Category Archives: The Industry

States Ongoing Role in Broadband

Pew Research recently published an interesting Issue Brief on their website that explores the ideas of states continuing the work to ensure that there is widely available, lasting broadband in their state. It’s easy to forget that most of the giant federal broadband programs were generated as a result of the pandemic and the ensuring poor economy. If you listen to federal broadband policymakers, you’d think that broadband issues have been solved, but every state knows there are still a lot of people in their state who either don’t have access to good broadband or who can’t afford to buy it. Pew is asking states to continue the broadband effort and to not put broadband access on the back burner as an issue that has been solved.

Pew suggests what an ongoing state effort might look like if states want to develop long-term policies that ensure that citizens have access to good broadband today and into the future. Pew offers a framework of four policies for states to consider.

Broadband Deployment. Now that we are likely at the end of seeing any meaningful broadband infrastructure funding for many years to come, it’s going to be up to states to find funding to fill any remaining infrastructure gaps. Every state has them. There are still numerous low-income housing complexes and apartments that commercial ISPs are not willing to serve. There are still low-income neighborhoods that fiber ISPs are bypassing when they bring fiber to a community. There are still rural households who live at the end of long driveways that ISPs won’t serve, even when grants supposedly require them to do so. We’ve not seen the end of defaults by ISPs that have won broadband grants. And while NTIA won’t admit it, there are still a lot of places that were incorrectly excluded from broadband grants, either because of poor FCC broadband maps, or because of the drastically failed BEAD map challenge process. Pew is reminding states that if they don’t help to solve these gaps, nobody else will do so. While some of these problems will require some kind of infrastructure grant program, there are other ways that states can help to bring solutions to finally finish the infrastructure gap.

Broadband Affordability. This is a broadband issue that is being ignored at the federal level. Broadband affordability is only getting worse as inflation in housing, utilities, food, and health care keeps squeezing household budgets, making it harder to prioritize a broadband subscription over rent and food. We now know what a workable solution for affordability looks like. Congress created the Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) that provided a $30 discount on broadband prices for low-income homes. Many of the largest ISPs used this plan to create broadband products that ended up being free or very inexpensive for households. We’ve now seen New Mexico create a program similar to ACP, while a few other states offer smaller broadband discounts. Pew is reminding states that if it’s really important to them for homes to be connected, then affordability programs have to be high on the list of solutions.

Higher Speed Minimums. The FCC established 100/20 Mbps as the definition of broadband and broadband grant programs latched onto that speed in defining technologies that could be grant-funded. To compound the speed issue, the FCC broadband maps allow ISPs to claim the speeds they can deliver, and there are numerous ISPs that claim they can deliver the FCC minimum speed while delivering something slower. Pew is reminding states that anything they do related to broadband should not focus on the bare minimum required speed today but should be forward-looking for what is coming in the foreseeable future. Everybody understands that an ISP that can only deliver 100/20 Mbps today is going to feel completely obsolete in a decade. Pew says states should have priorities that require much faster speeds than the FCC bare minimum requirement for any broadband efforts they support.

Network Scalability. Pew is using scalability to remind states that they should only support companies and technologies that can be scaled in size or scaled in speed without a major future reinvestment in the existing network. Pew says that if states don’t consider scalability, they will end up supporting ISPs or networks that will grow obsolete.

Pew says that 34 states have already adopted at least two of these four cornerstones as broadband goals. Pew warns states not to assume that the remaining construction in BEAD and RDOF are going to solve the infrastructure gaps, and that many of the other grant-funded networks will be unable to meet future speed and scalability goals. There has been talk in some states about shutting down their broadband offices now that broadband availability has been solved, and Pew is trying to remind them that is not the case.

What Happened to the Smart Home?

I’ve seen articles lately that say that the smart home is dead. Before diving into that topic, I want to revisit the history of the smart home. More than a decade ago, the industry was abuzz with promises that everybody was going to install integrated smart home technology to make their lives easier. The smart home movement can probably be traced back to the 2011 introduction of the Nest Learning Thermostat, which gave people an easy way to monitor and control energy consumption.

Within a few years after that, there was an explosion of smart home technologies hitting the market. 2014 saw the release of the Amazon Alexa and the Apple HomeKit. In that same time period, companies like Vivint, ADT, and Control4 were pushing full-house systems that integrated smart lighting, smart thermostats, smart locks, smart window shades, and automated music and video control throughout a home. Comcast entered the new industry in a big way, and by 2015 offered Xfinity Home, which integrated the best devices from multiple vendors for a basic monthly fee. Over time, indoor and outdoor smart cameras, smart appliances, and smart everything joined the technology mix.

