ISPs Need to Tackle Digital Inclusion

It’s clear that federal funding for digital inclusion activities is dead. NTIA and the Administration killed the funding for the Digital Equity Act, and it’s looking increasingly certain that NTIA is going to kill most or all of the BEAD non-deployment funds. These two sources of funding were going to be used to get a lot of computers and devices into the hands of people who need them and train millions of people to better use broadband.

Both of these efforts were going to benefit ISPs in a big way. Numerous studies have shown that once people buy a broadband subscription, they work hard to keep it. Broadband subscriptions are anti-recessionary, and people will ditch other expenses in their life, before cancelling a broadband subscription.

I think it’s in the best interest of ISPs to step into the federal funding void to help tackle this issue. Very few ISPs have attempted to tackle the issue, but one tackled it in a big way. Comcast Internet Essentials provides a monthly broadband connection that includes WiFi for qualifying low-income households for as little as $14.95 per month, with no extra fees for equipment or activation. Participants get access to computer training, either online or in person. Participants can buy a computer for $149.99. The company says it has helped 10 million homes with the program and has a goal to help up to 50 million homes by the end of 2027.

Setting aside the low price issue, the Comcast Internet Essentials program is addressing two of the keys to digital inclusion – getting devices in the hands of people who need them and showing people how to use broadband. I have no idea how Comcast handles these two issues. I have to assume, at their scale, they’ve arranged to buy a lot of basic computers for a low price. If I had to guess, I would think that Comcast outsources the training to a vendor. Comcast can pull this off due to the size of the Internet Essential program – there is a lot of economy of scale in helping 10 million homes. Smaller ISPs are not going to easily be able to duplicate what Comcast has done. But that doesn’t mean that small ISPs can’t make a difference in their markets.

One way for an ISP to participate in the digital inclusion effort is to somehow partner with the local folks who are already tackling the issue. There are folks in most parts of the country already tackling these issues. It might be a library, a non-profit, or a local government agency. In my part of the world, the leader in this effort is the Land of Sky COG, a state-sanctioned group of local governments that work together to tackle local problems.

Providing funding and technical assistance to your local digital inclusion groups can help them pursue their mission of helping people join the digital world. I can think of multiple ways for ISPs and digital inclusion folks to partner that range from ISPs providing funding to ISPs, to wading in and providing hands-on assistance with training or refurbishing computers. The same advice applied to the digital inclusion folks who were counting on federal and state grant funding need to regroup to stay viable. You should be knocking on the doors of local ISPs to let them know what you are doing and explain how what you do helps them.

There has been talk for the last twenty years about solving the digital divide. The way to do this has been understood from the beginning – get people connected, make sure people have computers, and make sure they know how to use them. While some folks started to tackle these issues years ago, the topic got national and local attention with the promise of federal grant funding. It’s in the interest of ISPs and digital inclusion folks to work together to find a way to keep this effort moving forward. It’s good for communities, good for ISPs, and it’s the right thing to do.

Do We Have a Spectrum Policy?

Telecompetitor recently published an article that cited concerns from analysts at MoffettNathanson Research that wonder about the way spectrum is being allocated for FWA home cellular broadband. It turns out that the big cellular carriers are devoting a huge amount of network resources to FWA while reaping only small financial benefits. FWA use may already account for more than half of the traffic on the Verizon cellular network while only accounting for 3% of Verizon’s revenues. FWA makes up only 6% of T-Mobile’s revenues.

I’ve written about this before, and the difference in monthly data usage between cell customers and home broadband customers is immense. CTIA, the association for cellular carriers, recently reported that the average cell customer uses 17.2 gigabytes of data per month on cellular networks. OpenVault recently reported that the average home broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes per month at the end of the third quarter. That means that the average FWA customer is using as much bandwidth as 37 average cellular customers.

You might ask why it matters how Verizon and T-Mobile use the spectrum they purchased in FCC auctions. From a regulatory perspective, it probably doesn’t matter. Once these companies buy the spectrum, they are free to use it in ways allowed by the spectrum licenses. Cellular spectrum has been used for home broadband for many years through the sale of hotspots. The big difference between hotspots and FWA is that hotspots most normally have stingy data caps similar to what is sold to cellphones, while FWA offers unlimited home broadband.

