Category Archives: The Industry

More Low-orbit Satellites

The City of Shanghai entered the low-orbit broadband satellite market. Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) launched 18 satellites in August and a second batch of 18 satellites in October. The satellites are being branded as Qianfan, or ‘Thousand Sails’.

SSST satellites are being launched by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) using the Long March 6A rocket. SSST plans to launch 108 total satellites this year and 648 satellites by the end of 2025, which are part of a first constellation of 1,296 satellites. Future launches are expected to carry from 36 to 54 satellites. The completed network will consist of 14,000 satellites, with ultimate plans of perhaps 30,000 satellites by sometime in the 2030s.

The venture is being backed by the municipal government of Shanghai which is hoping to foster a commercial space industry.

This is not the only Chinese satellite venture. The China Satellite Network group, established in 2021, plans to launch a constellation of 13,000 satellites, with the first launch expected soon. This venture has the backing of the Chinese government. The government has been working on a new generation of reusable medium-lift rockets which it expects to be ready in 2025. The first launchpad has already been constructed on Hainan Island. The government’s goal is to reach 100 rocket launches per year.

China also recently launched ten satellites for Geely Group Automotive. These satellites are the first part of a constellation that will be used to build a communications network for autonomous vehicles.

OneWeb is still putting satellites in orbit. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine War forced the company to stop using Russian Soyuz launches, and the company is now using its competitor, SpaceX, to get into orbit. OneWeb currently has 660 satellites in orbit, which meets it’s initial goal announced years ago. At this point, One Web is offering satellite services to governments and selling excess broadband capacity to residential satellite providers like Hughesnet, Viasat, and Starlink. One Web’s advantage is the use of a polar orbit that allows it to reach locations in the far north.

Starlink has continued to launch satellites and had over 30 launches this year. At the end of September, the company has launched 6,426 satellites, with 6,371 that are functional. The company still has plans for reaching a goal of 12,000 satellites in its initial constellation, and 30,000 as a long-term plan.

Project Kuiper, backed by Jeff Bezos launched two test satellites in 2023 and the company says it still has plans to launch a first constellation of 3,200 satellites.

According to GSA, which tracks the satellite industry, 34 countries are either planning, evaluating, or testing broadband satellites. There have already been satellites launched by UK, Mexico, Japan, Papua New Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, and Timor-Leste.

The skies are clearly going to be filled with satellites in a few years. It’s not hard to imagine 100,000 broadband satellites in orbit in a decade or so. One has to wonder what this will mean in terms of price competition. Starlink has one of the highest broadband prices in the U.S. Companies like SSST and Project Kuiper are likely to be serious long-term competitors, which will likely eventually bring prices down.

EchoStar Stays Alive

We are in the midst of what can only be considered as merger mania, a topic I covered in yesterday’s blog. One of the recently announced deals is the announcement that DirecTV is acquiring all video assets of EchoStar, which had just merged with Dish at the beginning of this year. This means that DirecTV will take on all of the Dish video customers along with Sling TV. As part of the merger, DirectTV is also taking on all of EchoStar’s debt.

This means several things for the industry. First, it means there will only be one satellite-based traditional video provider. DirecTV hasn’t said if it will continue to market under the Dish brand name, but the two satellite services will now be one. This will give the company the chance to consolidate and save costs. It also means that DirecTV will have a lot more cable customers and should have more leverage with programmers. Both DirecTV and Dish have been fighting with programmers to allow smaller video packages that people want. You might recall that DirecTV also currently serves the traditional AT&T cable customers.

The other interesting consequence of this is that it saves Charlie Ergen’s launch of Dish, the newest cellular company. Dish had been facing a $2 billion debt maturation next month, and many analysts predicted the company would have to enter bankruptcy. This gives Dish a clean balance sheet for the cellular business and provides the company with up to $5.5 billion in new debt headroom to complete the network and market its cellular services. The merger is not yet a done deal, and various creditors are being asked to take a haircut to help complete the transaction.

The press releases refer to the remaining Cellular company as EchoStar, and we’ll have to see if the cellular business keeps that brand name going forward.

It’s going to be interesting to watch Dish. The company spent $6 billion to meet its build-out commitments to the FCC. It’s estimated it will need a few billion more to meet the next coverage commitments in 2025.