Like with every new tech market, analysts went nuts with predictions. In 2014, smart home was a featured technology at the annual CES tech show. Market analysts predicted that a huge number of homes would adopt an integrated suite of smart home technologies, and that the industry would grow to half a trillion annual dollars by 2020 (in 2025 it was a $100 million industry). I still remember the ads describing how your home would greet you when you came home from work. The thermostat would already have increased the temperature. Lighting and your favorite music would follow you as you walked from room to room. Every room would have a screen to view video or to connect online. Outdoor water system would keep your lawn and plants perfect, and robot mowers would keep the grass trimmed, all without any effort from you. Window shades would be automatically raised and lowered to capture or block sunlight as needed during the day. All of this would be controlled by talking to your smart house. By 2017 and 2018, practically every electronic device made for the home included a WiFi connection, with many also having the ability to be controlled by a voice command from Siri or Alexa.

Over time, the shine came off the technology. The devices to automate the home were expensive, and not that many people tackled whole-home automation. It also quickly became apparent that users were at the mercy of the manufacturers. For example, Google’s Nest bought the smart-home hub vendor Revolv in 2016, and two years later intentionally shut down the service, causing the $300 units to become bricks. In 2017, Jawbone went bankrupt and stranded large numbers of  smart speakers and fitness trackers. People started to understand what it means to have devices controlled by the cloud instead of locally. People also grew increasingly uncomfortable having devices like the Amazon Echo listening to everything being said in the home. Many people also grew wary of trusting the giant companies behind the smart technology. Finally, smart appliances were expensive to maintain. I had the electronics in a dryer die during the supply chain shortages after the pandemic, and I was faced with an expensive repair for a new electronics card, even if the parts had been available. I was lucky enough to be able to replace it with an American-made dryer with old-fashioned analog dials.

Starting in 2025, magazines for the real estate industry started to carry articles talking about how buyers weren’t interested in buying homes with smart technology. It seems like home buyers are moving away from smart home technology. This seems to be driven by the high cost of maintaining smart systems, privacy concerns, and overall digital fatigue. Real estate agents report that buyers are seeking homes with “unplugged” spaces, and homes with manual switches and dials instead of automation. This is probably part of a larger trend against intrusive electronics. The Washington Post reported that there is a small resurgence of landlines in homes where kids aren’t allowed to have smartphones. A lot of young people have started to buy flip phones as a way to get away from smartphone addiction. A lot of homes have taken down doorbell and indoor cameras from fear of being hacked.

Of course, nothing is universal, and there are still plenty of homes with a profusion of connected devices they actually use, and home automation is here to stay for folks who want it. But I’m still wondering what the heck I will ever do with the smart features on my refrigerator and stove.

Pew 2026 Broadband Survey

Pew Research has been doing annual national surveys of broadband usage since 2000 and recently released the results of the 2026 survey. Pew surveyed 5,511 adults across the country, with a survey that achieved an overall margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.

The most interesting thing about the survey report is that it contrasts people who use the Internet from any source with those who have home broadband. The report is full of graphs, and the data by year is available with a click under each graph.

The overall percentage of adults who use the Internet continues to creep upward and is at 96%. The bottom line story is that most people use the Internet, but there are differences when looking at demographic factors:

  • There is still an age gap, and 99% of people under 49 years old use the Internet, compared to 89% for those over 65.
  • There is a difference by ethnicity, with 98% of asians using the Internet and 93% of blacks.
  • There is very little difference by gender, with women holding a slight edge at 97% compared to 96% for men.
  • There is a definite income gap, with 99% of households with incomes between $70,000 and $100,000 using the Internet, while 91% of households with incomes under $30,000 use the Internet.
  • There is also an education gap, with 99% of college graduates using the Internet, while 93% of those with a high school education or less use the Internet.
  • There is only a slight difference in community type, with 97% of urban and suburban respondents using the Internet compared to 95% for rural residents.

There are larger differences when looking only at those with a home broadband subscription. 78% of respondents to the survey have home broadband, the same as in 2024. But there are bigger differences when considering demographic factors.

