Repurposing TV Station Spectrum

The FCC received an interesting petition in March from the owner of low-power TV stations. HC2, which owns 14% of the 1,800 low-power station in the country, asked the FCC to allow the stations to cease the requirement to provide at least one free traditional broadcast signal. Instead, HC2 wants to repurpose the TV spectrum to use 5G technology to broadcast signals to 5G-enabled devices.

Low power television service (LPTV) was established by the FCC in 1982. The intention of the order was to allow the creation of more TV stations in small markets and to add stations in urban areas that want to broadcast alternative programming to the big network stations that were prominent at the time. LPTV stations that have converted to digital broadcast use 3 kilowatts for VHF and 15 kilowatts for UHF channels. Analog stations broadcast at 50 watts for VHF and 500 watts for UHF channels.

HC2 is asking that the FCC allow a transition to the 5G standard as an alternative to having to upgrade stations to the ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 standards. HC2’s vision is to abandon transmissions to TV sets and instead transmit high-quality video to cell phones and other 5G-capable devices. They recognize that the market for linear TV is dying and that a huge number of people spend many hours per day on cell phones. There are currently no cell phones capable of receiving these signals, but HC2 believes that if the FCC allows the change that phone makers will build the technology into phones.

TV delivered straight to cell phones would be an interesting product. HC2 believes the direction of the video market is towards mobility and wants the ability to change their operating model to meet shifting consumer demand. They argue that at a time when carriers are complaining about a lack of 5G spectrum, the spectrum from the LPTV stations will bring more mobile applications to the market without eating into normal cellular spectrum.

HC2 sees a lot of other possible applications. For example, the spectrum could be used by vehicle fleets to send software updates to vehicles without bogging down normal 5G networks. The LPTV networks could be used to provide last-mile connectivity to customers communicating with direct-to-device satellites. Those satellites could beam signal to a hub and have the signals redistributed locally using the LPTV spectrum, eliminating the need for a customer to have direct line-of-sight to a satellite.

HC2 says that early tests of the technology show the ability to transmit signal for up to 20 miles. They’ve also been able to maintain signals to a cell phone in a car traveling at 60 miles-per-hour.

It’s an interesting petition, and it will be interesting to see who opposes it. It sounds like satellite providers might side with the idea. It will be interesting to see if cellular carriers see this as a threat or an opportunity – I suspect they won’t like a new competitor. Handset makers might support the idea if they think it will help to sell more cell phones.

To be clear, the FCC is not obligated to open a rulemaking. The agency gets petitions all of the time asking for rule changes. But it would be unusual for the agency to not at least consider an idea that creates a new market.

Why Are There So Many Bad Poles?

Most ISPs that build much aerial fiber run into situations where a lot of poles are in bad shape that must be replaced. This adds both cost and time to a fiber construction project since the pole replacement process can be expensive and slow.

There are a lot of reasons why wooden poles go bad over time:

  • Rain, snow, and humidity can cause poles to rot and decay, particular at the ground line where soil touches the pole. Moisture often brings fungal decay.
  • Seasonal changes in weather can cause poles to expand and contract and cause cracking that allows in moisture.
  • High wind can cause cracks in poles that can get worse over time. Overloading poles with too many wires can speed up deterioration.
  • Termites and wood-eating insects can erode a pole’s strength. Woodpeckers damage poles by drilling small holes that expand over time.

All wooden poles naturally rot and decay over time and eventually go bad. Industry literature abounds with estimates that wood poles should last between thirty and fifty years. Those lives would suggest that perhaps 2.5% of deteriorated poles should be replaced with new ones every year.

Many poles get replaced before the end of economic life.

  • The biggest cause of early pole replacement comes from road widening. Utilities can sometimes reuse some poles during this process.
  • The next biggest category of early pole replacement come from line upgrades. This mostly comes from electric utilities wanting to add heavy wires to existing poles. But sometimes adding other wires like coaxial cable or fiber requires a new pole to handle the wind load.
  • The other big cause of pole replacement is traffic accidents, which is unfortunately common since most poles are placed immediately adjacent to roads.
  • There can be a lot of localized pole replacements caused by tornadoes, hurricanes, and ice storms.

But even with the early replacement, a utility should expect to replace more than 2% of poles every year. We have a huge national inventory of bad poles because most utilities are replacing poles at half that rate. Utility practices differ, and there are some utilities where poles are mostly in good shape. There are also utilities at the other end of the scale, and I know of a few small rural utilities where the vast majority of poles need to be replaced.