Dish took a big chance on its original network design and pursued an open RAN architecture, which has the goal of using off-the-shelf generic hardware instead of the proprietary gear offered by the handful of industry vendors. The open RAN hardware has taken longer to perfect than hoped for, and the company ended up building a network that is a mix of open RAN and more traditional gear.

Dish has struggled. It acquired Boost Mobile and saw customers drop from 10 million to under 7.5 million. But the company seems poised to start attracting customers to it’s new 5G networks, which are likely wide open. I’ve been looking at the FCC cellular maps a lot lately, and I see Dish is in many markets like around my city, where it likely doesn’t yet have many customers.

It’s interesting how quickly the cellular industry has changed. The FCC required T-Mobile to support the launch of Dish as a term of T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint. At that time, just a few years ago, the FCC felt that the market would suffer without a replacement for Sprint. But since then, the big cable companies are aggressively selling cellular and migrating traffic to their own existing wireline networks. Other large ISPs and telcos other than AT&T and Verizon are exploring the cellular business plan as well.

One of the more interesting possibilities for Dish is to enter the fray in pursuit of FWA cellular broadband customers.

Merger Mania

The industry is suddenly awash with talks of acquisitions and mergers.

In September, Verizon announced the acquisition of Frontier Communications in an all-cash deal valued at $20 billion. The deal was touted for adding Frontier’s fiber customers to Verizon’s base of FiOS customers – which would grow Verizon to approximately 10 million customers.

T-Mobile has announced two acquisitions of fiber overbuilders. The first was the acquisition of Lumos, which has been building fiber in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Lumos currently has over 300,000 customers, but T-Mobile said it would continue to invest for the company to grow pass 3.5 million homes by the end of 2028. T-Mobile also announced the purchase of Metronet, a fiber overbuilder from the Midwest that has expanded into 17 states. Metronet currently passes 2 million homes, and T-Mobile says it will invest to grow to 6.5 million fiber passings by the end of 2030.

T-Mobile is also buying Uscellular from TDS for $4.4 billion. This purchase has drawn attention from six Senators who disapprove of the sale.

As I was writing this blog, Bell Canada, a subsidiary of giant BCE, announced it wants to buy Ziply for $3.6 billion. Ziply was formed in 2020 by buying properties in the Pacific Northwest from Frontier.

DirecTV announced recently that it will acquire all of the video assets of EchoStar, which had just merged with Dish at the beginning of this year. This means that DirecTV will take on all of the Dish video customers along with Sling TV. As part of the merger, DirectTV is also taking on all of EchoStar’s debt.

Will not directly broadband, but highly related, Qualcomm has made overtures to buy Intel. This is a particularly interesting offer since a decade ago Intel had looked at buying Qualcomm.

Fierce Network published an article in September that said that 400 fiber ISPs are ripe for acquisition. Assuming that even just fraction of those ISPs are interested, this foretells a lot more coming announcements of industry consolidation. There is an interesting quote in the article. Andrej Danis of AlixPartners said that many fiber overbuilders “will never reach critical mass.”

This is an interesting observation that highlights the difference between how the financial world and investors look at the fiber business compared to many of the ISPs who have built fiber.

Many fiber businesses clearly have the goal of growing large enough to flip to somebody larger. The investors in these businesses are largely venture capitalists who hope to sell companies at a premium multiple of what they paid to build the business. For example, the Lumos deal is reported to be valued at over $9,000 per existing broadband customer – a lot more than what the company spent to build the existing networks.

Almost anybody who owns a fiber ISP is going to be tempted to sell at those kinds of valuations. But there are still a lot of ISPs with a different motivation. Once a broadband network is mature, it turns into cash cow and spins off a lot of cash annually. I know ISPs that have expanded fiber networks strictly for the permanent cash flow that builds long-term family wealth. Such ISPs envision operating networks for many decades to come.

A New Complaint About BEAD Maps

Earlier this month the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) made an ex parte filing with the FCC that warned that the current FCC maps do not reflect the reality on the ground of rural broadband. They warn that there are a lot of places that need broadband that will not be covered by BEAD. They warn that areas that don’t get funding now by BEAD will be left behind.

Anybody who reads this blog knows that I’ve been making this same argument for the last several years. As NRECA points out, the new FCC broadband maps are a big step up from the previous FCC mapping. The old maps reported broadband by Census block, and in doing so often showed an area as having good broadband when only a few places in the block had a faster technology.

