Category Archives: The Industry

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.

FWA and the Urban Digital Divide

The end of ACP put the kibosh on the business plans of ISPs working to tackle the urban digital divide. I’m aware of a several ISPs working to bring broadband to neighborhoods where the majority of customers qualified for the $30 ACP discount. These business plans only made sense because a chunk of the revenue was guaranteed by ACP.

While some say that ACP is not yet dead, at this point, it looks like it will take a miracle, or at least a powerful champion in DC, to reinstate something like the ACP. I’ve been brainstorming with communities about alternatives to ACP, and I’m starting to think that perhaps FWA cellular service is the next best alternative.

I’ve had access over this past year to large volumes of Ookla speed tests in different markets, and what I’ve seen is that FWA cellular carriers are successfully delivering speeds of 100 – 300 Mbps within a mile or two of a cell site. I’ve seen neighborhoods on the FCC map where Verizon is now claiming gigabit capability, but I haven’t seen any speed tests yet in those areas to see what that means in real life. However, wireless broadband speeds get a bit wonky in cities where small dead zones pop up in the shadow of hills or buildings that block the signal.

FWA cellular is often the most price-competitive broadband alternative now that ACP is gone. Prices of $50 and $60 per month for unlimited broadband are a lot more attractive that the prices of the big cable companies.

There are network issues with using FWA on any mass scale. Carriers aren’t talking about the network management side of FWA in any detail, but from various corporate announcements it seems like FWA is mostly intended to monetize excess bandwidth capacity at towers. That means that in any given neighborhood, there is some natural cap on the number of customers an FWA carrier is willing to serve to not harm normal cellphone traffic. While carriers don’t want to talk about it, there is a lot of evidence that the wireless broadband signal varies in strength and is not nearly as stable as landline broadband. FWA is not a great technical solution for dense MDU properties and is probably best used for single-family homes and small businesses.

Deploying FWA on a significant scale means making new investments. I can’t imagine that cellular carriers are interested in making investments in infrastructure and marketing costs to sell FWA broadband in low-income neighborhoods. Expanding an FWA network means constructing new cell sites, probably small cell sites, and involves getting fiber backbone to new sites.

But I can picture various kinds of partnerships between a City and cellular carriers that might work. One kind of partnership would be on the infrastructure side. I can picture a City or an ISP looking for a low-income broadband solution and willing to invest in small cell sites and fiber to feed them as part of bringing a more affordable broadband solution to selected neighborhoods.

I can also envision various partnerships on the customer/marketing side. For example, cellular carriers today are involved in numerous wholesale arrangements with companies that repackage and resell services on their network. I can envision a city or ISP willing to buy thousands of bulk FWA connections a month – and with a wholesale discount, they could offer lower prices to low-income homes. I have to think there are many variations of these themes and a slew of possible partnership arrangements.

This is all reliant on cellular carriers willing to enter into a discussion of partnerships. Such partnerships would be obviously good for low-income residents and could help to increase broadband adoption in low-income neighborhoods. This would be good for cities that will benefit by having more residents connected to broadband. This could also benefit the cellular carriers by bringing them new customers and revenues, with somebody else tackling the marketing effort on their behalf.

How’s Your Cellular Coverage?

The FCC recently announced that it is ready to launch its 5G Fund, which will provide $9 billion to bring better 5G cellular coverage to rural America. The FCC will be choosing the areas that are eligible for the 5G Fund using mapping data it collects from cellular carriers of where they claim to serve. An area is considered as served for purposes of the 5G Fund if at least one carrier is providing 5G cellular coverage with a speed of at least 7/1 Mbps.

That requirement for a specific speed should sound familiar, because for broadband grants, an area is considered covered if at least one ISP offers a speed of 100/20 Mbps.  But there is one big difference between broadband coverage and cellular coverage – the mobility issue.

If the FCC broadband maps are accurate and one ISP really can deliver a broadband speed of at least 100/20 Mbps – then the FCC has deemed that customers to have an option to buy broadband. But cellular coverage is very different. People don’t necessarily choose a cellular carrier because the speeds are good at their home. They also care about the coverage when they are commuting, shopping, going to school, etc.

