStar, which is not nearly enough to compete for terrestrial cellular service. However, after the recent IPO, the company is awash with cash and could buy more spectrum. In the OBBB, Congress mandated the FCC to find 800 MHz of midrange spectrum for auction, so there will be plenty of spectrum coming into play over the next decade.

Another big question for me is the overall bandwidth needed to feed a cellular network. Most cell sites today are fed with 5-10 Gigabit backbone connections. The new Starlink constellations will have a greatly increased amount of capacity, but the backhaul to hundreds of thousands of cell sites would have to eat into the overall capacity of the satellite constellation. SpaceX must be counting on being able to grow far past the current 15,000 satellites currently approved by the FCC, and in fact, they have requested to grow the constellation to 100,000 satellites. The increasing usage to support cellular would also mean the need for a lot more earth stations to feed the network.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle would be getting started. The three big carriers all have roaming agreements with each other, but they might decide not to make it easy for a new competitor to enter the market. Very few people would buy a cellular service that wouldn’t work when they travel to other parts of the country. There was speculation after SpaceX made this announcement that the real purpose was to pressure the big cellular companies into giving the company an MVNO deal (resold cellular) so it could combine terrestrial resold cellular with satellite cellular. That’s an interesting dilemma for the big cellular companies, because if SpaceX had an MVNO, it could then selectively build cell sites over time.

SpaceX will likely never stop surprising the market with big ideas that are outside of the box. While this one is certainly doable, it wouldn’t be easy unless one of the big cellular companies blinks and lets SpaceX into the cellular business through the backdoor of an MVNO. But you can never say that SpaceX wouldn’t do this even without that easy onramp.

Digital Equity Ecosystems

Today’s blog is about a new book, Digital Equity Ecosystems, written by Colin Rhinesmith. Colin is an Associate Professor of Information Sciences and the Director of the Digital Equity Action Research Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

He uses the term ecosystem as a way to encompass the wide variety of organizations and people that are necessary to bring a digital equity solution for a community. This is an interesting read for anybody who is interested in creating a sustainable community coalition to address digital equity issues in a local community or region. The common definition for bringing digital equity to a community means tackling three key issues – getting people connected to broadband, making sure people have the computers and devices needed to use broadband, and training people how to use the technology and safely navigate the Internet.

A lot of communities have created a local coalition of people and organizations interested in tackling digital equity issues. Some of this work was prompted by the pandemic, but the process went into high gear when the federal government said it would be funding digital equity efforts. A lot  of local coalitions were formed to attract federal funding but quickly realized that a big benefit of a coalition is  introducing local practitioners to each other so they aren’t working at odds with each other.

The book looks in depth at five large digital equity coalitions formed in Baltimore, Chicago, Essex County, Massachusetts, LA County, and San Antonio. Colin looks at the history of the formation and operation of each coalition to see what they had in common, and to see what worked and didn’t work. Rhinehart condenses his findings into the factors needed to create and sustain a permanent and effective coalition. The book recognizes that digital equity work requires a permanent long-term effort since there will always be community members that need help with digital equity issues.

One of the most useful sections of the book discusses the many stresses that make it challenging to sustain a coalition. Rhinesmith’s research shows that successful coalitions need to have complete transparency and be willing to openly discuss and tackle the many concerns of members that can lead to what he calls advocacy fatigue, where members drop out of the coalition when the effort needed to support the coalition competes with external time constraints.

The book draws many specific conclusions. As somebody who has participated in several local coalitions, the book’s conclusions ring true. Here are just a few of the many conclusions reached by Rhinesmith:

  • Coalitions have a better chance at sustainability if they are created organically by community members or non-profits than if the effort is led by a local government.
  • A successful coalition needs some permanent funding to support a few core people who keep the coalition operating. A coalition needs a full-time core effort to be effective since it’s difficult to keep a coalition of all volunteers going for the long haul.
  • To keep coalition members engaged, a coalition needs to regularly meet goals and accomplish specific tasks so that members can see the value of sticking with the effort.

This is a scholarly work, meaning that it comes with added features you might not get from other books on the topic. For example, the fourteen pages of references to organizations and articles on digital equity topics are alone worth the price of the book.

I heartily recommend the book for anybody who is engaged in digital equity work. Even small communities where a coalition might consist of a handful of local organizations and people will find some useful ideas in the book about how to keep the effort going.

