Supreme Court to Hear ISP Copyright Case

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine if ISPs are required to terminate broadband service for customers who are accused of copyright violations. The suit is a result of a longstanding dispute between Cox Communications and music labels, including Sony Music Entertainment.

The Supreme Court case stems from a series of court cases that ended with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Cox. The case was accepted by the Supreme Court since the ruling conflicts with some aspects of similar cases in the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts.

The case originated with a 2019 decision by a Virginia Court that found Cox liable for both contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and awarded the record companies an astounding $1 billion in damages. Cox appealed, and the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the charges for vicarious infringement and vacated the $1 billion of damages.

This was still a troublesome ruling for ISPs because even after getting rid of the damage penalty, Cox still stands in violation of contributory damages over actions taken by its customers. The record labels insist that Cox should permanently disconnect any customer who engages in repeated copyright infringement. This ruling would turn ISPs into Internet policemen who must monitor and punish customers who engage in copyright infringement. That doesn’t just mean people who download copies of music, but also movies, games, books, and pirated sports events.

This is an incredibly uncomfortable role for ISPs. ISPs don’t monitor customer usage because that would mean looking closely at everything that customers do. Instead, the music companies want Cox and other ISPs to react to complaints made by copyright holders. That might make sense in a perfect world, but the real world isn’t perfect. Complaints are rarely made to ISPs by copyright holders, and there is an entire industry of companies that make a living by issuing takedown requests for infringements of copyrighted materials.

The music companies expect ISPs to cut off subscribers after only a few violations of copyright. ISPs are in the business of selling broadband connections, and the last thing they want to do is to permanently disconnect paying customers. This would also be devastating for broadband customers. Most homes in the U.S. don’t feel that they have broadband choice, and most have access to only one fast ISP. If they lose that connection, they could find themselves cut off from functional broadband. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a teenager or visitors to a home violate copyrights and get the household disconnected from broadband. Losing broadband is a severe penalty for an infraction that would incur only a small fine if taken to court. The right penalty is to force people who infringe copyrights to pay a fine. Copyright holders are asking to bypass the law enforcement and court system, and want to turn ISPs into the judge, jury, and executioner for copyright violations.

ISPs need to keep an eye on this case and should have associations file comments in the court proceeding. A ruling against Cox is a ruling against every ISP. I assume consumer advocates will also weigh in with briefs since the penalty of permanently losing broadband doesn’t fit the crime.

The Spectrum Policy Mess

There was a recent article in LightReading that asked a great question – BEAD bet big on CBRS and 6 GHz bands, so why is Congress gutting them? Answering that question needs some context.

NTIA leaned into supporting fixed wireless throughout the BEAD process. During the original BEAD map challenge process, NTIA made it clear that locations covered by WISPs using licensed spectrum (CBRS) were to be considered as served as long as the WISP claimed the ability to deliver 100/20 Mbps broadband. There were vigorous challenges by governments and ISPs during that map challenge, so some areas served by licensed spectrum were kept as BEAD-eligible if speeds were below that threshold.

More recently, NTIA came out with a surprise decision that State Broadband Offices (SBOs) had to remove BEAD locations served by WISPs using only unlicensed spectrum. We’ll have to wait for the final count, but folks are speculating that this removed about 15% of the remaining BEAD-eligible locations nationwide.

It’s likely that the majority of rural WISPs will be incorporating 6 GHz spectrum into rural fixed wireless networks. If they haven’t done so yet, it will be a big component of future electronics upgrades. 6 GHz spectrum has wide channels that allow WISPs to deliver much faster speeds to customers within a reasonable distance from a tower.

When NTIA made the announcement that locations served by unlicensed WISPs are considered to be served, NTIA also changed the BEAD grant rules drastically and is allowing fixed wireless, cellular FWA, and satellite on the same playing field as fiber when choosing grant winners. NTIA is allowing SBOs to give some priority to fiber, but since NTIA also reserves the right to review every grant award, I think the priority for fiber is somewhat of a smokescreen. It seems clear that wireless carriers and satellite carriers are going to win a lot more BEAD locations than anybody ever anticipated. WISPs that win BEAD are going to be heavily reliant on CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum.

At the same time that BEAD was changing, Congress took a different path that poses a big threat to the availability of CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum. Congress has accepted the hype from cellular carriers that they will be running out of spectrum in a few years. The carriers even rolled out the old saw that the U.S. is losing the 5G race to China. My cynical take is that the carriers want more spectrum to expand FWA home wireless.