But from a market perspective, it matters a lot because the government has suddenly decided to shuttle a lot more spectrum to the cellular carriers. In the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress instructed the FCC to find at least 800 megahertz of spectrum for commercial wireless services. The expectation is that the sale of this spectrum could raise around $88 billion for the U.S. Treasury. It’s highly likely that the three big cellular companies would buy most of this spectrum along with perhaps a few large cable companies.

Cellular carriers need this extra spectrum to support FWA. Even if they add no new FWA customers, home broadband usage has been growing at around 9% per year, so FWA will take up an increasing share of existing cellular spectrum every year. But the major reason the carriers need more spectrum is because they have big plans to continue to grow FWA cellular. Verizon says it plans to double the number of FWA customers by 2028. T-Mobile says it plans to grow from today’s 7.8 million FWA customers to over 12 million by 2028. AT&T has expressed no specific plan for FWA growth but has recently stepped up sales significantly.

The three carriers will need the new spectrum being made available by Congress to support their sudden appetite for using spectrum to compete for home broadband. That’s one of the more surprising sentences I have ever written. A decade ago, I would have been laughed out of the room if I had suggested that our scarce national spectrum resource should be used to compete with landline broadband networks.

This is policy gone amok. Clearly, the carrier lobbyists were successful in getting this change inserted into the Big Beautiful Bill. That alone is extraordinary, because in the past, the FCC and the NTIA together collaborated to determine spectrum policy. Apparently, Congress can now set spectrum policy in a footnote of a budget reconciliation bill.

There are many other important uses for the same spectrum bands now being considered for expanding FWA. The spectrum is also needed for the military, for rural fixed wireless broadband, for communicating with airplanes, for weather services, for public safety, and for WiFi.

That last use is the most troublesome of all. WiFi spectrum is by far the most valuable spectrum in the U.S. economy. Almost everybody reading this blog spends most of their online time, whether by computer or cellphone, using WiFi spectrum. The FCC is likely going to have to dip into the 6 GHz WiFi spectrum to satisfy the Congressional mandate. That is absurdly short-sighted and undoes decades of careful spectrum deliberations that have tried to make sure that every use of spectrum is protected.

It’s a fair question to ask if we even have a national spectrum policy now. Raiding 800 megahertz of the most valuable spectrum we have to support FWA sounds less like a policy and more like a land grab by the cellular industry.

Another Look at Starlink Performance

The Internet Society published a blog by Isabel Suizo of Carnegie Mellon University that looks at Starlink’s impact on digital equity.

The blog made three interesting points about Starlink. First, Starlink is not meeting the regulatory performance goals in the U.S., the EU, and Australia. The blog cites speed tests from M-Labs that show that only 24.7% of U.S. speed tests, 13.6% of EU speed tests, and 42.2% of Australian speed tests exceeded 100 Mbps. That speed requirement to qualify as broadband came from the BEAD grants in the US, the Connecting Europe Broadband Fund (CEBF) in the EU, and the Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) regime in Australia.

The analysis noted that Starlink comes closer to meeting the regulatory goals if it is judged only by the peak speed measured at a given location, versus looking at average speeds over time. This is a major finding that has not been widely discussed before. It means that Starlink speeds vary for a customer and that Starlink does not deliver a reliable speed of at least 100 Mbps. The blog contrasts this with fiber, where average and maximum speeds are similar, meaning fiber delivers a reliably steady speed.

The second finding of the report is that there is little difference in Starlink broadband throughput between the top 10% and bottom 10% of households ranked by household incomes. That means, at least at the global level, that Starlink delivers the same broadband to everybody.

However, that’s not entirely true since Starlink does offer priority service to businesses and users like ships in the ocean. These priority customers pay extra to guarantee good broadband. It has also not been widely discussed that Starlink restricts broadband speeds for customers who exceed its 1 terabyte data cap in a month.