Most rural county seats or other sizable towns have several cellular carriers with good coverage in and around the towns. When I hear complaints about lack of rural cellular coverage, this often translates to mean that people who live in towns lose coverage when they drive into rural areas. When I look in detail at specific counties, I find many examples where the carriers that claim coverage in the rural areas are not the same carriers that most people in the towns are using.

When I look at the FCC cellular maps in my county, I find large areas where only one carrier claims coverage. The FCC maps show that in my county, there are pockets where only T-Mobile, UScellular, or Verizon claim service. If I cross a little further into the next county, I find large rural areas where the only carrier with claimed coverage is Dish.

This creates a dilemma that is not recognized in the FCC’s definition of cellular coverage. The reality is that delivery drivers, real estate agents, commuters, and anybody else who regularly moves between the city and rural areas must subscribe to multiple carriers to guarantee a working cellular signal. I subscribe to AT&T since, in my hilly city, Verizon and others have a dead zone at my house. But AT&T has the least amount of rural coverage in the county, and so my AT&T phone gets no signal when I travel outside the city. And when I say outside, I usually lose coverage with AT&T within a few short miles outside of town.

Earlier this year I interviewed a real estate agent who works in a rural county in Illinois. She has to carry phones subscribed to four different carriers in order to be able to have coverage at the various homes she is trying to sell. I’ve heard similar stories from many people who travel during the day such as delivery drivers and social workers.

This creates a big real life conundrum. According to the FCC maps there are no large areas of my county that don’t have at least one cellular carrier that claims coverage. This county is not going to get any new cell towers from the 5G fund. And yet everybody I know says they have poor cell coverage outside the city. No matter which carrier they use at their home, they quickly drive to areas outside the city where that carrier doesn’t work.

I understand that this issue is probably worse in hilly Appalachia where I live since there are dead zones everywhere caused by the hills. But this issue appears everywhere. I was working in a rural Minnesota County in a flat farming area where half the county can only get AT&T at home and the other half can get Verizon. This means a hassle and havoc for anybody who travels between the two areas.

What I am describing is the natural consequence of cellular signals that only carry for a limited distance from any tower. In my county, somebody who works around my county needs to be able to connect at times to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Uscellular. The only way to do that is to have four phones or else pay huge fees for roaming.

I love the idea of the FCC’s 5G Plan since it will bring cellular coverage to areas where no carrier serves. But the 5G Plan is not going to solve the general public feeling that rural cellular coverage is terrible. I think that what is needed is for the FCC to implement roaming fees and policies that make it reasonably affordable to use your cellphone when you drive into an area served by somebody other than your home carrier.

Communications After a Disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cellular from Satellites

There was a burst of recent press about cellular service provided from satellites. This was probably prompted by the two recent hurricanes that have disable terrestrial cellular and broadband networks in the southeast. I’ve seen speculation and discussion on Reddit and other forums where people have been wondering if satellite is the future of cell service and if the ubiquitous giant cell towers will eventually become obsolete.

The short answer to that question is no, but the longer answer is that there are a lot of reasons why this is unlikely to happen. The first is pure physics. Radio waves of all types spread over distance, and a cellular signal sent from a satellite will spread and weaken a lot compared to the same signal sent from a cell tower in your neighborhood. As radio waves spread, the size of the receiving antenna needs to be larger to catch the full signal. A cellphone does not present a big enough area to receive a strong satellite signal. You can easily see this by comparing the size of your cellphone to the size of a Starlink receiver.

Everything I’ve read says that there is also a major line-of-sight issue with cellular wireless connections. I don’t know about you, but the vast majority of my cellphone calls are made inside my house, a business, or a moving car. How useful is satellite cellular if it only operates optimally when you are outdoors?

The strength of cellular signal equates to quality. Speed tests show that my AT&T cellular signal is consistently over 100 Mbps and sometimes as high as 200 Mbps. Space cellular companies cannot match those speeds. My cellphone is consistently faster than the speed test results I’ve seen for Starlink home broadband.