In the One Big Beautiful Bill, Congress renewed the FCC’s ability to hold spectrum auctions and instructed the FCC and NTIA to identify at least 800 megahertz of spectrum between 1.3 GHz and 10.5 GHz to be auctioned. The FCC must auction at least 300 megahertz of spectrum within two years, which must include at least 100 megahertz of the C-Band spectrum between 3.98-4.2 GHz. The bill carves out two bands of spectrum that cannot be considered for auction or relocation. The 3.1-3.25 GHz spectrum has been used by the military for many years. Also excluded is spectrum between 7.4-8.4 GHz, which is part of the X-Band spectrum that is used for military satellites.

The FCC and NTIA must identify 500 megahertz of other spectrum that will support full-power commercial licensed use cases. The new law does not protect CBRS spectrum, which sits at 3-55 – 3.7 GHz. This spectrum is used today by over 1,000 entities today such as WISPs, private networks, ports, schools, sports venues, hospitals, airports, and the DOD. The OBBB also doesn’t protect 6 GHz spectrum that is fully used today for WiFi. The FCC approved 6 GHz spectrum for WiFi in April 2020, and the spectrum is key to the ongoing deployment of WiFi 6 and WiFi 7, along with rural broadband.

There is no guarantee that the FCC will touch these two blocks of spectrum, but it’s going to be exceedingly hard to find 800 MHz of spectrum to auction without grabbing some or all of these two spectrum bands. There will obviously be a big battle from WISPs and the WiFi industry to protect CBRS and 6 GHz, but the FCC has the cover from Congress to allow them to raid the two spectrum bands.

As the LightReading article points out, NTIA and Congress are working at odds with each other. It’s not hard to envision BEAD grants going to WISPs and then watching WISPs lose the spectrum they need.

This whole mess comes from Congress meddling in spectrum policy – something they haven’t done before. The historical process was for the FCC to weigh the pros and cons of available spectrum and to pick the most beneficial use for each spectrum band. But Congress wanted to claim $85 billion in potential revenue from spectrum auctions to offset tax cuts.

I’ve talked to WISPs who say that losing CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum puts them out of business. That would leave them with the historic WiFi spectrum that has too few and overused channels.

The economy will suffer greatly in the long run if the cellular carriers are able to pull off this unprecedented raid on spectrum. Rural broadband will suffer a big hit. But the biggest hit to the economy would come from loss of WiFi spectrum, which fuels trillions of dollars of value across the economy.

FCC Begins to Streamline Regulations

In the June 2025 Open Meeting, the FCC adopted several changes to FCC rules, which are the first results of its larger Delete, Delete, Delete docket that aims to eliminate unneeded regulations and reporting. The FCC took the following three actions:

Streamline Cable TV Rules. The most sweeping change was to eliminate 27 pages of regulations, which covered 77 regulations and 8 forms related to providing cable TV service. Deleting these regulations recognizes the reality of the cable TV industry where traditional cable companies have lost half of their cable customers and continue to lose millions of customers each quarter. The rule changes were streamlined by:

  • Eliminating unnecessary forms and rules,
  • Deregulating cable equipment not used exclusively to receive the basic service tier,
  • Exempting rate regulations for small businesses,
  • Declining to extend rate regulation to commercial establishments, and
  • Modernizing numerous rules to account for the sunset of cable programming service tier rate regulation in determining basic service tier rates and to simplify and streamline the remaining regulations.

These changes have been badly needed and provide an opportunity for traditional cable providers to stay competitive with online programming options. It seems likely that there will be more changes coming to cable television as Delete, Delete, Delete continues.

Eliminate the Need for Professional Engineer to Certify Mapping. I’ve written several times over the years about the FCC’s requirement (which came from Congress) that requires ISPs that send mapping information twice each year to have their mapping data blessed by a professional engineer. Instead, ISPs must have filings approved by one of the following:

  • A corporate officer possessing a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in engineering and who has direct knowledge of and responsibility for the carrier’s network design and construction.
  • An engineer possessing a bachelor’s or post-graduate degree in electrical engineering, electronic engineering, or another similar technical discipline, and at least seven years of relevant experience in broadband network design and/or performance.
  • An employee or agent with specialized training relevant to broadband network engineering and design, deployment, and/or performance, and at least 10 years of relevant experience in broadband network engineering, design, and/or performance.

This will still require some small ISPs to hire outside assistance, but it should be less costly than finding and hiring a professional engineer.