Satellite News August 2026

Starlink’s Capacity Growing. An analysis by MoffettNathanson estimated a huge increase in potential capacity based upon a migration to the new V3 rockets. The analysis said that the current capacity with the V2 satellites is between 8 and 16 customers per square mile, which limits the overall penetration to 2% – 3% of U.S. households, even when the current 15,000-satellite constellation is completed. The new V3 satellites should bring a lot of additional capacity, including the opportunity to sell broadband in denser population areas. MoffettNathanson estimates the overall capacity, assuming that two-thirds of satellites are upgraded to V3 by 2030, is between 24% – 35% of households, or the capacity to serve 35 million to 50 million potential subscribers. This increase is fully dependent on the company being able to regularly launch the new Starship rocket, which will only be able to carry 60 V3 satellites per launch. SpaceX successfully launched a Starship rocket on July 27 that carried twenty V3 rockets into space. This was a test, and the satellites were allowed to quickly deorbit.

Satellites Monitoring Wildfires. Satellites have been used to view the progress of wildfires, but to a limited degree of effectiveness. Existing satellites don’t notice fires until they have spread to several acres, and they typically only transmit a picture of a wildfire every twelve hours. The nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance has launched three satellites that are the beginning of a fifty-satellite constellation to detect and track wildfires in real time. The full constellation won’t be in place until 2030. The satellites are sensitive and will be able to see a fire as small as a 5-meter square. When fully deployed, the satellites will be able to give an update on a fire every twenty minutes.

A Big Drop in Satellite BEAD Locations. There is a significant drop in the number of eligible locations for the BEAD grant awards made to Starlink and Amazon Leo. The NTIA analysis compared the location of BEAD awards to the new FCC mapping fabric. The new mapping identified 50,578 BEAD locations that are no longer considered as mapping points, meaning they are probably buildings like barns and sheds. The analysis showed 262,053 locations that are now considered to be served by broadband of at least 100/20 Mbps. Finally, there are 61,512 locations that would be excluded if NTIA accepts broadband provided by unlicensed spectrum to qualify as served. Altogether, these reductions could reduce the amount awarded to Starlink and Amazon LEO by at least $354 million. Note that these same kinds of reductions are also being made to fiber and other technology awards as NTIA continues to nibble away at the total BEAD dollars being awarded.

 Texas Broadband Office Facing a BEAD Audit. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows called for an audit of the Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO). The audit is coming from industry allegations that BDO too heavily favored satellite broadband over fiber and other technologies. The BDO recently put the entire BEAD grant program in the state on hold, seemingly due to this issue. Even if the accusations are proven to be true, it seems highly unlikely that NTIA would allow for higher dollar awards if the State wanted to re-award canceled satellite locations to a more expensive technology.

SpaceX Rocket Hit the Moon. The discarded upper portion of a rocket launched in January 2025 by SpaceX crashed into the moon on August 5 at a speed of 5,400 per hour, creating a 60-foot-wide crater. The original launch was to deliver a moon lander.

Data Centers in Space. Early this year, SpaceX announced plans to put one million satellites in space to create a huge AI data center. Since then, additional applications for AI satellites have been filed with the FCC, including 88,000 satellites by StarCloud, 51,600 satellites by Blue Origin, and 20,000 by Cowboy Space. These are just the U.S. companies, and there are discussions around the world of creating orbiting data centers.

SpaceConnect Association Launched. In an inevitable move, the companies in the space business created a trade association that will propose and lobby worldwide for regulations that will “enable innovation, investment, and expanded connectivity through next-generation satellite networks”. The inaugural Board consists of Chair, Ashleigh de la Torre, Vice President of Public Policy at Amazon; Secretary, Michael Schwartz, Senior Vice President, Corporate and Business at Telesat; and Treasurer, Barbee Ponder IV, General Counsel and Vice President of Regulatory Affairs at Globalstar

Change for Railroad Rights-of-way?

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals made a recent ruling that could end up eliminating one of the biggest rights-of-way issues that slow down fiber construction projects. In the case of CSX Transportation v. Zayo Group, LLC, the court ruled that the easement that CSX owns for its railroad tracks only applies to the surface of the Earth and that the railroad right-of-way does not extend either above or below the tracks.

The court said specifically that the installation of underground fiber lines or overhead fiber lines that are tall enough not to interfere with trains does not constitute “continuous trespass”. This ruling means that Zayo is free to place the fiber without the railroad company’s permission and that Zayo doesn’t have to pay any one-time or ongoing fees for the rights-of-way.

The court said that the right-of-way still belongs to the actual landowner. That’s an important distinction, because most railroad lines were granted an easement to build the railroad lines, and were not given outright ownership of the land. The land under the tracks is still owned by a local government or a private landowner. Since most fiber crossings for railroads happen where the railroad tracks cross a public road, then the state, county, or city that maintains that road still owns the actual rights-of-way and can grant it to a fiber overbuilder just like they grant rights-of-way along all public roads.