Another huge issue is spectrum. Terrestrial cell companies use several different bands of spectrum to deliver cell traffic – all they need to do to add a new band is to get handset vendors to build it into future phones. None of these same bands of spectrum are available for satellite providers since the spectrum has been allocated to cell companies by the FCC through auctions. To provide ubiquitous satellite cellular, the space carriers need to find a lot more spectrum and get it built into handsets.

Then, there is a national security issue. Imagine if we moved all cellular coverage to space. It would present an attractive target in times of war. It would be much easier to sabotage a satellite network than the hundreds of thousands of terrestrial cell towers.

Finally, I’ve always believed in the old maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I think a large majority of people are happy with the way their cellular works. It’s hard to imagine people ditching traditional cellular service for something that doesn’t work as well.

With all of that said, there is still a market for satellite cellular in the U.S., and probably a bigger market for it around the world. There are still many rural places in the U.S. where cellular coverage is terrible, or non-existent. The FCC is poised to tackle the holes in rural cell coverage using the soon-to-be-launched 5G Fund for Rural America. When those networks are built, the market for satellite cellular in the U.S. will be even smaller.

But even then, there will be a sizable market for satellite cellular in the U.S. Nobody is going to ever build cell towers to cover the vast wilderness areas of the country. Satellite cellular is going to be very popular with campers and hikers and folks who work in remote areas since it gives them a lifeline to the world.

Satellite cellular could be a boon to much of the rest of the world. Even countries with a lot of cell sites often do not have the same kind of fiber backhaul used at our towers. In places where cellular is the primary form of broadband, cell towers are often already badly oversubscribed. Where our cellular speeds are often over 100 Mbps, the speeds in many third world countries is a tiny fraction of that speed.

I suspect the companies doing this will do quite well if they can make the cellular reasonably functional. But it’s hard to envision satellite cellular as a competitor to terrestrial cellular in first world countries.

Grant Bottlenecks

Cardinal News, a newspaper for Southwest and southside Virginia recently published an article that says that as many as two-thirds of the State broadband grants awarded in 2022 have fallen behind schedule.

The reasons for the delays in the Virginia grant projects are familiar to every ISP who has built a new network. The primary issue in Virginia has been the make-ready process for poles. This is work that must be done to make poles ready to accept a new fiber. Some poles require no make-ready, some require a rearrangement of existing wires, and many unfortunately require replacing an existing pole.

Some of the projects were delayed due to the paperwork needed before the physical make-ready process could begin. This includes getting pole attachment agreements in place and having engineers decide on the make-ready work needed for each pole. Once that process is complete, there are rules that dictate the make-ready timeline.

Virginia has elected to remain under FCC jurisdiction and rules for pole issues, but the State passed a law in July specifically intended to speed up make-ready work. But frankly, any rules or laws about pole access are nearly meaningless in places like the Appalachian regions of southern Virginia, where poles run through heavily wooded areas. It takes longer to tackle this work in rural, hilly areas on windy roads. It’s not going to help that some of the projects in southwestern Virginia now had to deal with damages from Hurricane Helene.

The reason I wrote the bog was not to highlight the Virginia issues, because it sounds like the State is on top of the issues and that the projects will likely get completed before hitting the end of 2026 when the federal funding for these projects expires. Virginia is also ahead of most other states in that the State set aside additional funding to help keep broadband projects on track. The reason for the blog was to highlight the likely delays that are going to happen when BEAD grants hit the ground.

It was originally thought that States would be on significantly different schedules for BEAD. However, the NTIA implemented a 365-day shot clock that requires States to make grant awards within a year after getting approval of a State’s Volume II BEAD rules. This means that within a six to nine month window, all BEAD grant projects are going to get rolling at the same time.