NRECA points out that the fatal flaw in the new maps is that ISPs self-report broadband speeds and are free to report marketing speeds instead of something closer to what is actually delivered to customers. It was an interesting policy choice for the FCC to make since this doesn’t match what the FCC is doing elsewhere. For example, the FCC requires ISPs to report broadband speeds for each product on the new broadband labels. The rules for the labels suggest that ISPs should report speeds that have some basis derived from internal ISP speed testing. In my early examination of broadband labels, most ISPs are ignoring this requirement and claim the identical speed on the broadband labels that is reported on the FCC maps.

ISPs know the speeds they are delivering to customers. Most broadband networks have the ability to measure speeds from their core network to the customer location – a speed that doesn’t get influenced by the performance of WiFi inside of a customer premise.

I’ve seen numerous examples of speeds reported for the FCC maps that are far faster than speeds measured by speed tests. For example, I recently found a big telco reporting 100/20 Mbps for rural DSL, while Ookla speed tests show an average speed around 25 Mbps – and no speed test faster than 40 Mbps. I’ve seen the same thing for WISPs and FWA cellular broadband, where Ookla speed tests are far slower than what is being reported to the FCC. There are cable companies with no speed tests of upload speeds faster than 20 Mbps, which means their areas should be eligible for BEAD grant funding.

In its filing, NRECA suggested that the public should be allowed to take speed tests to report to the FCC. The FCC certainly has the ability to crowdsource speed tests since it does so for cellular broadband. Customers can take a cellular speed test using an FCC speed test app. I can’t think of any reason why the FCC couldn’t directly collect speed tests directly from customers using the same or a similar app. I’m also mystified why the FCC couldn’t partner with one of the big speed test sites like Ookla to gather the many millions of speed tests that are already being taken every day.

ISPs do not want customer speed tests to be part of the equation, and they have some valid arguments that the results of any given speed test can’t be trusted. Every ISP will tell you that a big part of the problem that customers have with broadband is the WiFi signal inside their home. They might have old or inadequately configured routers. They might be taking speed tests from a computer located far from the in-home router.

But interestingly, if you gather enough speed tests, a good picture of broadband performance emerges. I’ve always focused on the maximum speeds measured for a given ISP. If an ISP says it can deliver 100 Mbps or gigabit speed, then there should be some speed tests close to that speed. My experience is that looking at large numbers of speed tests will quickly identify ISPs who are reporting speeds far faster than what they are delivering.

To be fair to ISPs, speed tests can also show the opposite. I’ve seen ISPs that claim a speed on the FCC maps of 25 Mbps or 50 Mbps but are delivering much faster speeds.

The NRECA is absolutely right about the BEAD grants. There are a lot of rural areas that will be excluded from BEAD because of overstated broadband speeds. Broadband offices and the NTIA will say that there is a BEAD map challenge process to address this issue. But I could write a whole series of blogs describing the ridiculous steps that NTIA is requires to mount a successful map challenge for BEAD. Even if the map challenge process was reasonable, many local governments don’t have the resources or budget to mount a serious map challenge. This means that counties that were unable to mount a successful BEAD map challenge have a good chance of having locations improperly excluded from BEAD.

When the dust settles from BEAD grants, there are going to be a whole lot of rural neighborhoods that will not get a broadband solution – and they are going to be vocal about it.  My prediction is that this is going to end up being a few million such rural locations. As much as the industry wants to pretend that BEAD is going to solve the rural broadband issue, anybody who looks close at the FCC maps and the BEAD process knows this is not the case.

The High Cost of Broadband

U.S. News and World Report published the results of a broadband survey in April 2024 that looked at what people pay for broadband. Respondents to the survey said they had originally paid an average price of $77 for Internet service but that current bills had climbed to an average of $89 per month through price increases or from the lapse of promotional pricing.

They recently updated the survey in the five most populous states – California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania, and surveyed 500 people in each state. The survey asked about the initial price of broadband when people first subscribed and the price today. They asked about issues like data caps that affect prices. They asked if people understood their broadband speeds. And they asked how respondents felt about the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program.