The final conclusion of the paper is that LEO networks have the potential to improve broadband performance in remote, underserved users. That is not surprising since it matches the stated goals for both Starlink and Kuiper. These companies have touted since they began that they can bring broadband to the underserved and unserved around the world.

Overall, this analysis adds to the evidence of how Starlink works in practice. The biggest revelation from the research I that speeds to a given customer vary, and that speeds are sometimes solid and sometimes aren’t. The research shows that, at least for now, Starlink is largely delivering the same broadband to everybody, with the caveat that there are customers who are willing to pay more for a higher priority. Only time will tell if priority for pay becomes a regular feature of LEO broadband. Finally, Starlink seems to be meeting its stated goals of bringing broadband to places outside of the reach of landline broadband networks.

Why I am Thankful 2025

It’s Thanksgiving time again, and time to list those things for which I am thankful. As I’ve been talking to folks lately, there is a lot of angst in the industry as things are rapidly changing. But I think there are still plenty of things to be thankful for.

Broadband Networks Being Built. You couldn’t drive in rural areas this past year without seeing signs of fiber construction. A lot of neighborhoods and homes got fast broadband for the first time in 2025. We became laser-focused over the last year on BEAD and forgot that there is continuing construction funded by programs like RDOF, CAF II, ReConnect, Middle-Mile, Tribal, and State grants funded by ARPA and the Capital Project Fund. By my estimates, over $11 billion in grant and subsidy funding was scheduled to be spent on broadband networks in 2025, following $10 billion in 2024.

Digital Inclusion Marches Forward. The administration put a big dent in the digital inclusion efforts around the country by cancelling the grants from the Digital Equity Act. However, I look around and see that thousands of people have gotten on board the digital inclusion bandwagon, and there is already a lot of digital inclusion work being done that didn’t wait for federal grants. I think we’ll look up in a year and see that we’ve created a digital inclusion ecosystem that will find sustainable ways to work to help folks to get access to devices and learn how to use them.

Also, Digital Equity Act funding is not totally dead, thanks to a lawsuit from NDIA challenging the Administration’s decision to withhold the funds allocated by Congress.

Rural Competition Improving. It’s easy to be dismissive of Starlink, but the company now provides broadband to 2 million U.S. households, most of which don’t have a faster broadband option today. Over the last year, T-Mobile, Verizon, and now AT&T enabled numerous rural cell towers with FWA cellular broadband, and customers lucky enough to live within a few miles of the towers got access to new, affordable broadband.

BEAD Not a Total Bust. For a while, it looked like BEAD would be gutted for fiber construction, but a lot of states were still able to make substantial grant awards to build fiber. Hopefully, the winning ISPs get to work and get fiber to communities that have been waiting a decade or more for better broadband.

Improved Cellular. Cellular speeds continue to improve. Recently, AT&T implemented 3.45 GHz spectrum at 23,000 cell sites in just a few weeks.

Technology Marches Forward. This last year saw announcements for faster PON fiber electronics and faster DOCSIS 4.0 gear. Fixed wireless radios are improving at an astounding rate. We’re even talking about routine texting from anywhere using satellites.

Personal Thanks. Like most years, I met a lot of new clients and made new friends this year. I am particularly happy to see a lot of new, younger faces who are taking the reins in the industry. I’m always thankful for the many friends and colleagues who have provided me with support and a sounding board over the last year. I’m thankful for my family who supports me as I work to support broadband projects and write this blog every day. I’m especially thankful for the cats, squirrels, crows, chipmunks, and the other critters who make me smile every day.

 

AT&T Adds New 5G Spectrum

AT&T recently agreed to purchase the 3.45 GHz spectrum from EchoStar and was able to deploy the new spectrum in 23,000 AT&T cell sites in a matter of weeks. The company will use this spectrum to beef up 5G speeds and to also power its FWA cellular home broadband product it markets as AT&T Air. While the spectrum sale still needs to be officially recognized by the FCC, the agreement between EchoStar and AT&T allows for an immediate lease of the spectrum to AT&T.