Unfortunately, there are no national laws that require utilities to keep up with pole replacement. Many utilities only replace those poles each year that are in danger of collapse, meaning the average age of their pole inventory keeps climbing.

Utilities are loathe to replace too many poles since it leads to higher electric rates. I have talked to small electric companies that are hoping that fiber construction will bail them out of their aging pole problem by having a fiber builder paying to replace a lot of poles.

I know pole replacements aren’t at the top of anybody’s list. Unfortunately, poor utility pole replacement practices continue to add a lot of cost to fiber projects. If nothing is done, sometime over the next 20-30 years we’ll see some utilities have catastrophic numbers of pole failures. Maybe these utilities are waiting for mother nature to somehow fix the problem for them.

AI Hype Begins

It didn’t take long after the widespread introduction of AI into the business environment for a carrier to claim it is using AI better than the competition. Masha Abarinova wrote an article in Fierce Networks that quotes Comcast as saying it is using AI more effectively than its fiber competitors.

The article covers a discussion with Elad Nafshi, the chief network officer for Comcast, who brags on the ways Comcast is already using AI more effectively than fiber-based ISPs. She quotes Nashi as claiming that Comcast has embedded AI that is “literally feet away from a customer” with real-time pattern detection capabilities that give Comcast the ability to pinpoint interference in the network.

I can already anticipate the fiber ISP retort to this claim, with fiber ISPs saying they don’t need a last-foot AI capability because fiber doesn’t have any interference since it has the same quality of service from end-to-end in the network.

I’ve been waiting for this first shot across the bow and suspect that Comcast’s claim will set off a chain of industry players claiming their flavor of AI is better than the competition. These claims are mostly hype and are aimed at Wall Street analysts and not at the general public. The biggest companies in the industry never miss a chance to claim they have an advantage. It’s easy at this early stage of AI to make this kind of claim since nobody can tell how much of such a claim is hype versus reality. Throw around enough buzzwords, and nobody can challenge such a claim.

A more interesting observation in the article quotes Nafshi as saying that general AI use among customers has not resulted in increased network traffic. He noted that while customers are using ChatGPT and OpenAI, the interactions between customers and the clouds are mostly passing text, which is not data intensive.

This differs a lot from what other industry players have been claiming about the future of AI. The article cites AT&T’s prediction that its network traffic will double by 2028 due to AI. Zayo cited an expected huge growth in network traffic as the justification to buy the fiber networks from Crown Castle.

I’ve been scratching my head for several months trying to figure out how AI might create the predicted explosive growth. I’ve yet to see anybody describe the specific AI traffic or functions that could double the traffic for a company like AT&T.

Network traffic is growing for other reasons. Ericsson recently predicted a 16% annual growth in cellular traffic. Numerous predictions for home and business broadband have predicted growth rates of 10-12% annually. Something drastic and new would be needed to double overall traffic on AT&T by 2028.

When Does 4G Sunset?

No large cell carriers have announced specific long-term plans for phasing out 4G cellular. However, all of them have commented in various forums that 4G will eventually be retired, as happened to 3G.

Looking at the lifespan of 3G might be a decent barometer for the lifecycle of 4G. The phase-out of 3G happened in 2022, about twenty years after its introduction. Interestingly, the 3G phase-out was delayed by the pandemic and might have otherwise occurred a little earlier. 4G was introduced into networks around 2010, and that might presage retirement of the technology starting around 2030.

When I researched the question online, I ran across numerous predictions that a 4G phase-out in the U.S. will likely start around 2030. All predictions are that 4G and 5G will continue to coexist until a phase-out begins.

One of the factors that favors 5G is that more customers every year are changing to cell phones with 5G capability. You might think that almost everybody upgrades phones, but when 3G finally was ended, there were still millions who didn’t have a 4G capable phone. Cell phones are increasingly expensive, and there is a significant portion of the public who hangs on to a working phone as long as possible.

One of the problems with phasing out 4G is that a lot of hardware and services are hard-wired to use 4G. For example, there are numerous IoT devices and vehicle systems that only look for a 4G connection. Any device you’ve purchased without a 5G capability will become a brick when 4G is finally retired.

One of the biggest issue of retiring 4G is that the lower frequencies used for 4G carry for greater distances in rural markets. If 4G was cancelled today, a lot of rural neighborhoods and households would lose cell coverage to some extent, and some would lose it totally. It’s possible that carriers will repurpose lower frequencies to 5G, but none of them have announced such plans.