I’ve always anticipated that there will be bottlenecks created by the large volume of BEAD grants, but having all of the grants launched within a narrow time window will aggrevate the issue. Consider a big electric company like Duke Energy that operates in multiple states in the Southeast. The company is going to be asked to deal with a lot of BEAD projects at the same time. All of the regulatory rules in the world are not going to help the inevitable bottleneck that a large utility will face in 2025 when multiple ISPs and projects try to get a response from the legal teams and engineers at a utility at the same time. Most States are going to throw extra money at trying to overcome the make-ready bottlenecks as Virginia has done.

Make-ready is only one of the issues that is going to cause delays. I’ve written before about the issues involved in permitting, acquiring rights-of-way and easements, and locating underground utilities that can all bog down fiber projects before they even get started.

Most State Broadband Offices have already indicated that they are going to pressure ISPs to sign contracts to complete projects in two, three, or four years, depending on the size of a project. ISPs will likely have to agree to these timelines, even when they know that delays may make it impossible to meet such a promise.

The good news is there is a longer time frame until BEAD dollars expire, but I fully expect in a few years to see more articles like the one in the Cardinal News wondering why it’s taking so long to build the promised broadband networks.

Heavy Broadband Users

One of the most interesting statistics coming out of the latest OpenVault Broadband Insight Report for the second Quarter of 2024 is that the percentage of customers using a terabyte of data each month continues to grow. OpenVault predicts that more than 20% of households will be surpassing a terabyte of data soon.

The following table shows the growth in what OpenVault calls power users – those that use more than 1 terabyte of data per month. The 2 terabyte customers are also included in the first column numbers. There was a one time burst of new terabyte users during the pandemic like there was with overall broadband usage, but the growth has continued since then.One issue with so many terabyte users is there must be a lot of homes paying extra for broadband because of data caps. That is where an ISP charges more for usage over some predetermined amount. Most landline ISPs now offer unlimited data usage – but not all. Comcast has a 1.2 terabyte monthly data cap that it only enforces in some markets. Cox has a monthly data cap of 1.28 terabytes. Mediacom has data caps that range from 350 gigabytes to 1 terabyte for its various products. Sparklight has a 700 gigabyte data cap on some products but unlimited on more expensive ones.

I recall in the early days of broadband that the vast majority of ISPs worried about large broadband users. This was largely due to the technology in use at the time. For example, I know many early fiber ISPs had deployed BPON that delivered 622 Mbps download and 155 Mbps upload to a neighborhood node of around 322 homes. A few large data users in the same node could cause noticeable problems for their neighbors. Cable companies that deployed DOCSIS 3.0 technology had even more problems since they often had 200 or more customers sharing the same node. Since then, most cable companies have split their nodes and reduced the number of homes sharing the same data connection.

I remember working with a number of ISPs that wanted to know what to do about heavy broadband users. I recall clients who had customers in residential neighborhoods who operated music file-sharing servers, and in one case, a pornography server. ISPs worried about people who operated early successful retail servers. I recall a customer who generated a huge amount of traffic to support a chat line service – something the FCC eventually frowned on. More recently, one of my clients had an unusually large number of customers operating bitcoin servers since the ISP operates in an area with cheap hydropower electricity.

In almost every case, the ISPs decided to invite heavy users to upgrade to a business service, with the extra payments helping to fund setting up an extra node. In a few cases, the ISPs ended up disconnecting customers they deemed were harming the network. This was always a gray legal area, and every ISP who did this struggled with the decision.

This is less of an issue today with more robust networks. Fiber ISPs now usually have the option to serve a few customers in each node with active Ethernet to segregate them from other customers. I’ve always wondered how the big cable companies handle this – it’s not something I’ve ever heard them discuss.

OpenVault says there is now a growing number of customers who use more than 5 terabytes of data per month. They didn’t cite the percentage, but anybody using that much broadband is tying up a lot of node resources. And I’m sure there are some customers using far more than 5 terabytes. I still think it’s a valid question to consider if somebody who regularly using that that much data is really operating a business and should pay business rates.

WiFi Calling

In an interesting lawsuit, VoIP-Pal, a patent holding company brought suit against AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Deutsche Telekom for now allow customers an option to use WiFi calling and WiFi texting.

