My overall impression of the BEAD NOFO is that the NTIA largely emphasized, and in many cases even strengthened the requirements for the grants as delineated in the federal legislation. But there is one area where I think the NTIA is instead treading carefully.

The federal legislation made it clear that BEAD grants should be made available to everybody – commercial entities, non-profit entities, Tribes, and municipal entities. The day that I read the federal legislation, I knew there would be an eventual showdown since many states have barriers or restrictions against municipal participation in building, owning, or operating commercial broadband networks.

The NTIA is tackling this sticky issue using the following language:

A state must Disclose (1) whether the Eligible Entity (the state) will waive all laws  . . . concerning broadband, utility services, or similar subjects, whether they predate or postdate enactment of the Infrastructure Act, that either (a) preclude certain public sector providers from participation in the subgrant competition or (b) impose specific requirements on public sector entities, such as limitations on the sources of financing, the required imputation of costs not actually incurred by the public sector entity, or restrictions on the service a public sector entity can offer; and (2) if it will not waive all such laws for BEAD Program project selection purposes, identify those that it will not waive and describe how they will be applied in connection with the competition for subgrants.

If there is any one area where politics creep into building broadband, it is with state restrictions on municipalities. There are states, like my state of North Carolina, where the legislature has repeatedly emphasized that it doesn’t want municipalities to be funding or operating fiber networks. This is also a bigger political issue because it creates another skirmish point in the ongoing battle over state rights versus federal mandates. There are many states that have drawn hard lines against federal mandates, even when it costs them a lot of money – such as the states that are still turning down billions of dollars per year of federal funding through the Affordable Care Act.

The NTIA could have handled this differently by plainly requiring that any state broadband plan has to make the grant funding available to everybody, including municipalities – as stated in the legislation. States could have reacted to that requirement in one of several ways. A state could file a plan that agrees to waive some or all municipal restrictions only for purposes of the BEAD grant. Broadband is such a hot topic in some states that a legislature might blink rather than take a hard line.

Or a state could react by filing a state plan that clearly sticks to existing barriers against municipal participation in broadband. That would set up a big fight between the state and the NTIA.

A state could react by refusing to file a state broadband plan and forgoing the billion dollars of funding that comes with this legislation. The interesting thing is that the legislation seems to have presupposed that some states might do this since there are provisions where municipalities and ISPs can ask for grants directly from the NTIA if a state refuses to agree with the requirements of the legislation.

I’m just guessing, and I have no insight into the mystery that is D.C. politics, but I think the NTIA chose a path that wouldn’t goad states into dropping out of the BEAD grant program. Perhaps they want to first open up a dialog, and the above language does that. It allows a state to define what it will or won’t do related to municipalities.

I also guess that this language will open up a dialog within each state about restrictions on municipal broadband. Recall that every state has to put its plan out for public comment before submitting it to the NTIA. The above language will force a state to defend its plans to the public if it refuses to allow grants for local governments. Any state taking that approach might expect a lot of public pushback – which is different than setting such policies behind closed doors in the legislature.

The language doesn’t preclude the NTIA from rejecting a state broadband plan if a state won’t budget on the issue, and it may eventually have to do so. But I also guess that the NTIA doesn’t want to directly administer the grant programs in some states, so it is motivated to see the money go to the states. I’m asked daily when I think BEAD grant applications will be available, and this is one more issue that makes it impossible to predict. If your state is going to fight the municipal broadband battle it’s going to be later than states who don’t.

I saw an article recently that reminded me about the early days of telephone technology. The article talks about the barbed wire fences used to bring the first rudimentary communications links to the remote Texas Panhandle.

Telephony using insulated copper wires started to appear in cities in the U.S. in the decades following the invention of the telephone in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Around the turn of the 20^th century, engineers developed a technology that could carry telephone signals for a greater distance using large-gauge bare copper wires. The technology involved installing two side-by-side bare wires – one to communicate in each direction.

Engineers discovered that a properly insulated network bare wire would have minimal power loss even over great distances. Bell Long Lines undertook the stringing of open wire copper routes on tall poles to routes between cities. The physical network consisted of bare copper wires connected at each pole to glass insulators. When I broke into the industry in the 1970s, I think every telephone technician and engineer had a green glass insulator sitting on their desk.

The cost of building poles and installing copper wires was expensive, and Bell Long Lines recovered its investment by providing expensive long-distance calls that generated enough revenue to justify building the network. Long-distance rates to call from coast to coast at the start of the 20^th Century were around $1 per minute – adjusted for inflation, that’s over $33 per minute in today’s dollars. Only corporations, the very rich, or the government could afford to make long-distance calls in the early days of telephony.