The transition to 5G has been successful. My consulting firm has looked at cellular coverage in several markets, and 5G connections have grown to be roughly two to one over 4G connections in the markets we studied. Interestingly, as more customers migrate to 5G, those networks get busier, particularly at peak time. Conversely, speeds on 4G network seem to be climbing over time as the demand decreases.

There was hope that 4G spectrum could be leveraged to last longer by using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing that allows 4G and 5G to share the same spectrum band. However, an article in LightReading last year says the technology has now been abandoned in the U.S. since the technology did not mitigate signal interference between the uses.

The Big Carrier Chess Board

There was big news in the long-haul fiber business recently when Zayo announced it will be acquiring the fiber assets of Crown Castle and adding 90,000 miles of fiber to its network. The acquisition will also Zayo’s access to major buildings to 70,000. Zayo says the acquisition will position it as a major player in providing transport for AI. Zayo has been actively building new fiber routes across the country in the last few years.

Crown Castle is also selling its small cell business to EQT, a major investor in Zayo. The announced cost of the fiber acquisition is reported at $4.25 billion. My back-of-the-envelope math says that is paying $47,000 dollars per route mile for long-haul fiber. That seems like a huge bargain. Here is the map of the Crown Castle network. The map doesn’t show the many local routes within metropolitan areas.

There have been rumors that Crown Castle hasn’t been doing well, with its slowdown based on the decision of cellular carriers to expand via small cell sites. Crown Castle made a major bet that small cell sites was going to be a thriving business. That didn’t sound like a bad bet based on the rhetoric of the big cellular carriers a few years ago – but the expansion to small cell sites ceased abruptly.

This will cause a big shift in the large carrier market. Vertical Systems Group tracks the large carrier market. For 2024 they rank the leasers in that market as 1-Luman, 2-Zayo, 3-Verizon, 4-AT&T, and 5-Crown Castle. Each of these business has at least a 4% market share in selling fiber  wavelengths. We’ll have to see if the acquisition bumps Zayo to number one.

Zayo was ranked seventh in connections to lit buildings, with Crown Castle listed at eighth. One has to thin this might move Zayo ahead of number six Cox, or number five Lumen.

Lumen is also in the news. It’s widely reported in the press that AT&T is going to make a $5.5 billion bid for Lumen’s retail fiber business. This deal is far from over, and AT&T hasn’t even made a formal offer yet. There are already rumors that T-Mobile, Verizon, and BCE (the Canadian company that recently purchased Ziply Fiber) might make counteroffers.

Interestingly, analysts are saying that an AT&T bid for Lumen’s fiber customers is as much about reducing cell phone churn as it is in acquiring fiber customers. However, if AT&T is successful in buying Lumen, they would grow to 55 million fiber passings, compared to 35 million for Verizon and 12 million for T-Mobile.

Verizon will be growing it’s footprint and is expected to close the acquisition of Frontier sometime this year. T-Mobile has also been active in fiber acquisitions and purchased a share of Lumos and Metronet last year and is partnering with two ISPs in Louisiana that are pursuing BEAD grants.

There are lots of other rumors in the industry, with the biggest being that T-Mobile is interested in buying Charter, which has over 30 million broadband customers.

It’s clearly going to be an interesting year watching the big companies move pieced around the chess board.

Robocalls Growing

The FCC has taken a number of steps in recent years to try to cut down on nuisance robocalls. Some of the FCC’s actions include:

  • The agency mandated that companies that originate voice calls implement STIR/SHAKEN, a set of rules that require validation of caller ID. One of the primary functions of this effort is to make sure that the number displayed on caller ID is the same as the number of the originating caller. The big telcos implemented this in 2021, and smaller carriers a year later.
  • Over time, the FCC expanded STIR/SHAKEN to gateway providers (tandems) and eventually to intermediate non-gateway providers.
  • In conjunction with the industry, the FCC actively tries to shut down active robocall campaigns.
  • The FCC has taken enforcement actions, including large fines against robocallers. In 2021, the FCC issued a $225 million fine against a group of telemarketers in Texas who were selling scam life insurance plans. In February of this year, the FCC issued a fine of $4.5 million against Telnyx for making sham calls that impersonated politicians.
  • The FCC requires that anybody selling a voice product give customers a free call-blocking tool.
  • Phone companies are free to block calls by default that they believe are illegal or unwanted.