  • There is a bigger age gap than with overall broadband usage. 83% of adults between the ages of 30 and 65 have home broadband, while only 71% of those over 65 have home broadband.
  • There is a difference by ethnicity, with 82% of Whites having home broadband compared to 70% for Hispanics and 72% for blacks.
  • There is very little difference by gender, with men holding a slight edge at 79% compared to 78% for women.
  • The biggest gap in having home broadband is related to income. 86% of households with incomes between $70,000 and $100,000 have home broadband, while only 57% of households with incomes under $30,000 have home broadband.
  • There is also a sizeable education gap, with 89% of college graduates with home broadband compared to 65% of those with a high school education or less.
  • There is a sizable gap by geography for home broadband subscriptions. 85% of suburban households have home broadband compared to 75% of urban households and 72% of rural households.

The survey report also looks at those who only use a cellphone for broadband access. The overall percentage held at 16%, the same as 2024.

Why Joint Ventures?

AT&T recently announced a joint venture with Global Infrastructure Partners (“GIP”), a part of BlackRock, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to build new fiber passings. AT&T will own 50% of the joint venture, with the equity investors owning the other 50%. It gets a little convoluted, but one of the assets that AT&T is bringing to the table is the fiber assets it recently purchased from Lumen. Those assets were placed into a new company, Forged Fiber 37, which will be rolled into the new joint venture with GIP. AT&T also currently operates the Gigapower joint venture with GIP.

The new joint venture brings big advantages to AT&T. The new capital partners can bring the money needed to grow the businesses. AT&T will be using the joint venture to expand fiber outside its traditional footprint. AT&T says it expects the two joint ventures to grow to 10 million passings by the end of 2030, meaning the new joint venture and Gigapower will need to be collectively adding 1.5 million new fiber passings per year. This is good news for the cities where Lumen slowed down and didn’t complete fiber expansion. With these new ventures, AT&T is now targeting 50 million fiber passings by the end of 2030.

AT&T isn’t the only big fiber company forming joint ventures. Over the last year, we’ve seen T-Mobile enter into four different fiber joint ventures as part of the company’s plan to  have 12-15 million fiber passings by 2030.

  • It created a joint venture with the investment firm EQT to buy and expand Lumos.
  • It entered into a joint venture with KKR to purchase and expand Metronet.
  • It formed a joint venture with Oak Hill Capital to buy and expand GoNetspeed and Greenlight Networks.
  • It formed a joint venture with Wren House to acquire and expand i3 Broadband.

Joint ventures are obviously a huge new trend. A decade from now, will we find that most of the retail fiber customers are owned by joint ventures?

There are a lot of advantages to creating joint ventures for fiber expansion. Building new fiber is capital intensive, and it’s a good place for investment firms interested in steady returns to park their capital. In the case of T-Mobile, its complicated ownership structure with Deutsche Telekom makes it impossible for the company to directly buy ISPs.

The investment firms are parking money with a trusted ISP partner that they believe can efficiently put the money to use. By this time, AT&T has the fiber expansion process down to an art form. Joining forces with AT&T or T-Mobile is a lot safer for an investor than directly buying an ISP, since an investor doesn’t know how to operate and navigate an ISP in the ever-increasingly competitive marketplace.

I’ve always wondered why investors weren’t interested in buying ISPs. One obvious reason is that the ISP business is capital-intensive and returns are not spectacular. But as every ISP knows, a mature ISP business spins off a lot of reliable cash. I’ve always believed that capital investors have been too heavily enamored by the possibility of investing in a tech unicorn company to earn immense returns. But investing in possible unicorns that don’t make it means throwing away investment capital. I’ve always thought there should be more appeal in buying businesses that spin off utility-level returns but create a lot of cash forever.

There is one other possibility with this trend of joint ventures. This might be an early step in the evolution of broadband companies if the ultimate goal is to eventually roll up joint ventures into a gigantic ISP that has coast-to-coast market power. We’re going to have to wait a decade to see the intentions of AT&T, T-Mobile, and these various capital investors.

Telehealth Hubs

A telehealth hub is a location that has been established to provide a place to give the public easy access to healthcare. Today’s blog will focus on telehealth hubs in eastern North Carolina, but there are numerous other efforts being launched across the country. ECU Health is a non-profit academic health care system that serves more than 1.4 million people across 29 counties in eastern North Carolina. Formerly known as Vidant Health, the system partners with East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine.