Proposal to Address Rules for TTY.  Finally, the FCC adopted a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to update regulations related to older technologies used to provide telecommunications services for those with hearing and speech disabilities.

New Proposed FCC Pole Rules

The FCC recently issued a proposed new set of rules in the ongoing pole docket that also asks for feedback for additional questions, and includes some clarification of earlier orders. The primary focus of the new rules is to define requirements for handling requests to add fiber to 3,000 or more poles at a time. This order is not approved but is included for consideration in the FCC’s July meeting. It’s likely it will be approved.

If approved, the FCC will change the following rules.

 New Rules for Large Attachment Requests. In a new rule that will affect many projects, an attacher must give written notice if it plans to request to attach to the lesser of 300 poles or 0.5 percent of the utility’s poles in a state. Attachers who don’t give the written notice lose the protection of the pole owner having to stick to the FCC timelines. For large pole attachment requests, the attacher and pole owner must meet and confer about the request.

 Change in Attachment Timeline. A pole owner must notify an attacher within 15 days if it can’t meet a survey deadline. A pole owner must notify an attacher within 15 days if it can’t meet a make-ready deadline.

The order sets the following time guidelines for orders of greater than 3,000 poles, but less than 6,000 poles.The timelines for connecting to more than 6,000 poles must be negotiated between the parties.

Self Help. An attacher is allowed to make estimates of the work required for make-ready if the pole owner is unable to do so on a timely basis.

No Limits on Applications. A pole owner can’t set a limit on the size or the frequency of requests from an attacher for pole attachments.

Improvements in the Contractor Approval Process. A pole owner must add a new contractor to its approved list within 30 days if existing contractors can’t get surveys or make-ready done.

Like always, these new rules would only apply in States that follow FCC pole rules.

The FCC also asks for comments to the following questions:

  • Should attachers be required to deploy equipment on poles within 120 days of completion of make-ready work?
  • What are the repercussions for an attacher who fails to deploy equipment within 120 days after the completion of make-ready work?
  • Should attachers make payment on an estimate for pole attachment within a specific period of time after accepting the estimate?
  • Should there be a limit on how much final make-ready costs can exceed the utility’s estimate without having to get additional prior approval from the attacher?
  • Should One Touch Make Ready (OTMR) rules be expanded to cover complex survey and make-ready work?

FCC Suspends Lower Prison Calling Rates

The FCC issued a surprising ruling that suspended an FCC order from 2024 that requires lower calling rates for telephone and video calls made from jails and prisons. The lower rates were approved by Congress as part of the Martha Wright-Reed Fair and Just Communications Act. That law required lower rates to be effective between January 1 and April 1 of this year for various sizes of facilities. The FCC voted in June to put last year’s order on hold until at least April 1, 2027.

I call this a surprising ruling because the FCC has historically been required to implement laws enacted by Congress. The current FCC presumably doesn’t agree with the 2024 law and subsequent order. In delaying the rules, the FCC cited a negative financial impact on jails and prisons from the new rates. It’s been a common practice for many jails and prisons to charge a “commission” that pay a large share of calling revenues to prisons. For larger jails and prisons, the calling commissions represented a significant revenue source.

Since the FCC was created as an independent agency by Congress, it’s been assumed that the agency is required to implement any laws Congress passes. The only other time I recall the FCC having a major issue with the law was when Chairman Mark Fowler in the 1980s took exception to Congressional rules related to the Fairness Doctrine, although there might have been other instances.

The new rates approved in 2024 range from $0.06 per minute for calls made from prisons to $0.12 per minute for jails with fewer than 99 inmates. These new rates replace older FCC rates that varied between $0.14 per minute for prisons to $0.21 per minute in small jails.

The 2024 order had also set the first cap on the rates for video calls – a technology that is rapidly replacing telephone calls. The new rate caps range from $0.11 per minute in large facilities to $0.25 per minute in the smallest ones. Before the new caps, there were some jails and prisons charging more than $1 per minute for video calling. A lot of prisons and jails also have high ancillary rates for things like a billing fee per call, or families asking for a paper bill. There are still huge fees in place for placing a collect call through an operator.

For those not familiar with prison calling, there are a handful of companies that provide the service in practically every jail and prison in the country. These companies together have what is essentially the last monopoly in the telecom world.