Anybody following the cellular industry knows that AT&T’s 5G speeds have significantly trailed the speeds being delivered by Verizon and T-Mobile. This should also strengthen AT&T’s recent decision to seriously market its FWA product. AT&T was several years behind Verizon and T-Mobile in marketing wireless home broadband, and just started to seriously market the product in 2024. AT&T had its best quarter of new FWA sales in the third quarter and added 270,000 new customers to bring it to almost 1.3 million FWA customers.

The most interesting thing about this upgrade was the short time required for the upgrade, with 23,000 cell sites upgraded in weeks. Just a decade ago, an upgrade like this would have taken fleets of technicians visiting each cell site, and the update would have normally taken more than a year. I recall stories about the challenges AT&T and the other carriers faced in implementing the first wave of 4G LTE. The LTE upgrades weren’t a one-time event, and every six months to a year there would be new 4G improvements.

AT&T was able to make the upgrade quickly today for several reasons. First, AT&T already owns 3.45 GHz spectrum in some markets, so it has already built the spectrum into its handsets and headends.

But the real news is that AT&T has upgraded cell sites over time to make it easy to make software upgrades remotely. Starting in 2017, AT&T used the required upgrades needed to implement FirstNet, the nationwide first responder network, as an opportunity to also update hardware and software at cell sites for its own purposes. Upgrades were made to hardware and software to prepare cell sites for the next decade of likely upgrades.

It’s easy to think that a company like AT&T probably has a relatively generic configuration at cell sites, but that was never the story historically. AT&T and the other cellular carriers deploy different spectrum in markets depending on the cell licenses they hold in each region. The company operates a range of sizes of cell sites, from tiny rural ones to monster sites in major metropolitan areas. This now also includes a number of microcell sites in markets that are used to serve a large building or a particularly busy neighborhood. AT&T cell sites also vary widely by the age and specific type of electronics at each cell site. The complexity of the historical cellular network makes it easy to understand why it was so challenging to implement a nationwide upgrade.

But AT&T clearly invested a lot in software that can be triggered quickly for a large number of cell sites. This AT&T announcement is good for AT&T, which can instantly realize the benefits of a change like adding new spectrum. It’s good for customers, who see faster speeds immediately. It’s not so good for the many folks who used to travel and make this kind of upgrade.

I’m an AT&T cellular customer, and I took a cellular speed test as I wrote this blog. My download speed is almost 100 Mbps faster than some tests I had taken in the spring. That increase may not come from this upgrade, but it might.

Broadband Subscribers 3Q 2025

I recently looked at the reported broadband subscriber counts from the largest publicly traded ISPs. Most of these statistics come from the quarterly reports of the ISPs. I decided to look at the change in broadband subscribers compared to last year, which I suspect tells more of a story than looking at the change only for the most recent quarter.

There are not a lot of surprises. Cable companies are losing customers, telcos have started to add net customers, and FWA cellular wireless ISPs still dominate the industry in terms of customer acquisition.By reading the industry press, one might assume that cable companies are bleeding customers. The losses for the sector are significant, at over a 2% loss of customers over a year, but not as high as you might expect.

Telcos have definitely turned the corner after having suffered losses annually over the last decade as customers bailed on DSL. These companies are still losing DSL customers, which masks the significant growth of fiber subscribers.

FWA growth continues to be astounding. The third quarter of 2025 saw the biggest quarterly gain yet of over 1 million new customers, and AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon account for most of the overall gain in broadband customers for the industry.

Outside of the FWA carriers, the biggest percentage gainers were Frontier and Shentel. The biggest percentage losers were Lumen and WOW!.

This chart will change going forward. Frontier should be merging with Verizon. Cox, which isn’t on the list because it’s privately held, should be merging with Charter. A lot of Lumen fiber customers will be moving to AT&T.

Are Cable Companies “Permanently Impaired”?

KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel recently said in an industry report that “There are reasons to believe that cable is permanently impaired.” By that, he believes that cable companies are going to continue to lose broadband customers as they compete with fiber and FWA cellular wireless.