ECU Health launched its Health Hub initiative in May 2023 as a way to bring healthcare closer to where people live. The Health Hub effort is concentrated in Pitt, Martin, Edgecombe, and Beaufort Counties, which are the most underserved areas in terms of local health care in the ECU Health footprint. These counties also still have poor broadband and cellular coverage, making it a challenge for residents to use telehealth.

Health Hubs have been strategically located in the parts of these counties that have the highest level of social vulnerability. Each Health Hub is located in a place that has good access to broadband. ECU Health has located telehealth centers in local churches, non-profits, or businesses willing to provide the space. There are now 21 telehealth sites in these counties. Each hub is equipped with necessary devices, including a computer with a webcam and microphone, and vital sign monitors like blood pressure cuffs, pulse oximeters, and thermometers. This equipment allows individuals to have virtual telehealth visits with doctors in the ECU Health system. Each site also has a Health Hub ambassador who helps residents connect with virtual care services and navigate the resources available to them.

Health Hubs are open to everyone in the community. ECU Health also makes these same services available to anybody who has a computer or smartphone and is able to connect from home. The telehealth visits have been priced at $55 per visit, which is often less than a typical insurance copay.

The hubs serve dual purposes. First, they provide a place for people to conduct telehealth visits, which is vital in a region where individuals have trouble with the transportation costs needed to travel to an ECU Health hospital or clinic. ECU Health has already seen that the telehealth hubs have reduced the number of emergency room visits that were made for non-emergency needs.

The Health Hubs are also a gateway to other community resources. They contain easy-to-read guidebooks that tell residents how to access services related to food insecurity, housing, and employment.

Telehealth hubs are a key link to health care in communities at a time when rural hospitals are closing, and there is decreasing local access to doctors and health services. Telehealth hubs are also needed in communities where people either don’t have access to or can’t afford the cost of broadband or cellular service. Systems like ECU Health understood that rural residents often skipped vital health care visits if they couldn’t afford the cost of transportation or the time off work to travel for routine health visits.

Telehealth hubs are not a replacement for rural hospitals, but they are a vital link to health care. We need a lot more networks of telehealth hubs, because without them we’re going to be seeing big swaths of rural America turned into health care deserts.

Ookla Speeds by State

Ookla issued one of its periodic reports that looks at broadband speed statistics across the country and ranks the states in terms of overall broadband speeds. The report uses speed test data at the end of the second quarter of 2026.

https://www.ookla.com/research/reports/50-us-state-broadband-speed-report-1h-2026-access-form

As usual, this kind of report has to be taken with a grain of salt since it averages all broadband speed tests from all ISPs and all technologies, so there are a ton of factors that influence a state’s broadband speed. Issues like the mix of people electing slow versus fast packages, the mix of technologies and ISPs, and the degree of competition all impact a given state’s average speed.

In general, speed tests also tend to understate ISP performance. Speed tests not only include customers with good broadband speeds that performs as intended, but speed tests capture the slower speeds due to WiFi issues within customer homes. I’ve always wondered if people having broadband problems take more speed tests than those who have good performance. The good news is that these kinds of issues affect customers everywhere, and so probably average out when comparing states.

The good news across the country is that broadband speeds are improving. When Ookla first published this report for June 2024, there were only ten states with at least 60% of speed tests above the FCC’s definition of broadband speed of 100/20 Mbps. In this latest measurement in 2026, only four states failed to meet that threshold – Alaska, Wyoming, Wisconsin, and Montana. Thirteen states now have at least 70% of speed tests beating the FCC definition of broadband. That’s pretty significant improvement in just two years.

It’s not surprising that the top-performing states in the past, like Connecticut and New Jersey, didn’t see much improvement in broadband speeds – mostly because the states have had a high percentage of homes with the option to buy gigabit broadband. The state with the biggest improvement from 2025 to 2026 was Maine, which grew to 63% of households achieving 100/20 speeds or faster in 2026 compared to 57.6% in 2025.

Ookla just started to track Starlink speeds in 2025 but is already seeing some big improvements in speeds. One of the interesting statistics in the reports is Starlink speeds by state. There are several factors that influence Starlink speeds the most. One is tree cover, and sure enough, states like West Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas are near the bottom of the list of state speeds, while plains states are near the top. But the other issue is that Starlink doesn’t have the same coverage everywhere. It’s not talked about a lot, but there are different numbers of satellites in different orbit paths. I assume Starlink puts more satellites in orbits that cross the most potential customers – and we can’t forget that the company makes that decision on the worldwide market, not just the U.S. There may be other issues affecting Starlink speeds – perhaps areas with greater numbers of customers have slower speeds.