The FCC’s actions put a dent in robocalling. According to the Robocall Index from YouMail, there were 4.8 billion robocalls in February 2020. That dropped to 4.6 billion in February 2021 and 3.8 billion in February 2022, Buit since then, volumes are back up to 4.2 billion in February 2023, and now 4.5 billion in February 2025.

Not all robocalls are bad, and the FCC’s efforts are aimed at eliminating unwanted robocalls. YouMail classifies robocalls into four categories:

  • Alerts and Reminders are calls from places like a school, a local government, or a doctor or dentist office.
  • Payment Reminders are to remind folks that a payment of some sort is due, and perhaps late.

The two troublesome categories are:

  • Telemarketing calls that come from a company with which a consumer is not a current or past customer.
  • Scams are calls that the FCC considers to be fraudulent and that try to get money from folks.

In February 2024 there was 1.32 billion telemarketing calls, that rose to 1.575 billion in 2025, up 19%. There was 840 million scam calls in February 2024, up to 1.035 billion in 2025, a 23% increase.

Robocallers have obviously figured out ways around the various network tools that have been implemented to stop them. Considering the sizes of fines that have been issued, there must be big payday from making large numbers of scam calls. The FCC says that stopping robocalls is still a top priority and posted this message to consumers earlier this year.

The bottom line is that the FCC seems to be losing the war against robocallers. They’ve shifted the battleground by killing techniques that used to work, but it seems like robocallers have gotten adept at still getting call through to the public. There is a lot of speculation that scam artists are using AI to be more effective in their calling effort.

Status of NG 911

The 911 emergency calling system got started in 1968 when AT&T established the digits 9-1-1 as a universal number to reach emergency services. In 1999, the industry started to tackle an upgrade labeled as enhanced 911 that integrated called ID, first for landlines and eventually using triangulation from cell sites.

By 2007, there was recognition that 911 could do a lot more, and next generation (NG 911) was created. NG 911 enables 911 callers and first responders to transmit text, photos, videos, and other data in real-time.

There is recognition today that 911 ought to be able to integrate IoT devices like home security cameras and wearables. There is work being done to introduce proactive incident detection and predictive analytics using AI to further assist first responders. There is also a recognition that 911 systems need better cybersecurity. The movement to introduce the latest technology is referred to as NGERS – next generation emergency response systems.

But before introducing the newest technologies, a lot of states still have a lot of work to do to implement NG 911. Maine, Tennessee, and Vermont implemented NG 911 in 2015, followed within a few years by Connecticut and Massachusetts.

A lot of states still have not completed the full transition to NG 911. The steps needed to implement include a lot of technology upgrades such as compliant call handling, computer-aided dispatch, and call recording systems. Work is also needed to align 911 with GIS data – and there are still many counties that have not converted property records to GIS. The number one issue cited by states that haven’t made the transition to NG 911 is funding. Many states have been hoping for more federal funding for the transition, which largely never was forthcoming. There was an effort to create federal legislation to promote the effort that never materialized.

Meanwhile, there was a federal effort through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and NTIA to create a framework where state 911 systems could be integrated into a national 911 grid. The effort of these two agencies seems to have slowed to nearly a stop since 2022.

One of the biggest challenges today is the introduction of new technologies that have changed to path needed to implement NG 911. It’s looking very likely that the big telcos will finally be abandoning the TDS-based public switched telephone network in favor of a digital SIP-based network. Technologies involving GIS and mapping have changed a lot in the last decade. It feels like trying to hit a moving target to complete an implementation of NG 911.

Another surprising roadblock is the number of 911 centers (PSAPs) in a given state. PSAPs have largely been funded and created locally, and that means that each 911 call center uses different hardware and software, making it hard to make any statewide updates.

Another missing part of the picture is the vendors that supply the systems to support 911. The technology that was used a decade ago is obsolete, and in many cases, there are no vendors rushing to do the R&D needed to develop the next generation of systems until there is a proven market to buy the new systems. In many ways, the rapid evolution of communications technologies has moved faster than the systems that incorporate them. One simple example is the recent announcement that satellite networks will be supporting cell phones to make 911 calls.

I think a lot of folks will be surprised that the conversion to NG 911 is still not close to complete, since industry press was full of success stories a decade ago.