Following are some of the key findings from the latest survey:

  • Overall, the survey found higher prices than the earlier survey. The average initial price paid by all respondents in this survey was $81, compared to $77 in the previous survey. They found that the average current monthly bill is $98, which is considerably higher than $89 found in the previous survey.
  • Between 12% and 17% in various states had run into a data cap issue.
  • 53% of respondents said they had some level of challenge paying their broadband bill. 14% of respondents said they often found it difficult to pay their broadband bill, while 39% said they occasionally had a challenge.
  • 76% of respondents said they would like the government to put a cap on the monthly cost for broadband.
  • 87% of respondents were in favor of revamping the Affordable Connectivity Plan that gave a $30 discount for low income households. I have to think they surveyor had to explain ACP to most people – it’s hard to imagine that a huge percentage of people know what that is.

By state, the average original price and current average price for broadband is:

  • California – $78 and $95
  • Texas – $81 and $92
  • Florida – $79 and $91
  • New York – $85 and $99
  • Pennsylvania – $83 and $110.

Since overall prices are higher than the previous survey, I wonder if broadband is more expensive in big states? My consulting firm does broadband surveys, and we’ve never gotten a response with an average rates as high as $98.

These survey results tell a very different story than is told every year by USTelecom, the trade association for the largest ISPs. In last year’s fourth annual Broadband Pricing Index, USTelecom made the claim that overall broadband prices dropped over 18% between 2022 and 2023.They make this claim by looking at broadband as a cost per subscribed megabit of speed – which has no relevance to the way that people use broadband.

I wish surveys like this one would ask one more question. I’d like them to ask if respondents feel they have a choice of ISPs. My gut tells me that customers who are served by the only fast broadband ISP likely pay a higher price than people who can choose between multiple fast ISPs.

The Trajectory of FWA

In what is bad news for many other ISPs, both T-Mobile and Verizon have plans to continue their aggressive growth of FWA cellular broadband. As a reminder, this is home broadband delivered from cell towers that mostly uses the same spectrum already being used at cell towers for cell service.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have had unprecedented success with this new broadband product since it first launched in 2021. The following table shows the growth in FWA so far this year.In the first two quarters of this year, the three carriers added almost 1.8 million customers, while big cable companies lost almost 500,000 customers, and big telcos saw a net gain of under 50,000 net new customers.

AT&T is the newest provider of FWA service and just getting serious about selling the service in 2023. AT&T does not provide FWA everywhere it has cell customers, and strategically uses FWA, mostly in rural markets, as a replacement technology when discontinuing copper service. AT&T continues to be focused on fiber expansion and has passed far more new locations with fiber in recent years than anybody else.

T-Mobile has been the most aggressive in deploying FWA broadband and now has over 6 million customers. T-Mobile says it’s goal is to reach 8 million customers by the end of 2026, which would require a continued growth of 400,000 new customers per quarter. T-Mobile recently announced longer-term plans to reach 12 million customers by the end of 2028 – which would mean stepping up customer acquisition to an average of 500,000 net new customers per quarter.

Verizon recently announced plans for aggressive FWA growth. The company says it will set a goal somewhere between 8 and 9 million customers by the end of 2027. This would mean average growth in the range of 275,000 to 350,000 customers per quarter – slower than the current rate of growth.

T-Mobile currently has over 1 million customers on a waiting list for FWA. Like Verizon, T-Mobile uses excess spectrum capacity at cell sites for FWA. Each company likely has an algorithm for each cell site to calculate the safe number of FWA customers that can be added without degrading cellular broadband service. Both carriers have said that they can’t justify building cell sites strictly for FWA service and only plan to deploy it at current or new cellular cell sites.

Verizon has been increasing FWA speeds in some markets by layering on C-band or millimeter wave spectrum for FWA. The advantage FWA has today is lower prices, but the product become formidable if download speeds can compete with fiber and cable companies.

If the three companies meet their growth goals, they will collectively have almost 20 million broadband customers in 2028 – almost as big as Charter or Comcast today. This growth is by far the biggest disruption of the traditional broadband industry, with FWA growth taking customers away from all other ISPs.

The real key to these growth plans is waiting to see if the public likes the FWA product and doesn’t go back to faster broadband alternatives. Reaching 10 million customers so quickly is impressive and unprecedented in the industry. But it’s no guarantee that they can grow at the same pace to reach 20 million customers.