Overall, Starlink speeds are improving. In June 2025, no state had 50% of Starlink customers meeting the FCC 200/20 Mbps definition of broadband. In the 2026 report, seventeen states now exceed 50% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps. The state with the biggest improvement was South Dakota, which now has 58.2% of customers exceeding 100/20 Mbps, compared to 37.1% a year earlier. Ookla notes that the size of the sample in South Dakota is so small that both numbers might not be reliable.

Finally, Ookla looked at rural broadband performance. Only three states didn’t see an improvement in rural speeds between 2025 and 2026. One can presume that much of this is due to the broadband networks that were being built as a result of ARPA and CPF broadband grants. Maine, Wyoming, Vermont, and Wisconsin saw the biggest improvements in rural speeds.

Hourly Broadband Billing?

Starlink recently announced plans for some interesting billing options. First, they will consider allowing customers to resell bandwidth to their neighbors by setting up small local grids. They are also considering allowing for billing by the hour, day, or week. What’s interesting about this is if this introduced in the U.S., it would allow for broadband billing in ways that already happen in many other parts of the world.

As an example, I’ve done some work in Nigeria, where customers struggle to afford broadband, and only businesses and relatively wealthy people buy unlimited monthly plans. The vast majority of broadband is provided by cellular carriers. There are a number of options for buying broadband for short periods of time. Unlike here, there is no loyalty to a specific cellular company, and a customer can choose to buy what is commonly called a daily plan from multiple cellular companies, and many people carry multiple SIM cards. These daily plans are most commonly sold in one- or two-day increments. The bandwidth on the daily plans is relatively small, with a daily cap of something like 240 MB, which might support WhatsApp messaging (which everybody uses), emails, or light browsing for things like shopping. Carriers also sell more robust data packages. For example, a customer can buy a plan for a specific app like TikTok or Facebook/WhatsApp for the day or month. Carriers also sell night plans by the day that provide enough bandwidth to download movies when the network isn’t busy.

There is a growing amount of fiber being constructed in Lagos and other cities. In Lagos, the government builds and leases out a conduit network to lower the cost of market entry for ISPs. Fiber networks deliver slower speeds than in the U.S. but are still far more robust than cellular data. Fiber providers also sell daily or weekly plans.

I can’t recall ever hearing of anybody in the U.S. trying hourly, daily, or weekly billing before. I recall some municipal Wi-Fi networks that tried to sell WiFi access that way to visitors and most failed at it. In the early years of airport WiFi, short-term billing plans were also being pushed.

If Starlink markets short-period billing in the U.S., it is a tacit recognition that a lot of people can’t afford a monthly subscription. Selling broadband by the day is broadband rationing and will lead to the kind of customer behavior I’ve witnessed in Nigeria, where customers save up broadband tasks for when they buy a daily plan. While this is better than not having broadband, it’s second-class broadband for those who can’t afford a full-time broadband subscription. Considering the number of households struggling with paying essential bills, there is likely a market for this.

The idea of allowing a customer to become a hub and share with neighbors is interesting. This is already a lot more common than you might imagine. It’s common for neighbors in apartment buildings to split a broadband bill and share WiFi through the walls. I know of examples of neighboring houses sharing broadband by running a cable or setting up a point-to-point wireless link between homes. Starlink is suggesting that people formalize this, including providing a discount for the home that becomes the main hub.

This is more of an urban idea than a rural one since homes need to be relatively close to share the signal from a common Starlink receiver. This could be a way for Starlink to crack the urban market by allowing several neighbors to share a connection to save money.

Starlink is clearly familiar with these kinds of models since it works worldwide. The company would have little chance of competing in Nigeria and many other African countries if it doesn’t allow for the way that people already buy broadband. It’s going to be interesting to see if the company really pushes these two ideas in the U.S.

How Stable is the Internet?

DE CIX, which claims to be the world’s largest Internet, cloud, and AI exchange operator, surveyed 400 of the largest IT and telecom infrastructures in the U.S. and the U.K. and reached some troubling conclusions. While 96% of those surveyed felt comfortable about the reliability of their own network, the average response was that network operators expect to spend an average of 11.5 hours per week over the next two years resolving network connectivity issues. That’s more than a workday every week diagnosing connectivity issues. One-tenth of respondents spend between 20 and 41 hours per week dealing with connectivity issues.