The problem that cable companies are experiencing stems largely from the time when they enjoyed a near-monopoly status in broadband markets across the country, when their only real competition was DSL provided over copper wires. For well over a decade, cable company broadband customers grew by huge numbers each quarter as people abandoned DSL. The reason for the cable company decline today is that the monopoly is now over and cable companies suddenly have to compete with alternatives like fiber and FWA cellular.

Using the term ‘permanently impaired’ makes it sound like cable companies have inferior broadband. From a technology perspective, fiber is clearly superior to cable broadband. Fiber has lower latency and less jitter for a more reliable signal, and fiber can provide very fast or symmetrical upload speeds for customers who care about upload. But a technology comparison would give the nod to cable over FWA wireless. Cable speeds are faster, and wireless networks generally have more variability of signal over time.

But most customers don’t buy broadband based on the performance specifications. Households that don’t need a lot of upload are perfectly happy with cable company download speeds, with tiers available from 300 Mbps to over a gigabit. Surveys show that a lot of cable company customers are happy with the broadband speed and performance.

The cable companies have been investing in increasing upload speeds, which will satisfy a lot of their broadband customers. Whether they goose upload speeds to 200 Mbps with a mid-split upgrade or invest in symmetrical speeds with a DOCSIS 4.0 upgrade, the increased upload speeds will be enough to satisfy the large majority of households.

I don’t think that most of the households leaving cable companies are doing so because of the technical differences in the technologies, other than perhaps heavy gamers and others who care about the difference in latency and jitter. The cable companies are seeing customers leave because of the way they treated customers over the last decade.

A lot of customers soured over the years on cable companies because of cavalier customer service, where customers had long wait times on the phone, and cable technicians routinely showed up late for customer appointments. It’s been a running joke about how dreadful it is to be stuck in a Comcast call queue. Cable companies didn’t create loyal customers when they had a big rate increase every year for more than a decade, and now have base rates approaching $100. Customers grew frustrated when new customers got low prices while long-term customers continued to pay the full list price. I think it’s the millions of customers who have a sour taste in their mouth for the cable companies who are bailing when they finally have a reasonable alternative that is not DSL.

I’m starting to get public feedback that the big fiber companies like AT&T are headed down the same path as the cable companies. I’ve been contacted in recent months by several AT&T fiber customers who are unhappy with their fiber service. One told me about an outage that lasted for nearly a week before AT&T finally fixed the problem – and then offered them a $3 discount off the bill for their inconvenience. Another customer told me about regular short outages on AT&T fiber – and this customer originally left the cable company for AT&T for this reason. AT&T fiber won a lot of customers when they entered markets because they were cheaper than the big cable companies, but the company has now raised rates for broadband by $5 per month two years in a row, at a time when the company is bragging about record profits.

Nispel is right that cable companies will continue to lose customers. That’s a natural consequence of the end of a near-monopoly. But urban markets will eventually reach an equilibrium, and cable will settle in at a lower penetration rate. We already know what that looks like after seeing how Verizon FiOS and cable companies reached an equilibrium in the Northeast.

The story is not that cable companies are losing customers and are doomed. The real story is that the ISPs displacing them are repeating the same mistakes made by the cable companies, and the public isn’t going to like them any more than the cable companies. A colleague recently observed that competition in urban areas is largely illusory and we’re largely seeing competition between equally inept ISPs. I’m starting to think he’s right.

 

Fiber and Public Safety

The Fiber Broadband Association released a paper Fiber for Public Safety: Fighting Fire with Fiber – How Broadband Infrastructure Protects Communities Before, During, and After Disasters. The paper provides some case studies that show how fiber infrastructure is supporting communities.

The report includes five case studies of real-world examples of how fiber broadband has proven make a difference for public safety and during disasters.

  • In California, Siskiyou Telephone restored communications to a fire camp within an hour after satellite broadband collapsed under the heavy demand from first responders.
  • In Hawaii, the hardened and buried fiber networks of Hawaiian Telecom kept working during the 2023 Maui wildfires while the rest of the island’s telecommunication grids went down.
  • In Oregon, Douglas Fast Net pre-positioned fiber at fire camp sites to make sure that broadband is available when emergencies hit.
  • In Tennessee, United Communications provides free fiber broadband to every fire and police station it serves and makes public safety a central mission of its fiber network.
  • In Georgia, PeachNet connects first responders and emergency agencies directly to fiber to strengthen readiness while also supporting community services.