 

Comparing State Broadband Performance

Ookla recently published a report that compares broadband connectivity and performance in each state. The report highlights the percentage of broadband customers who are receiving broadband speeds that meet the FCC’s definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps.  This is also the speed threshold being used for the $42.5 billion BEAD grant program, which is supposed to provide grants to every part of the country that can’t achieve 100/20 Mbps. Ookla is the largest and most commonly used speed test in the country and receives millions of tests each day, so these comparisons are based on huge numbers of speed tests.

The Ookla results are interesting and give states a way to compare themselves to peer states. Connecticut, North Dakota, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Tennessee had the highest percentage of speed tests that met the 100/20 Mbps threshold. downstream and 20 Mbps upstream. Each state had over 62% of speed tests faster than 100/20 Mbps – with Connecticut at 65.8% and Tennessee at 62.2%.

Ookla also got more granular in its analysis. For example, the analysis compared average speed tests result in each state for urban and rural broadband customers. There is a map in the report that industry folks are going to want to explore. This comparison produced some interesting results:

  • Connecticut, which has the overall highest percentage of homes receiving 100/20 Mbps had 72.4% of urban households and 62.3% of rural households receiving that speed. Number two overall fastest was North Dakota which had 69.7% urban and 64.6% rural.
  • The state with the biggest urban/rural digital divide was Washington, with 61.1% of urban households and only 28.7% or rural households receiving 100/20 Mbps.
  • South Carolina has a higher percentage of rural homes receiving fast speeds (56.4%) than urban homes (55.1%). The other states where urban and rural broadband performance is similar are North Dakota and Nevada.
  • Some of the most populous states had low rural broadband speeds including Illinois (38.7%), New York (39.4%), and California (40.1%).
  • The states with the lowest percentage of rural homes meeting 100/20 Mbps are also the least densely populated – Alaska (17.3%), Montana (20.8%), and Wyoming (25.3%).
  • The other states with percentage of rural broadband coverage under 40% include New Mexico (29.4%), Wisconsin (31.4%), Oregon (32.2%), Idaho (34.1%), Michigan (37.5%), and Maine (37.6%). These are the states that will require a heavy life from BEAD grants.
  • Some states are probably surprising to those outside of the industry. The best example is Mississippi, which historically had poor broadband coverage. However, the analysis shows urban coverage at 62.3% and rural at 56.6%. There is a lot of industry derision aimed at the RDOF program, but that program enabled rural electric coops in the state to build fiber.
  • Finally, a few states showed big improvement between the first two quarters and 2023 and the first two quarters in 2024. The states with the biggest improvements are New Mexico (50%), Arizona, (45%), Minnesota (38%), and Nevada (37%).

Anybody who looks closely at speed test results will quickly understand that any given speed test might not be accurate because of issues inside a home. A home might receive adequate broadband, but an old or underperforming WiFi router might lower the speed delivered to devices. WiFi is also subject to distance and interference issues, and computers located at the far end of a house might receive significantly slower speeds.

However, when taken in mass, speed tests provide an accurate comparison – if you assume that WiFi is a problem everywhere. This means is that every state actually has a higher percentage of homes that receive 100/20 Mbps than shown by the Ookla numbers. However, the relative differences between states, or between urban and rural parts of states are believable.

The Barrier to Closing the Digital Divide

In a finding that will surprise nobody, Pew Charitable Trust analyzed all of state plans related to the Digital Equity Act (DEA). This is the grant program that is aimed at tackling barriers to broadband adoption, such as getting computers into homes, providing training on how to use technology and the Internet, and increasing broadband adoption rates. Pew found that every state and territory says that the primary barrier to closing the digital divide is affordability.

The DEA is the first federal grant aimed at directly tackling digital equity barriers – previous federal grants have largely concentrated on broadband infrastructure. The DEA will provide grants administered directly by NTIA and is also providing funding for every state to make local grant awards.

States area really struggling with the affordability issue after Congress let the Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) lapse – the plan that provided a $30 monthly discount for low-income households. ISPs had responded well to the ACP program. For example, the biggest cable companies offered plans that were zero cost to customers who qualified for ACP, or that let them take the discount for faster-speed plans. States could see that ACP was getting broadband into millions of homes that would not have otherwise afforded it.

A lot of states were expecting to use the DEA grant funding to help people enroll and take advantage of the ACP plan. The vision was that there would be a home broadband plan that every household could afford. The DEA funding was also going to be used to buy computers for homes and to train people on how to best use the Internet.