The FCC set the first rate cap on prison calling rates in 2013. Before that, there were rates as high as $2.50 per minute for collect calls. Immediately after that first FCC ruling, a petition was filed at the FCC in 2013 to further reduce rates, and that petition eventually led to the Martha Wright-Reed Act. In full disclosure, I was a technical and cost witness on behalf of inmates in the early FCC cases.

You might wonder how prison callers can justify such high rates when most people now enjoy affordable unlimited long-distance calling. One reason for the high rates is the sizable commissions that go to jails or prisons. Prison calling companies claim they have higher costs since they have to handle penological functions like recording and archiving calls. They also have costs to bill and collect for calling, either from inmate commissary accounts or billed to families. There was a time, a few decades ago, when penological costs justified higher rates, but modern calling technologies have eliminated most of the extra costs.

The FCC order only affects interstate calling rates, and most calls made from jails and prisons stay inside the state. States have a wide variety of rules and rates for in-state calling. When writing this blog, I found a list of in-state rates from a few years ago, and the highest were Minnesota and South Dakota at $0.36 per minute. The lowest in-state rates were New Jersey at $0.06 and California at $0.07 per minute.

Prison calling rates matter because numerous experts say that allowing inmates to stay in contact with their families is one of the best ways to lower recidivism. When I worked on the FCC petitions, I heard numerous stories of prisoners, or their families, who couldn’t afford to make calls.

New Tax Rules and ISPs

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) creates some significant new benefits for building broadband networks. Following are the primary ones. Tax experts may glean some other ones out of the lengthy bill.

Bonus Depreciation is a tax incentive that allows businesses to immediately deduct a significant portion of the cost of building qualified assets, instead of spreading it out over as asset’s useful life. Before OBBB, bonus depreciation was being phased out. It was at 40% of the cost of a qualifying asset in 2025, 20% in 2026, and zero in 2027. OBB resets this back to 100%. There is also no dollar limit on newly used bonus depreciation.

Bonus depreciation can be applied to any asset with a useful life of twenty years or less. That means it can’t be applied to fiber, conduits, towers, and buildings, but can also be applied to all other components of building a new fiber or wireless network. Bonus depreciation applies to more than network assets and can be applied against vehicles, furniture, computers, and software. There are some limits on the amount that can be used for vehicles.

This is a big deal for somebody building a fiber network because it can provide tax relief at the time you are funding and building a network. Big ISPs see the value of this, and AT&T said after passage of the bill that the bonus depreciation provides an incentive for the company to accelerate construction for the 30 million planned new fiber passings.

There is one downside to note for bonus depreciation – if you sell an asset that took advantage of bonus depreciation before the end of its normal expected life, the seller forfeits the bonus depreciation and must recognize it as taxable income at the time of the sale. Note that businesses can still use normal 179 accelerated depreciation for fiber and other long-life assets.

Opportunity Zones: OBBB makes the opportunity zone program permanent. The program was set to sunset at the end of 2026. The opportunity zone program is aimed at promoting infrastructure investments in economically distressed areas. Qualified investments made in opportunity zones can generate deferred taxes and reduced capital gains. It’s been fairly easy to qualify fiber networks as eligible for opportunity zone benefits, particularly if the fiber projects were built in conjunction with other economic development initiatives.

There are maps online that show the areas where current opportunity zone investment apply. States will likely modify the maps starting in 2026 since the definition of eligible low-income communities has changed. The new rules are also friendlier for making investments in rural opportunity zones.

Interest Deductibility. OBBB permanently changes the adjusted taxable income formula used to calculate the amount of interest a business can deduct. The new formula is computed using Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA) and not the more limited EBIT.

R&D Deduction. This probably doesn’t benefit many ISPs, but OBBB restores the permanent ability to deduct research and development costs, including a one-time opportunity to deduct these expenses retroactively to January 1, 2022.

FEMA and ISPs

One big change coming from the current administration is that the federal government is shoving payments from FEMA down to States. The administration talked about completely closing FEMA, but just recently said that they would keep the agency open in the future. But with the budget cuts that came out of the OBBB, it’s clear that the federal share for paying for disasters will go down, meaning the State share will increase.

Depending on the state, this transfer of funding responsibility could have a huge impact on an electric utility or a telecom provider with an extensive network. FEMA has quietly helped to pay for damages to networks caused by major storms, fires, floods, or other disasters.

FEMA was created in 1979 by combining several emergency response efforts in the federal government. FEMA became part of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and has the dual mission of providing disaster relief and educating the public on disaster awareness.

