John Deere’s Private 5G Network

FierceNetwork recently published an article talking about the private 5G network implemented by John Deere for it’s campuses and factories. Having a secure private wireless network is allowing the company to implement 5G technology onto the manufacturing floor.

The company got started on this solution when it spent $546,000 to buy CBRS PALs licenses in 2021 in five counties in Illinois and Iowa, that included its headquarters in Rock Island County, Illinois. John Deere has more than twenty facilities in the five counties.

The key to making this work was the exclusive use of spectrum, meaning that Deere can always rely on the wireless bandwidth free of interference or use by others. That assurance allows the company to establish a wireless network to communicate directly with manufacturing equipment in its factories.

It’s taken four years for the company to make the transition to wireless broadband, with the company having to find a 5G interface for each piece of equipment. Jason Wallin of John Deere is quoted that the company adopted an 80-10-10 model where 80% of broadband needs are covered by the private 5G networks, 10% by WiFi, and 10% with hard-wired Ethernet. The company says it is spending $1.7 million this year on updated smart tools to take advantage of the wireless network.

The company was quoted in 2021 about seeking the same wireless solution in its other factories around the world. But adopting this in other locations would require working with a cellular license holder to somehow carve out spectrum for each factory.

The creation of 5G private networks was one of the original big promises for 5G. There have been some notable examples of private 5G networks created around the world for Airbus, Shanxi Coking Coal, Group, Tesla, Lufthansa Technik, and NEC. However, this has not been the booming business for cellular carriers they hoped for. If you look back at industry press five years ago, you’d see the carriers touting this as a major opportunity. However, like other business lines based on 5G, the performance badly underperformed the expectations. The John Deere example showed a corporation that found it better to buy the spectrum and tackle this on its own rather than partnering with a carrier.

The CTO of John Deere says the company expects to use the newly created wireless network far into the future. This sounds like a relatively small investment to gain the benefits of fully automating the factory floor by connecting all machinery to an integrated network.

Eliminating FCC Regulations

I’m sure nobody is surprised that businesses regulated by the FCC responded with long lists of regulations that should be eliminated after the FCC invited them to do so in the Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding. Seemingly every trade association has an existing list of hated regulations, and the FCC heard from telcos, cable companies, cellular carriers, programmers, satellite companies, and even more obscure parts of the industry like prison phone providers and robocallers.

Some of the requests were fully anticipated and had been mentioned in the Delete, Delete, Delete docket. For example, AT&T and Verizon asked the FCC to eliminate most of the rules related to maintaining or reporting on copper telephone networks. The companies are tearing down those networks and would like to finish the task without paperwork or having to notify the public.

The purpose of the Delete, Delete, Delete docket is to eliminate rules that are antiquated and no longer needed. Trade groups took this as an opportunity to ask the FCC to eliminate regulations across the board, including regulatory rules that were explicitly ordered by Congress or rules recently adopted by the FCC. For example, there were multiple requests from ISPs to eliminate broadband labels, which just went into effect last year. Prison phone companies asked to overturn a recent FCC order that reduced prison calling rates. Verizon asked the FCC to reverse a recent decision that requires it to unlock phones so that customers can more easily change carriers. AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate its authority to issue fines after the company was recently fined.

One of the more interesting requests came from debt collection agencies and those who represent robocallers. They want to get rid of the rules that let the public easily opt out of receiving robocalls or texts. This doesn’t seem likely since the FCC is still actively working to eliminate junk and spam calls.

It is going to be very interesting to see what the FCC does with the huge pile of requests they received. I don’t know if anybody has added up the industry requests, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there are 10,000 specific regulations somebody wants to kill. The normal process in the past to add or delete regulations has been to issue a list of the specific changes being considered to get industry feedback. I assume that FCC staff will have to somehow wade through the huge list of requests to find those that meet the spirit of Delete, Delete, Delete. A lot of what is being suggested by the various industries are changes to active regulations that are not obsolete.

This is going to be a test of how activist the new FCC is going to be. If the Commission sticks to the stated purpose of eliminating unneeded regulations, this docket will not likely cause a ripple in the industry. I think everybody agrees that federal regulators should periodically eliminate outdated regulations.

However, the FCC could use this docket as a short-cut way to eliminate piles of active regulations. If that happens, it seems likely we’ll see scads of lawsuits challenging the FCC for not following the prescribed process for making regulatory changes. Interestingly, some recent court orders question the authority of regulatory agencies like the FCC to add new regulations that were not directly by Congress, and it seems to me that this same concept would apply to eliminating regulations.

Cleaning Up After Construction

I recently read an article from the ABC TV station in Cleveland that covers local complaints about damage caused during fiber construction. It’s titled. “It’s Terrible!: Local Communities Angered about Damages Caused by Broadband Installations”. This is not a headline that any ISP building a network wants to see.

In this particular case, the construction was being done in Brunswick Hills Township by Frontier, who used MasTec as the construction vendor. The story includes a complaint from a resident who said MasTec had hit a buried electric line and that she was reduced to using candles for months. The construction also hit a gas line and recently hit another buried electric line that knocked out power for 200 for ten hours.

Anybody who has ever buried fiber is familiar with these kinds of incidents. Sometimes the problems are caused by operator error where the company doing the construction makes a mistake. However, the problem often comes from the locating vendors that misidentify existing buried utilities. Folks who bury fiber would love to never hit any utility, but it unfortunately happens with fair regularity.