It’s easy to say in retrospect that every State, County, or non-profit that proposed to use ACP as the primary tool for solving the digital divide was somewhat naïve. It was clear from the start that the ACP program only had enough funding for a few years and that Congress would need to act to keep the plan going. We’ve had a Congress for over a decade that struggles to pass needed legislation. Lawmakers from both parties sponsored bills to continue the ACP, but no bills ever got enough support to even get a Committee vote.

States are now scrambling to find alternative ways to improve broadband in communities with low broadband penetration. The Pew article outlines a few such efforts being tried in communities:

  • Expand free WiFi at community anchor institutions to provide more places for the public to connect to the Internet.
  • Bring free broadband to public housing.
  • Bring free WiFi to parks and other commonly used outdoor locations.
  • Establish tech hubs where people can not only get free WiFi but can use public computers and get trained on how to use computers and broadband.
  • Lending programs to get Internet-connected devices to the public.
  • Establish telemedicine hubs.
  • Fund WiFi infrastructure for newly constructed low-income housing.

These are all great ideas, but they are all not nearly as beneficial as getting broadband directly into every home. I wrote a blog in 2020 about a study done by the Quello Center, which is part of the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State. This study was conducted in a way to isolate the results from factors such as household income and race, and it showed definitive proof of the advantages to students of having a computer and broadband in the home. One of the most stunning findings of the study was that “The gap in digital skills between students with no home access or cell phone only and those with fast or slow home Internet access is equivalent to the gap in digital skills between 8th and 11th grade students.”

States rightfully still have a goal to get broadband into every home, and a handful of States are looking for ways to create a State broadband subsidy similar to the ACP. State funding such plana is expensive, but this might be one of the most beneficial ways that a State government can help low-income households.

It’s frustrating to see government programs that work die from lack of funding. Pew has been one of the strongest proponents of continuing the ACP plan. But it feels like every day that goes by, the more remote the chance of the ACP being resurrected.

Is Broadband Inflation-proof?

Inflation has returned to the historical average of around 2.5% per year, but we’ve experienced several years in a row of much higher-than-average inflation. In times of inflation and rising prices, consumers and businesses normally cut back on expenditures.

For years, I’ve believed that broadband and cellphones usage is somewhat immune to inflation, meaning that people don’t ditch these services unless they have no other choice. In a very ad hoc and non-scientific poll, I’ve been asking ISPs about the impact of inflation on customer subscription rates. Many small ISPs don’t do an exit interview with customers who are disconnecting, so they don’t always know why they lose customers. But no ISP I talked to said that they were aware of losing any significant numbers of customers who could no longer afford their broadband plan.

For a more detailed look at the question, I found a survey done by Recon Analytics in April 2023 at the height of inflation. The survey asked consumers the kinds of expenditures they expected to cut back in a time of increasing prices.

The responses were what you might expect. About 20% of households said they didn’t plan to cut spending. But most respondents said they would trim expenses. The biggest category of planned savings was to reduce dining out, and 50% of respondents said they planned to dine in-home more. Next on the list was clothing, with 39% of respondents saying they would buy fewer clothes. 19% of respondents said they would cut back on streaming video and audio services. 16% of consumers were considering cutting the cord on linear cable TV. 14% of consumers planned to cut back on driving and gas costs. 14% of consumers were going to cut back or cancel gym memberships.

Only 8% of consumers planned to cut back on home internet or cellphone expenses. A deeper dive into these customers showed that customers planned to save money without discontinuing service. Some households planned to switch to less expensive broadband or cell plans, which probably explains a lot of the success of FWA cellular broadband. Some consumers planned to downgrade broadband to a slower speed tier. I saw a different survey that showed that people were hanging onto cellphones longer before upgrading.

The survey found almost nobody willing to discontinue broadband or cellphone usage completely. This is a testament to how embedded broadband and cellphones are in our lives. The average American adult spends an average of over 7 hours per day online – which is evenly split between computer and cellphone usage.

Most of us have good reasons for not wanting to lose broadband. At the end of 2023, over 12% of U.S. employees worked remotely. A huge percentage of homes use broadband for entertainment to stream video and music. 70% of American adults use social media. Three out of four Americans plan games online. Most households now bank online. An increasing number of people use telemedicine. And who doesn’t shop online?

Since I’m in the broadband business I often talk to folks about these issues, and it’s become clear to me that people value broadband as much as they do having electricity and water in their homes.