Repairing Undersea Fiber

I saw several articles voicing concern about sabotage when two different undersea fiber operators, C-Lion and BCS East-West Interlink, reported breaks in fiber in the Baltic Sea in the same week. There was speculation that Russia was cutting fibers to try to disrupt European broadband. It was eventually reported that the cuts looked like accidents, but conspiracy theorists still like the sabotage story better. Having two cables broken in the Baltic Sea got headlines because of tensions caused by the war in Ukraine. To put the Baltic Sea fiber cuts into perspective, there are two to four cable cuts to undersea fiber somewhere in the world every week.

Interestingly, a fiber cut to an undersea fiber doesn’t cause as much harm as most people imagine. This map that shows all of the current submarine cable routes. There are a huge amount of redundant routes to most of the world. A single fiber getting cut is an inconvenience and not a huge problem. Even if all of the fibers in the Baltic Sea were cut, Internet traffic would still be delivered through long-haul fiber routes across Europe.

There are exceptions, and there are island nations that can be isolated by even a single fiber cut. Multiple fiber cuts can cause localized slowdowns. There were four cable cuts off Africa in a relatively short time in 2024 that caused broadband outages in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Benin. It’s more of a challenge in Africa to reroute traffic using landline fiber since much of the continent still has inadequate middle-mile and long-haul fiber routes.

There are a wide variety of ways that undersea cables get cut. The two most predominant causes are fishing vessels and fibers snagged by anchors. Breaks can come from natural causes like earthquakes, volcanos, or heavy seas. Fibers are cut more often in relatively shallow water than in the deep water in the middle of oceans.

The constantly weekly cuts to fiber have spawned a naval repair industry of ships that constantly circle the globe to fix cable breaks. While that might sound like an exotic job, fixing fibers in the Baltic Sea in February sounds like it deserves hazard pay to me.

The process of repairing cut fibers is interesting. In shallow water, the repair ships locate and grab the end of the cut fibers using ROVs (remote operated vehicles). The mini-submarines grab the fiber with robotic claws and drag the fiber to the surface.

Repairing fibers in deep water is harder. The repair ships locate the fiber using sonar and voltage drop test equipment to locate the ends of the cut fiber. Anybody who locates buried fiber would be intrigued by the process. They then use grapnels, which are large hooks, to snag the fiber and pull it to the surface.

Once the two fiber ends are retrieved, the repair process would be familiar to any fiber field technician. The one difference is that long-haul fiber routes have periodic light repeaters built into the fiber, so it’s more challenging if one of those in part of the repair.

A Spectrum Crisis?

CTIA, the trade association for cellular companies published a recent blog titled, “The Looming Spectrum Crisis”.  The blog quotes a study from Accenture that concludes that a lack of spectrum for 5G is reaching a point of crisis. The Accenture study says that cellular networks will be unable to meet nearly one-fourth of peak-period requests for connection as soon as 2027.

My first reaction to this headline was, “Here we go again”, because this feels like the giant industry drama eight years ago when the wireless industry told everybody who would listen that the U.S. was losing the 5G war to China. That effort was also aimed at getting more spectrum to support 5G. In retrospect, it turned out that nobody cares what China does with wireless inside their own country.

The other original promise was that 5G was going to revolutionize connectivity. Cell sites were going to be upgraded so that customers could get huge amounts of bandwidth by combining signals from multiple small cell sites that were going to be on every corner. 5G was going to unleash self-driving cars, virtual reality, and even the ability for doctors to do remote operations. It turns out that none of those things were ever implemented because cell carriers quickly realized that people weren’t willing to pay extra for a faster cell signal or for the bells and whistles.

However, the scare tactics worked, and the carriers got the new spectrum. The public didn’t get the bells and whistles, but we got faster cellular networks that work better, and that’s okay.

The CTIA blog seems to be rehashing the same old claims. The blog says that without new spectrum, consumers won’t have access to next-generation products and services like remote robotics, extended reality devices, and autonomous vehicles. Lack of spectrum also means that AI will be stifled.

The biggest threatened consequence of not getting more spectrum is that competition will suffer. By that, CTIA means that the carriers want more spectrum to expand 5G FWA home broadband. That’s interesting because the CEOs of the cellular carriers have all publicly been saying that 5G home broadband is a sideline and was implemented to use up excess capacity in the network. This is the first time I can recall seeing FWA as the justification for needing more spectrum. I can understand why the carriers want more FWA – they had grown the business in only a few years to over 11.6 million customers at the end of 2024. However, wanting more spectrum to sell more FWA customers is not a looming crisis.