FEMA was busy in 2024 and responded to 90 disaster events that included numerous fires, several major hurricanes, including Milton and Helene, floods, landslides, and tornadoes.

FEMA has served as a financial backstop when disasters cause widespread damage to infrastructure of all kinds. FEMA has shown up in the past when a governor and the President both declared a disaster event. FEMA typically has paid for a portion of storm damage, with additional help coming from a State.

FEMA isn’t the only source of federal funding, and Congress can directly approve funding to go to a state that has a disaster. However, all of the experts I’ve been reading expect that the federal funding for disasters will drop significantly, meaning States will be expected to fund a significant portion of storm damages.

A diminished FEMA is going to create havoc. States do not have the extensive disaster teams that swarm a disaster area for up to a year after a disaster. States may not have mechanisms in place to easily fund damages to infrastructure and may need to pass legislation to be able to reimburse an electric company, cable company, or other network owner.

I’ve witnessed numerous occasions when disasters cause extensive damage to networks. I worked with a client a few years ago who had large stretches of fiber burned from an extensive wildfire. There was a hurricane in the U.S. Virgin Islands a few years ago that snapped almost every utility pole on one island. Hurricane Helene last year not only knocked down poles in Appalachia, but in many cases, the ensuing floods washed away entire roads and the networks along them.

You might wonder why network owners don’t buy commercial insurance to protect networks. I suppose they could, but such a policy would be extremely expensive and would drive up the cost of the services supported. I’m not aware of any affordable network replacement insurance available in the market.

There are things that telecom network owners and utility owners might want to consider doing in reaction to a weakened FEMA. It’s important for network owners to work with states to make sure they are ready to help them after a disaster. With FEMA as the financial backstop, network owners have felt able to begin repairs immediately since they understood that the funding to cover repairs would eventually show up. It’s scarier to begin spending money without understanding how disaster reimbursement will work.

It’s not unrealistic to picture disasters where a state will be unable to cover the full cost of damages. It’s not hard to imagine network owners who can’t afford to make repairs without a guarantee of at least partial reimbursement. This could result in electric or broadband networks that sit unrepaired and customers unconnected to vital services, magnifying the negative impact of disasters.

Free-space Quantum Optics

In a joint effort by Yale University, Stony Brook University, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, scientists have been working on a project using free-space optics to transmit quantum signals through the air using lasers. The specific project is called Q-LATS for Quantum Laser Across the Sound, where signals are being transmitted 27 miles from a tower at Yale across Long Island Sound to a tower at Stony Brook University.

Quantum computers are used to create qubits, which have the ability to exist as both a one and a zero simultaneously. This allows a quantum computer to explore multiple scenarios at the same time. Qubits can be created using trapped ions or photons. Quantum communications function by generating entangled photon pairs. One photon is retained and used for calculations, while the other is sent to a distance location. Anything done with the retained photon is sensed at the distant end, thus transmitting the details of the computations.

The project is looking for alternatives to using fiber cables. It turns out to be very challenging to transmit quantum signals through fiber since some of the qubits are lost during the transmission. Fiber cables used to transmit quantum signals work best when heavily shielded and buried, making it costly to establish paths for future quantum communications.

The Q-LATS project hopes to show a reasonable alternate to fiber in places where costly fiber routes are impractical, such as across the Sound. Free-space optics can be used to transmit quantum signals in urban locations, across water, and even into space.

Transmitting light signals through the air has limitations due to rain, fog, and atmospheric turbulence, but the scientists believe these shortcomings can be more easily overcome than finding the funding to build specialty fiber routes.

For now, quantum transmissions are mostly of interest in academia to transmit signals between universities. But quantum computing holds some interesting properties that should eventually make it of use for data centers, large businesses, the military, and others. Quantum signals are seemingly nearly impossible to intercept or hack because the effort to do so instantly interferes with the transmission of qubits. That’s even more so with free-space optics, where a hacker would have to somehow intercept a line-of-sight transmission through the air.

Quantum communications might eventually become the standard for sending highly confidential or sensitive information. It’s not hard to imagine using free-space lasers to transmit quantum signals between Wall Street firms, between large businesses and data centers, and between government and military locations that require a secure path.

The Industrial Metaverse

When Facebook changed the company name to Meta in 2021, it looked like the company would be taking the lead to bring virtual reality into everyday life. The company promised in 2021 that it would create an interconnected and immersive digital world where users could engage in socializing, working, learning and creating. Meta invested over $60 billion since then to create metaverse technologies.