Most folks in the industry can tell stories about the importance and resilience of fiber networks and disasters. Here are a few of my own:

  • In the aftermath of a bad summer thunderstorm near Laurel, Maryland, I saw where the storm had knocked down a tree that broke the electric, telephone copper, and cable company wires. Amazingly, the Verizon FiOS fiber did not break and was holding up to the full weight of the tree. The broadband was still working in the neighborhoods fed by that fiber. I wish I had a smartphone camera in those days.
  • The electric utility in Lafayette, Louisiana, built a fiber backbone around the City and connected fiber to electric substations, the University, and public anchor institutions. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the LUS Fiber was the only functioning communications network in the City.
  • When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville and surrounding counties, all communications went down as entire roads were wiped off the map, which crippled networks by destroying the fiber backbones that supported broadband, cellular, and telephone networks. However, the fiber network from Duke Power kept operating since the company had recently built a redundant fiber path into the area along a route that didn’t get destroyed. Having this operating fiber backbone sped up the restoration of the power grid by weeks since at allowed Duke repair crews to communicate with the outside world.

The whitepaper points out that fiber networks can play a huge role in public safety when built correctly. Burying fiber, like in Maui, made a huge difference. Building redundant routes can guarantee connectivity when other networks fail.

Grants Should Look Forward

State Broadband Offices had to go through a process this year of deciding if various technologies qualify for grant purposes as priority projects. A priority technology must meet the following requirement: Provide broadband service that meets speed, latency, reliability, consistency in quality of service, and related criteria as the Assistant Secretary shall determine; and ensure that the network built by the project can easily scale speeds over time to meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses and support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.

NTIA chose a speed of 100/20 Mbps as the metric for meeting the current test of a priority technology. This is convenient, since this was the declared speed that the legislation said a BEAD-funded technology must be able to deliver. Today’s blog asks if that definition is adequate.

One way to consider what the current speed of broadband should be is to look at historical trends. For many years, Cisco issued reports that regularly reported that the demand for speed was growing at roughly 21% per year for residential broadband, and a little faster for business broadband. Cisco and others noted that the demand for broadband speeds was on a relatively straight line back to the early 1980s.

It’s not hard to test the Cisco long-term growth rate. The following table applies a 21% growth rate to the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband established by the FCC in 2015.This table is somewhat arbitrary since it assumes that broadband demand in 2015 was exactly 25 Mbps – but there was widespread praise of the new definition at that time, other than from ISPs who wanted to stick with the 4/1 Mbps definition. This simple table accurately predicted that we would be talking about the need to increase the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps download around 2022, which is exactly what happened. The FCC did not have a fifth Commissioner at the time and wasn’t able to make the change until March 2024 – but in 2022, the FCC wanted to change the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps download, which was at a 21% compounded annual growth rate from the definition of broadband the FCC had established in 2015.

I can’t think of any fundamental industry changes that would change the historical growth rate in the near future. We’ve certainly seen a big demand to buy faster broadband products. Consider the following chart that starts with the assumption that 100 Mbps was the right definition of broadband in 2022. Growing that number over time by the same 21% results in the following table. What does this table suggest for BEAD and other grant?. Consider the evaluation of Starlink, which is the technology that is closest to meeting or not meeting the needed speed. Ookla released a report in the first quarter of 2025 showing that the median speed on Starlink was 104.71 Mbps download and 14.84 Mbps upload, and that only 17% of Starlink customers in the first quarter fully met the 100/20 Mbps speed threshold.

The table above suggests that the current definition of broadband in 2025 should be something like 177/35 Mbps. It’s debatable if Starlink meets the 100/20 Mbps test today, but it clearly doesn’t meet a test based on the speed demand in 2025.