It is true that cellular traffic usage has been growing rapidly and likely will continue to do so. Ericsson says the rate of growth of cell phone data usage in North America will be 16% per year through 2030. That prediction must be tempered by the fact that OpenSignal says that 85% of cell phone traffic is now handled by WiFi and not with cellular spectrum.

I guess the wireless industry saw that crying wolf worked eight years ago, and are adopting the same tactic again. The industry clearly needs more spectrum in the future, but it’s not particularly believable that cell networks will be unable to complete huge numbers of connection requests only a year and a half from now.

If the industry is really going to run out of 5G spectrum by 2027, you would think there would have been a much louder stink about this before the second quarter of 2025. You also might think that an industry that was facing that kind of crisis wouldn’t have connected 11.6 million FWA home broadband customers to scarce 5G spectrum in the last few years – particularly since the average FWA customer uses up to 100 times more cellular data in a month than the average cell customer. I am sure that the real purpose of this kind of headline is to give cover for the FCC to give more spectrum. But it’s so damned dramatic.

Rural 5G

The FCC voted last year to launch the 5G Fund for Rural America to expand 5G coverage into the many parts of country with poor cell coverage. It may turn out that market forces might mean that some of that subsidy won’t be needed since the big carriers are expanding into rural areas. A recent blog from Ookla documents the rural expansion of 5G. Ookla concludes that fierce nationwide competitive pressure is driving the carriers to look harder at rural areas to gain every possible customer.

Ookla, which collects a huge volume of speed tests, is one of the few companies that can look at carrier expansion using its own data. When Ookla sees multiple speed tests on 5G, it has definitive proof that coverage is present in an area. Ookla looked at the recent rural expansion from each of the three primary carriers.

T-Mobile. Ookla shows that T-Mobile has the largest rural 5G footprint today. T-Mobile claims it covers 323 million people, or 98% of U.S. households with 5G using its low-band 600 MHz spectrum. This low-band spectrum carriers for a greater distance than the spectrum used by other carriers. The company was required to expand coverage to 97% of the population as part of the agreement with the FCC when it purchased Sprint. I have to wonder about the 98% coverage. If you look closely at the FCC cellular maps, T-Mobile shows coverage of very slow speeds over a lot of rural America, and you have to wonder if this coverage is real enough to even use for voice calls.

T-Mobile also is the fastest carrier in much of the country, which came from the deployment of the 2.5 GHz spectrum that the company acquired with the Sprint purchase. The company has used the 150 MHz band of the spectrum to increase speeds in the top 100 markets in the country. We know that T-Mobile has rural plans since the company announced in 2024 that it is hoping to achieve a 20% market share in rural America by the end of 2025. That claim is bolstered by the pending close of the purchase of 30% of the spectrum and all 4.5 million customers of UScellular.

AT&T. A lot of the company’s rural expansion comes from FirstNet. This is a nationally funded program to create a nationwide first responder network. AT&T was awarded $6.5 billion to build the network and also given 20 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum. FirstNet brought AT&T a 25-year contract with the government. There is an expected $2 billion additional investment to upgrade the network to 5G everywhere.

One of the key requirements for FirstNet is that it must be made available to first responders in rural areas. This led AT&T to install FirstNet on all of its own towers and to build over 1,000 rural towers. AT&T announced in October 2024 that it has 6.4 million connections and 29,000 public safety agencies on the network. AT&T has also invested heavily in spectrum auctions and spent $37 billion the FCC’s C-band and 3.45 GHz auctions.

Verizon. Verizon doesn’t own much low-band spectrum that would give it coverage in rural areas. Instead, the company relied on a technology called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) that allows one spectrum band to toggle between 4G LTE and 5G  in 1 millisecond increments. While it works, this didn’t give the company the boost it was hoping for.

Verizon’s rural strategy seems to be through acquisition, and the company has bought cell carriers operating in Kentucky, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Montana. Verizon is also buying $1 billion of 850 MHz, AWS and PCS spectrum from UScellular.

Verizon is betting on the C-Band spectrum that it purchased in 2021 for $52 billion. It’s hoping that the 161 MHz band of spectrum will carry it into the future. The company has announced it intends to deploy more rural spectrum,

None of the carriers are likely to expand into sparely populated rural areas where coverage is often nonexistent. But the current expansion plans likely will bring cellular relief to a lot of rural areas, long before any solution might come from the FCC.