The article talks about how the ranchers at the XIT ranch in Texas got creative and installed the technology using existing strands of barbed wire. The XIT ranch was gigantic and enclosed three million acres of grazing land. To provide context, the northern border of the ranch was 162 miles long. The quality of the connections using barbed wire was expectedly dreadful, but the connections were good enough to notify other parts of the ranch about emergency situations like a grass fire. The article says the ranchers tinkered and improved the quality of the barbed wire network over time by adding insulators along the fence to minimize the wire touching any surfaces that added interference. Early in my career as a consultant, I visited the XIT Rural Telephone Cooperative, and I remember seeing insulators along barbed wire fences. They were no longer used for telephony, and I never made the connection at the time to understand that the fences had been rudimentary telephone lines.

The technology for using open wire networks improved over time with the introduction of open wire carrier which used frequency division multiplexing. First-generation open wire carrier could carry up to 4 simultaneous calls on a pair of wires, and over time the carrier technology improved to carry up to sixteen calls at the same time on pair of open copper wires.

The use of open wire technology for long-haul transmission of telephone calls carried into the 1970s. Rural telephone companies built last-mile telephone systems using the traditional twisted-pair copper wires. But open wire technology was still the preferred way to send telephone signals for longer distances, and there was always one or more routes leaving a rural telephone exchange that used upon wire technology. These routes were always easy to spot due to the insulators.

The technology lasted even longer for railroads who strung long-haul copper networks between stations so they could have free calling. I wouldn’t be shocked if there are still a few of these routes in place along rural railroad spurs in the remote west.

Open wire technology was ultimately replaced by better technologies using traditional copper wiring, microwave radios, and ultimately by fiber. But many rural telephone companies kept the old open wire routes in place as an emergency backup for times when other wires went out of service.

I’m prompted to write blogs about older telco technologies when I occasionally ponder how far the world of communications has come in a relatively short time. We went from open wires to satellites and fiber optics in less than a century – largely thanks to Bell Labs, which constantly pushed the frontiers of how we communicate. I wonder what the folks at the XIT Ranch of 1900 would make of the 10-gigabit fiber routes that likely serve the area today?

Every year I write a blog at Thanksgiving talking about the things in our industry for which I am thankful. Most years, this is easy because there are always a lot of great things happening in the broadband industry. But 2021 has been hard for a lot of the folks in the broadband industry. I was deeply touched this year by many of the stories I heard during the pandemic. I heard from a rural high school principal who was upset because 9% of the students in his school disappeared when learning went virtual. I talked to a librarian who was distraught watching students sit outside her library in the snow all day to keep up with virtual schoolwork.

Please feel free to comment at the end of this blog about events this year in the broadband industry for which you are thankful.

ARPA Grants Provide Local Solutions. The ARPA grants given directly to local governments are a breath of fresh air in an industry where only carriers have been able to get government funding for broadband projects. Towns, cities, and counties can use this money to solve the most pressing broadband problems in their community – rural residents with no broadband options, low-income neighborhoods that have been left behind, or retail shopping districts that ISPs have ignored. It’s too bad that it took a pandemic to try the idea of empowering local communities to tackle the problems that are specific to their communities.

Finally, an Emphasis on the Digital Divide. The recently enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) created two new grant programs to address digital equity and inclusion. Together these provide $2.75 billion in grants to tackle the digital divide. We’ve been talking about the digital divide for at least fifteen years, and this is the first significant effort to try to include everybody in the digital economy. It’s hard to imagine being digitally illiterate in today’s economy since so much of daily life is now online.

Technologies Continue to Improve. As I look around the industry, I can see that every broadband technology is getting better. There are scientists and engineers continuing to improve the performance and speeds of the technology that fuels our broadband. We’re seeing a new generation of fiber PON, better fixed wireless radios, a new generation of DOCSIS, and better cellular technology. These will all fuel better broadband.

Improved Cellular Speeds. This might seem like an odd thing to be thankful for. But much of the country saw big leaps in cellular data speeds in 2021 as the cellular carriers launched the new spectrum bands being labeled as 5G. The immediate impact of the upgrades is a giant leap in bandwidth, which makes life easier for a lot of homes without a landline broadband connection. More importantly, the major cellular carriers are all launching unlimited-usage broadband plans using the new cellular spectrum. The new spectrum will enable functional broadband in rural homes close enough to a cell tower. In cities, the faster cellular offers an affordable broadband alternative to those who can’t afford cable company broadband.

Infrastructure Funding? I was a little hesitant to put this on the list. I think we’re going to have to wait for a decade to find out if throwing the huge sum of $42.5 billion at rural broadband is really going to work. I have no doubt that this will make broadband better for huge parts of the country. But I also worry that much of the money will go to the projects that fail or to the giant ISPs who will not be the good stewards of the funding in rural areas. I’m also doubtful about the FCC being able to improve the mapping quickly enough so that communities are not left behind by this funding. Since this is once-in-a-generation funding, I’m happy for the millions of folks who will get better broadband but worried about those won’t.

It’s a Good Year to be a Consultant. I’m not going to kid you, it’s a nice year to be a consultant and to be in high demand. But it’s also a frustrating year. I’ve had to say no to many projects where I know I could have provided the solution clients are seeking. There have been recent weeks when a dozen potential projects came to my attention – and it’s frustrating to have to say no.