Just under half of the IT teams surveyed already spend more than ten hours per week troubleshooting cloud connectivity issues. The most typical problems reported include downtime or reliability issues (26%), latency or slow performance (28%), and security vulnerabilities/DDoS attacks (27%).

When asked to list their biggest concerns over the next year, the IT teams listed: latency (28%); security vulnerabilities (27%); downtime and reliability (26%); cost of connectivity (24%); data sovereignty (23%); staff expertise (22%); and visibility into data flows (20%).

The cost of network outages can be staggering. According to a study released in July by Gartner and the Ponemon Institute/Emerson, the losses for an outage for various industries is:

  • Enterprise & Data Centers: $300,000 to $540,000 per hour (with major incidents exceeding $1 million).
  • Finance & Banking: $1 million to $5 million+ per hour due to high-frequency trading and continuous transactions.
  • Auto Manufacturing & Industrial IoT: 2.3 million per hour due to assembly line freezes.
  • Retail & E-Commerce: $1 million to $2 million per hour in direct lost checkout revenue.
  • Healthcare & Hospitals: $474,000 to over $3.2 million per hour.
  • Small-to-Medium Businesses: $8,000 to $25,000 per hour.

DE CIX says these findings are particularly troubling in a world where many businesses and applications are increasingly reliant on AI, which needs low-latency uninterrupted connections. It seems likely that as AI becomes more prevalent, the impact of outages will be more widespread and cost more than estimated above.

The big Internet network carriers all brag about their reliability, but in a world where large multi-hour outages are becoming routine, there is nobody around who is delivering 5 nines (99.999%) reliability – the long-time standard for a high-quality network connection. I still see backbone contracts that guarantee major uptime, but every such contract now comes with wiggle room language that says that the carrier selling you a circuit is not responsible for outages caused by somebody else.

I’ve written before about the increase in big network outages. Verizon has already had two major outages this year, one in January and one in August. We’ve seen the negative results of major outages. Airports shut down. Numerous businesses stop functioning.

As good as our backbone networks are, they are complex, and network connections must pass through multiple nodes to cross the country. I think it would be ironic if the biggest Achilles’ heel of AI turns out to be the long-haul fiber networks and the Internet hub system in the country.

Price Competition

Maybe for the first time ever, we’re seeing some real price competition affecting the largest ISPs. The big ISPs have seen competition in some markets for the last decade, but in many markets, competition really seems to be making a difference.

Fierce Network recently quoted Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong as saying that he is seeing irrationally low prices from some fiber overbuilders who are selling gigabit broadband for as little as $30 – $40 per month. He says that it costs Comcast as much as several thousand dollar to convert an HFC customer to fiber, and that he can’t understand the rationale behind selling fiber broadband that cheaply.

He still said in the same article that he doesn’t think that customers will leave Comcast broadband to switch to FWA cellular wireless. I’m a bit mystified by that statement. The three FWA carriers have been adding a million new customers per quarter to FWA, and those customers have to come from somewhere. Ookla noted in a recent article that 70% o FWA customers are in urban and suburban areas, and it’s hard to believe that a lot of those customers aren’t coming from a cable company. I think FWA is succeeding in urban areas because of price. A customer that bundles FWA wireless with a cell plan can buy home broadband for as little as $35 per month. In today’s tight economic times when people are getting price conscious about everything, that seems like a significant savings for a household. FWA speeds aren’t terrible and customers within a mile of a cell tower can routinely see download speeds between 100 Mbps and 300 Mbps, and faster in some markets.

Competition is also forcing marketing moves by other big ISPs. Verizon recently announced that it is going to bundle fiber home broadband with cellular service on a single bill. I bought FiOS fiber from Verizon in 2007 and I have been wondering since then why the company didn’t bundle the two services. At that time, I had AT&T cellular, and I would have considered changing to Verizon if they had offered me an incentive – but no offer ever came.

I understood in 2007 why Verizon didn’t offer a bundle. Verizon was structured in distinct product silos, and the fiber FiOS, the copper DSL, and cellular businesses each operated separately. When Verizon launched fiber FiOS it didn’t even buy voice from the legacy telco and installed its own new softswitches. It’s taken the company twenty years to finally decide that bundling could be beneficial for customers and the bottom line. For the last five years, Comcast has been doing well bundling broadband and cellular in Verizon markets, and its still taken this long for the Verizon to fight back with its own bundle. One thing I tell clients you can always count on with the big telcos is that they are the exact opposite of nimble. Perhaps that’s starting to change a little.