Of course, anybody with a smartphone can make a WiFi call across their phone’s data connection, and the lawsuit is really a complaint that the cellular companies are forcing customers to pay for a traditional voice and texting plan when customers only want to buy a bare broadband connection.

The company has filed multiple suits, including a class-action lawsuit that alleges that the big carriers are squelching a nascent WiFi calling industry. That suit seeks to represent 373 million smartphone customers and is asking for almost $269 billion for customers to be delivered in the form of lower bills.

The argument being made in the current lawsuit is that WiFi calling is technologically independent from cellular voice service and that these giant carriers are presenting WiFi calling as a feature rather than allow it to be a standalone service option. The suit says that treating WiFi as a feature allows cellular companies to save a huge amount of costs by dumping WiFi calls to landline connections.

The final argument is that the big cell companies don’t charge anything for the WiFi feature, making it impossible for others to offer competitive alternatives.

This is an interesting lawsuit for several reasons. First, there is no denying that cellular companies reap huge benefits by dumping voice and data connections across home and business WiFi networks, which makes ISPs carry their traffic for free. Many of you might remember discussions in the industry a decade ago about how ISPs might be able to make money by offering WiFi bypass services to cellular carriers. But that idea died pretty quickly when cellphones came with a WiFi connection and customers began dumping data cellular data across their home broadband connection for free. I used to wonder why ISPs never challenged this free use of their networks. It’s clear why this is okay today when big telcos and cable companies have a cellular product that completely relies on dumping traffic to WiFi connections.

The allegation with the most legs is that cellular carriers are forcing a bundle on customers that includes data, voice, and texting. I assume that the large majority of customers want that bundle so that when they are out of range of WiFi networks they can still complete texts and voice calls. But there are probably a significant number of people who mostly use their phones at home, work, and other places with WiFi connections who would prefer to save money and unbundle the traditional cellular package.

I wonder how many people would buy a data-only cellphone? The idea that the lack of a WiFi calling option disadvantages 373 million people is pretty silly, but there may well be a few million people who would elect a data-only cellphone option – so the concept has some merit even if the claim is exaggerated.

It’s also an interesting question if regulators could mandate a data-only cellphone option. Unlike broadband that is not regulated, the FCC has full regulatory authority over cell service. I can’t imagine the FCC getting involved as the result of this lawsuit, but they might investigate the idea if enough customers were asking for a data-only cellphone. The regulatory trend in the country has been against forced bundles, and most cellphone packages are exactly that.

Disasters and the Supply Chain

One of the unexpected consequences of Hurricane Helene is that it disrupted and shut down the high-quality quartz mines near Spruce Pine, North Carolina. This will cause a temporary disruption for the semiconductor industry.

One of the most important steps in making silicon chips and key components for solar panels is to melt down a highly purified substance called polysilicon. This can only be done in crucibles that don’t react with the polysilicon, and the best material for making the crucibles is the ultra-pure quartz that is mined at Spruce Pine. The mines there are said to have the highest-purity quartz in the world and most of the crucibles in the world used for making chips come from Spruce Pine.

The pandemic showed us how vulnerable the world is to disruptions in the supply chain of important materials. In the telecom industry we had some surprising shortages caused by breaks in the supply chain for raw materials. One of the earliest and biggest disruptions during the pandemic came from the shortage of the raw materials used to make the resins that are used as enclosures for telecom gear. Resins require polyethylenes, nylons, polycarbonates, and acrylonitrile butadiene (ABS). The supply chain broke for several of these key components.

A longer-lasting shortage in the industry crippled the manufacture of computer chips. It turns out that chip manufacturing relies on almost two hundred raw minerals like silicon, germanium, gallium, indium phosphide, boron, phosphorus, and many others. The worldwide supply chain issues shut down chip manufacturing when many of the raw materials became hard to acquire.

While major weather events can disrupt the supply chain, the impact is usually temporary, except when severe weather destroys key facilities that are part of the supply chain. There are many other causes of supply chain disruption including political unrest, labor shortages, high fuel costs, transportation restraints, and cybersecurity threats.