In the market, Meta released a series of Quest virtual reality headsets that were popular with some gamers but never got wide acceptance. The most successful product is Ray-Ban smart glasses, which are largely a phone you wear as glasses and that don’t include VR technology.

This month, Meta announced its new priorities for the future, which don’t include more exploration of the metaverse. The company laid off 100 workers from Reality Labs, and there are industry predictions that Meta will back out of metaverse research by the end of the year.

At least for now, this kills the idea of having virtual reality meetings at work and of taking virtual vacations. There were predictions in 2021 that this would be the new killer app for broadband usage and that home VR would finally be able to fully utilize home gigabit connections.

However, virtual reality has not been a total bust. A recent article in Wired describes how virtual reality has been embraced by manufacturers. There are some major advantages to being able to build a virtual version of a factory to try new ideas.

Cited in the article is report from the World Economic Forum that believes that industrial virtual reality will be a $100 billion business by 2030. This new industry might best be described as spatial computing. This combined virtual reality and augmented reality to benefit industrial applications.

The purpose of industrial VR is to create simulations of large industrial settings. The article says that Amazon uses a virtual simulation of its warehouses to train the robots that move and retrieve packages. Lowe’s uses the technology to consider its options before changing store layouts. There is a long discussion of how BMW uses the technology to improve efficiency in its auto factories.

Virtual reality for gaming is far from dead, and a dozen companies are making headsets for gaming. But the idea that we’ll all create avatars of ourselves that will navigate in a virtual world is going to go on the shelf for a while – maybe forever.

Broadband and Rural Real Estate

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America. They universally tell me that it’s gotten exceedingly hard to sell rural homes that don’t have good broadband.

I’ve also written a few blogs over the years about people who moved to a rural home and were shocked to find they couldn’t buy broadband. They probably moved from a place where broadband is ubiquitously available, and they never imagined that there were places without broadband. The most famous such story in my neck of the woods involves Brian Rathbone, who owns the broadband consulting company Broadband Catalyst. When he found his new home didn’t have fiber, he undertook nearly a decade-long effort to get it, including building the fiber to reach from the road to his remote home.

The Brattle Group released a study late last year that concluded that bringing fiber to a home might add as much as 14% to the value of the home. They undertook the study by comparing the prices for homes in 2023 that didn’t have fiber to prices in the same neighborhoods in 2024 after getting fiber. This was a time period with some significant inflation, so the increase can’t be attributed entirely to fiber, but there is no doubt that getting fiber added significant value to homes. Over the last decade, I recall estimates made by others that estimated the increase in home value for getting fiber of 6% to 8%.

The value of bringing fiber to a rural home has to be greater than for an urban home. How do you quantify the value of adding fiber to a rural home if it suddenly makes the home marketable? In my mind, a house that is put up for sale and gets no offers can be said to have no value. Some rural real estate agents have told me stories of homes without broadband that sat vacant for years after the owners left the home for some reason.

Of course, fiber isn’t the only form of rural broadband. When real estate agents talk about homes without broadband, they include homes served by rural DSL, cellular hotspots, or high orbit satellite broadband. In rural areas, I’ve run across numerous residents who tried and abandoned each of these options as inadequate and not worth the cost.

The rural broadband landscape has gotten more complicated in recent years. For example, most counties now have a few cell towers that provide FWA home cellular broadband. But the coverage areas for decent broadband from towers are small, perhaps two miles, and in the counties I’ve examined, FWA typically covers 20% or less of the area.

WISPs have been stepping up their game in many markets with new radios and better backhaul. It wasn’t unusual three or four years ago to find counties where all WISP customers saw speeds of 10 Mbps or slower. WISPs are often now delivering much faster speeds in these same places.

The big wildcard is Starlink. There are rural customers who rave about it, particularly those for whom Starlink brought the first really workable broadband. But I’ve talked to Starlink customers who complain that the quality of broadband varies throughout the day, making it a challenge to work from home. Many people moving from a cable company or fiber connection are likely to be skeptical of satellite broadband.

Of course, the advantages of bringing better broadband to rural homes go far beyond just the value added to the real estate. The counties I know that have worked hard to get better broadband have several other major goals. They understand the boost to the local economy when rural folks can make good incomes working from home. Counties are universally desperate to keep young residents from leaving the County to find jobs, and they hope that better broadband opens up local opportunities. Good broadband is also key to attracting retirees to move from cities. It’s nearly impossible to put a dollar value on these benefits.