The BEAD future-looking test is challenging because nobody defined what future-looking means. I can think of two definitions of forward-looking that might make sense. One is to judge what speeds should be delivered when the grant project has been constructed, which for most BEAD projects will be at the end of 2029. The growth chart suggests that the speed for defining broadband in 2029 will be around 380/76 Mbps.

I think a better forward-looking test for a government-sponsored grant should be that a grant-funded network should still be relevant a decade after a grant is awarded. The chart suggests the desired speed should be 1191/238 Mbps in 2035.

Naysayers will argue that the 21% growth in speed demand can’t be sustained. Consider taking a more conservative approach that cuts the historical growth rate in half. That conservative approach would say that a target speed for a grant-funded project would be 195/30 Mbps in 2029 and 345/69 Mbps in 2035. I have nothing to go on except my gut, which tells me that 345/69 Mbps will feel inadequate in 2035.

Can the FCC Regulate Local Permitting?

ACA Connects, an industry group that represents midsize cable companies and fiber overbuilders, recently asked the FCC to issue regulations to streamline permitting and the acquisition of rights-of-way. For those who lose track of the various industry advocacy organizations, ACA Connects was previously known as the American Cable Association.

The ACA Connects comments were filed in response to the open Notice of Inquiry that asks for comments that can eliminate barriers to wireline deployments. The ACA Connects comments ask the FCC to investigate and regulate three issues. First is the timeline for local communities to respond to a request for rights-of-way or construction permits. ACA Connects members have related stories of communities that sit on requests for months with no response. ACA Connects advocates for a shot clock that requires communities to react within a specified time, similar to what has been required by the FCC for requests for placing a new wireless tower.

Second, the group asks that fees charged for access to rights-of-ways be cost-based and objectively reasonable, and that new ISPs are provided the same treatment that was provided to incumbent providers. There are communities that want large up-front fees to obtain rights-of-way and permits that go far beyond a reasonable value. I’ve often suspected that this is a result of cities losing franchise fees as the cable TV industry continues to lose customers.

ISPs also object to hidden fees and costs. The filing documents examples of unreasonable costs, such as having to bury conduit deeper than is required by industry standards. The filing cites an example where an ISP was asked to repave a full block after disturbing only a small portion of a sidewalk.

It’s worth noting that these are not universal problems, and many communities are welcoming fiber overbuilders with open arms and easing the process of bringing competition to their community. But any ISP understands how unexpected delays and costs for a routine function like obtaining rights-of-ways and permits can delay, and even kill plans to complete a new network project.

ACA Connects recognizes that this would be a big lift for the FCC. Communities are going to strongly resist any efforts to dictate rules for how cities manage and charge for rights-of-way. The FCC has made headway in managing the placement of towers and wireless facilities. But that’s partially because the process of siting a tower is unique. However, rights-of-way rules apply to a lot larger universe than just ISPs. Any changes to the rules will suddenly change the way that cities interact with electric utilities, cable companies, gas utilities, and even the general public who wants to make changes like cutting a new driveway into a busy road.

Local communities view control or rights-of-ways as one of the most important rights of a community and will resist any attempt by a federal agency to change the rules. I predict a huge legal battle if the FCC decides to tackle this. Not that it should matter, but that means that implementing what ACA Connects recommends could take many years and many lawsuits before implementation.

The FCC’s ability to tackle something like this has been weakened by recent Supreme Court rulings. For example, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court largely ended the Chevron deference and ruled that federal agencies are on shaky ground when they make decisions that are not explicitly directed by Congress. In the 2025 ruling, McLaughlin Chiropractic Associates, Inc. v. McKesson Corp., the Supreme Court ruled that Courts can more easily disagree with rulings made by federal agencies, making it easier for courts to disagree with orders made by the FCC.

Like with many other regulatory issues, the reality of the court rulings means the right forum for fixing these issues is in Congress. But Congress has been conspicuously missing from regulation since the Loper Bright ruling. There is no question that the ISPs that prompted ACA Connects to file these comments are feeling pain in the market. But even if the FCC tackles what they are requesting, there won’t be any quick fixes.