We are constantly reminded of the fragility of the international supply chain. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore killed the delivery of raw materials to numerous U.S. manufacturers. A recent rumor of a dockworker strike caused a shortage of toilet paper as consumers recalled one of the biggest early issues during the pandemic. Political unrest in Africa routinely cuts off major supplies of cobalt, platinum, and chromium.

Some supply chain problems are purely political, like when nations get into tariff wars and raise the cost of importing goods. Farmers too well remember the impact of the Chinese tariffs on U.S. pork that were imposed as part of a larger trade war a few years ago.

The newest cause of disruptions comes from cybersecurity attacks on companies. Corporations can be shut down for weeks or months as a result of major hacking. Many U.S. auto dealers suffered major problems a few months ago when CDK, a supplier of the software that operates dealers, was hacked.

One of the key characteristics of supply chain disruptions is that they are most often a big surprise. There is nobody who could have imagined the disruption of mining for ultra-pure quartz in western North Carolina. I’m sure that the folks running that mine would have sworn that such an event was unthinkable. What we’ve learned in recent years is that almost nothing is unthinkable anymore.

Challenges of MDU WiFi

Park Associates, along with Xfinity Communities, recently conducted a big survey of multi-dwelling tenant landlords to explore the issue of offering WiFi to tenants. This differs from offering broadband inside of apartments or condominiums units and explored the issues associated with offering WiFi in community spaces or across an entire property. You can download the full whitepaper here. The conclusion of the study was not surprising – tenants like access to WiFi, but many building owners are reluctant to tackle it for various reasons.

The report notes that there are 29 million apartments and almost 10 million condos in the U.S., so there is a huge potential market for ubiquitous WiFi.

One part of the survey asked residents to rate the factors that are important for choosing an MDU. The most important attribute was good soundproofing, but broadband was number two. Broadband was more important than covered parking, a community pool, availability of office space, an on-site gym, or electric vehicle charging stations. 54% of apartment tenants and 61% of condo tenants said that low-cost broadband was important, and just slightly less wanted broadband that was available immediately after moving in. There was interest in having more than one ISP (40% and 53%) and having gigabit speeds (35% and 48%). The demand was less for ubiquitous WiFi, with the importance of WiFi in common areas at 32% and 52% and the ability to roam on WiFi at 29% and 49%.

The surveys of building owners uncovered some important trends. Landlords reported a lot of reasons to want ubiquitous WiFi that are unrelated to providing WiFi for tenants. A lot of landlords are now using smart technology throughout a building to manage a range of devices such as temperature controls, security cameras, security access, and monitoring devices like water leak detectors. Landlords operating multi-story apartment buildings noted that they can get a substantial discount on insurance rates if they have reliable leak detectors in place, since a water leak can be devastating in a multi-story building.

Building owners reported a huge difference in dealing with WiFi and broadband in newer buildings versus those that are more than ten years old. 82% of landlords reported having trouble maintaining device connectivity in older buildings compared with only 13% of new buildings. 77% of landlords reported having trouble connecting to the Internet in older buildings versus 19% in new buildings. These differences must stem from having new buildings that were prewired with fiber and designed with WiFi in mind compared to older buildings where this is an add-on.

Landlords that don’t offer WiFi to residents claimed a number of reasons for not doing so. 69% said that managing WiFi is a hassle. 64% said it costs too much. 53% said that residents don’t want to share a WiFi connection that is available to other tenants. 50% said that WiFi is not reliable. Any ISP or vendor that wants to sell a WiFi solution to landlords should be prepared to address these reservations.

Another issue noted by landlords is that they expect that any technology solution will last at least ten years. That’s been a problem in recent years as WiFi routers having improved dramatically year after year as modem technology gets better and as we see new WiFi standards.

Landlords also expressed a lot of concerns about smart home devices. They want devices that automatically work with existing administrative systems. They are always leery about bringing in different brands for different applications. They are naturally concerned with the cost of smart home devices. There is a lot of concern about the data security practices of smart device makers.