It’s also possible that the day will come when satellite joins the competitive fray. Starlink is not a serious threat in urban areas today because of a capacity issue and the number of customers it can handle in a given area. Starlink speeds are also slower than the other urban technologies. But this might change when Starlink launched enough next-generation V3 satellites to improve speeds and capacity. And nobody knows what’s going to happen to the satellite market when Amazon LEO finally joins the fray. If Amazon decides to compete on price, it will put a lot of pressure on Starlink to match – and there are urban customers who might be willing to buy satellite broadband if the price differential isn’t a lot. There are already some urban folks buying Starlink because of its mobility. I know several people who buy Starlink so they can take their broadband along with their camper, and they use it as home broadband when they are back home.

Five years ago I predicted that broadband would routinely be priced at $100 or more, and there are noncompetitive markets today where that is the price. But there are a whole lot of markets now, where prices are a lot lower than that. Of course, none of the big companies price strictly by market any more – they price by customer and neighborhood, so what we’re really likely to see are competitive and non-competitive neighborhoods in cities, with my bet that the low-income neighborhoods will be paying the most for broadband.

Let’s Refurbish More Computers

One of my favorite groups in today’s broadband ecosystem are the folks who refurbish used computers, laptops, and cellphones so that they can be reused again. The folks who do this fill an important and needed niche in the industry. Refurbishers come in many flavors. There are both large and small non-profits that do this work. Commercial firms who do this range from neighborhood computer shops that refurbish a few devices as a sideline to larger companies that refurbish large volumes of devices.

Refurbishers don’t all have the same business model. Some non-profits do this to donate devices to those who need them. Others sell used devices for low prices. Some only fix devices, while others offer a range of services. One of my local favorites is Through the Trees, a non-profit that not only offers affordable devices for those who need them but also operates a help desk and training programs to help people learn how to best use the devices.

Refurbishers play some important roles. Getting free or reduced-cost computers into the hands of those who need them is a hugely important goal. It’s easy for people to recognize that not having a device to use the Internet is a huge barrier for folks who can’t afford to buy a computer or tablet. I know one refurbisher who first got started by providing computers to kids in homeless families.

I could write many pages on how getting a computer can change a family’s life. Getting a device means getting access to all of the online things most of us take for granted. Numerous studies have shown that students with a computer in the house gain far more digital skills than those who only use computers at school. A computer in the home can mean online banking, telemedicine, schooling and training, and taking part in the everyday digital world that most of us take for granted and don’t even notice.

Refurbishers also help the environment. I’ve seen estimates that the world generates over 60 million metric tons of total electronic waste each year. It’s estimated that we throw away over 40 million computers every year, most of which eventually end up in a landfill. Only 15% to 20% of e-waste is recycled to some degree, and what we discard ends up putting heavy metals and toxic waste like lead, mercury, and cadmium into our landfills.

Refurbishing only a small percentage of devices would make a big difference by reducing waste and by helping those who need a device. I saw an estimate that 88% of homes do nothing with used devices, and they pile up in some corner of their home.

When I’ve suggested to people that they give their computer to a refurbisher, their number one fear is that somebody will access the data they have on the computer. I would hope over time that fear lessens as we keep more and more of our data in the cloud. But there is no reason to worry about your data if you use a reputable refurbisher.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a standard guideline that defines how to scrub or sanitize hard drives before safe reuse. The NIST SP 800-88 (Guidelines for Media Sanitization) defines three key steps for proper media sanitization. Refurbishers take these standards seriously since they would otherwise face financial risks and wouldn’t be able to be insured.

  • First is destruction. NIST defines three methods of cleaning data from a device based on the data’s sensitivity and the potential risk of recovery. “Clear” means overwriting or erasing data using approved software. “Purge” means using a magnetic device or cryptographic erasure to remove data. “Destroy” means physically damaging a device through shredding, crushing, or melting so that data recovery is impossible.
  • Next is verification. This means testing the cleaned device to make sure that data is no longer accessible.
  • Finally is certification, meaning a refurbisher must provide a certificate of destruction that details the sanitization process and the details of who and how the data was scrubbed.

If you aren’t giving your old computers today to a refurbisher, you need to give this some thought. There is somebody living near you who could get some life-changing good out of your old machine.