CSX had argued that the property rights related to railroad tracks do not fall under the jurisdiction of the State of Indiana, but the court disagreed. The lawsuit was originally filed when CSX alleged that Zayo had illegally trespassed in ten different situations where the company had crossed railroad tracks with fiber without paying the railroad. The court ruled that CSX didn’t have legal standing to make assertions of criminal trespass. The court further said that CSX failed to demonstrate that its railroad easements were exclusive to only railroad use, and that even if it could be construed that the railroad had that right on the surface, it couldn’t make that same claim for the ground below the easement or the air above the easement. The court said that the Zayo fibers did not disturb the railroad’s business in any way.

It’s likely that this ruling will be appealed. But if this ruling stands, it will be a big deal for companies that build networks. We’ve heard a lot of talk over the last year about the FCC wanting to override local jurisdiction for providing rights-of-way along public roads. While there are some horror stories of local government rights-of-way along roads taking too long, most permits are handled pretty routinely and are not the giant mess being claimed by the FCC. The real rights-of-way problems come when trying to build networks to cross railroad tracks, bridges, interstate highway underpasses, or parklands. Each of these situations can add both time and cost to a fiber construction project.

Railroad crossings can be a particular problem, because a large fiber project in a rural county might need to pass railroad tracks at multiple locations. It’s often not easy to determine who owns a given stretch of track, and in many cases the tracks are owned by companies that bought the easements from a defunct railroad or abandoned line. There can be big fees to cross at a single location, and I’ve seen fees as high as $20,000 to cross a single set of tracks. The even bigger problem is the delays. It’s not unusual for the paperwork for a rail crossing to stretch to well over a year.

A few years ago, the Virginia legislature tried to solve this problem by putting a shot clock on the approval for a railroad crossing and by limiting the fees. Unfortunately, that law was eventually knocked down by a court. Perhaps this ruling, made at the Appeals Court level, will have some staying power.

The Need for Public WiFi

One of the most interesting positive things that came out of the COVID pandemic was that communities and organizations across the country deployed public WiFi hotspots. This was done at the time to support students and workers who were expected to find a way to work remotely. And this worked well in a lot of places, and I’ve talked to communities who said the public flocked to the free WiFi during the pandemic.

There was another benefit of the free hot spots – they created places where people who couldn’t afford broadband suddenly had a place to access the Internet. This number of people varies by community, but the nationwide numbers suggest that around 14% of homes don’t have a home broadband solution, and as many as 80% of those folks say they would buy a home broadband solution if they could afford it.

As I wrote about in a recent blog, the number of homes without broadband is unfortunately growing due to affordability issues related to the other increasing costs of daily life like rent, food, health care, and transportation. An increasing number of homes are finding it harder to maintain their broadband connection. Several ISPs have told me about a growing number of broadband customers that regularly disconnect and then reconnect broadband during the year depending on their ability to pay the bill.

I recently realized that a huge percentage of the pandemic-inspired hot spots are gone. In some cases, the WiFi radios installed in 2000 are wearing out, and there is no funding to replace them. Other communities have turned off public WiFi because nobody is paying for the underlying broadband connection. In other cases, there is nobody who wants the responsibility of maintaining and operating the WiFi network.

There are also social issues involved in the hot spot issue. I’ve talked to a few communities that disconnected public WiFi because they didn’t like that it continued to attract people to congregate near hotspots after the end of the pandemic. They didn’t want people congregating in business or tourist districts and sometimes worried about public safety when people were using free WiFi after dark.

A decade ago, there was also a national trend for restaurants and stores to offer free WiFi. That trend has reversed, and there are far fewer places today that offer free WiFi to the public. Many businesses just stopped offering the service. A lot more put the WiFi behind passwords so that it was only easily available to customers. Many have redirected the WiFi signal to serve indoors and not to the nearby sidewalks and parking lots.

I think that one of the reasons for the decreasing interest in deploying public WiFi is a perception that everybody has a cellphone and doesn’t need public WiFi. I worked with the local social agencies in a large suburb of a major city last year, and I learned that a surprising number of people with cellphones don’t have a monthly cellular plan and only use their cellphone where they can find a public WiFi connection. But even people with expensive cellular plans have a skimpy data cap that means they must find WiFi to make it through the month.

There is one hopeful trend. I’ve seen a dozen communities that have deployed WiFi in public parks in recent years. The only downside of these deployments is that the WiFi would probably benefit the public more if it were near where people live. There are also some state programs that are supporting public WiFi, like a recent one in New Mexico. But unfortunately, for every new public hot spot being created, my guess is that a dozen are fading away. That number might be an exaggeration, but the trend is in that direction.

There was a lot of hope that BEAD nondeployment funds could be used to fund public WiFi. My guess is that, even if those funds are ever released, the funds will only be allowed to be use for specific uses that probably won’t include public WiFi. This is an issue that local and state governments can address. Of all of the broadband fixes available in the world, this is one of the lowest-cost ways to bring better broadband to communities. Unless we get a working permanent replacement for something like the ACP plan that subsidized home broadband, there are going to be a lot of homes where public WiFi is a necessity.