More troublesome in this story is a claim that the construction contractor left a large open hole behind them. It’s worth watching the video, because there is a huge hole that looks like it was intended for a fiber vault. The hole looks to be well off what normally be considered as public right-of-way where construction is allowed to dig without an easement from a property owner.

The real issue of the story is that Frontier and its contractor left behind some big messes. This story must be concerning to the many construction contractors that get this right. Contractors generally have a person assigned to construction projects to deal with the problems that inevitably arise. This particular incident would never have been a story if the situation had been dealt with immediately to the satisfaction of homeowners.

Let’s face it. Fiber construction is messy. Boring means digging holes, which quickly become messy in wet weather. Construction in the right-of-way upsets homeowners who think of the public areas next to the street as part of their front yard.

A lot of my ISP clients like to get ahead of these issues. They put doorhangers on every home in a construction area a week or so before construction to tell them what to expect. Most ISPs insist that contractors return areas to as near to original condition as possible after the construction. Most contractors today take pictures of areas before and after they dig as proof that they did the restoration work after digging.

ISPs also often talk to town officials ahead of time to tell them what to expect, and to give them somebody to contact when they hear about problems. Nobody wants a town official on TV complaining about them like happened in this story.

An ISP that makes a mess also has to worry about resident who refuse to buy service from them. A lot of my clients look at the construction process as a sales opportunity, and they knock on doors during the process to apologize for the commotion and mess and to introduce their new fiber broadband.

Broadband is Critical Infrastructure

The Kansas legislature recently enacted HB 2061 that declared that broadband is critical infrastructure. Specifically, the new law says that it is a felony to trespass or damage aboveground and belowground lines, cable and wires used for telecommunications or video services. When Governor Laura Kelly signed the bill she said it critical that all Kansans have access to reliable high-speed internet.

Kansas joins Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee in classifying broadband networks as critical infrastructure and making it a crime to interfere with or damage telecom networks.

At the federal level, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) includes communications technology as one of its sectors of critical infrastructure. The CISA website says, “The Information Technology Sector is central to the nation’s security, economy, public health, and safety, as businesses, governments, academia, and private citizens are increasingly dependent on its functions”.

This might seem like feel-good legislation sponsored by the telecom industry. However, the real goal is to make it easier for law enforcement to go after those who vandalize networks. There is a notable uptick in reported theft and damage to our networks. A whitepaper by NCTA, CTA, USTelecom, and the Rural Broadband Association highlighted a nationwide survey of telecom providers for June through August 2024 that identified 3,929 incidents of theft and vandalism, which is 44 incidents per day. The attack on networks affected service to more than 325,000 customers. In addition to knocking neighborhoods out of service, the attacks have disrupted 911 centers, emergency responses, and hospitals.

The current primary driver of damage to networks is copper thefts. But there are also numerous reported attacks on utility poles, cellular towers, telecom construction projects, and fiber optic wiring. The attacks aren’t limited to telecom networks, and there is a growing number of attacks on electric grids and EV charging stations.

The Kansas law hopefully makes it easier to penalize those caught in vandalism to networks. This law is part of a national strategy to make it easier for law enforcement to work with carriers to reduce vandalism. Raising crimes against networks to felonies means a higher priority to pursue those doing the damage, and just maybe, a little less desire to do the damage.

What’s Your Broadband Journey?

Anybody who was using computers before 2000 can describe a broadband journey of how they communicated over the years. That journey mostly describes the broadband choices we each had in our neighborhood.

My broadband journey started sometime in the early 1980s. I had a TRS80 home computer from Radio Shack. I played around with programming and learned the basics of computing. But I  really started to enjoy the computer when I discovered bulletin boards. I lived in Oakland, California, at the time, and there were hundreds of different bulletin boards available with a local call. These were text-based forums where you could type messages (punctuation often not allowed). I bought what I recall as a 300-baud modem that let me connect to different boards. I spent a lot of time on music, science fiction, and sports boards. About the same time, I joined CompuServe. I didn’t like the chat rooms there as much as I did the bulletin boards, but it was my first online introduction to being able to follow the news.

Over time, I upgraded to better computers. I eventually joined AOL and used it mostly for email and to play online trivia games. Dial-up modems by this point were up to 56 Kbps, a blazing speed compared to my first modem.

Since I was in the telecom industry, and I closely followed the development of DSL. I had moved to Maryland, and I recall buying DSL service from Verizon in late 2000 at a blazing speed of 1 Mbps. My office at the time was served by a T1 at 1.6 Mbps, shared by a dozen people. I recall being amazed that I could get 1 Mbps at home just for me. DSL was so much faster than dial-up that it felt like it ought to last for many years.

But it didn’t last. AOL and other web companies piled the web full of pictures, and 1 Mbps soon started feeling slow. A few years after getting DSL, I upgraded to a cable modem from Comcast. My recollection is that it delivered 3 Mbps download.

Verizon announced that it was building fiber in the DC suburbs, and I got on the waiting list years before the product launched. My neighborhood was one of the first neighborhoods to get FiOS fiber in Prince Georges County. I was the first customer in the county that Verizon tried to connect with FiOS voice and the Verizon installation crew was at my house for almost three days in 2004 trying to get voice to work. My FiOS connection gave me 30/5 Mbps, which felt like lightning at the time. At the time, I couldn’t figure out the benefit of having 5 Mbps upload, when most people didn’t even have 5 Mbps download.

My next move was a step backward. I moved to St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. I scoped broadband before I went. The telephone copper network was so poor there that voice barely worked, and the cable company didn’t yet offer broadband. I subscribed to Broadband VI, a local WISP, and I got a solid connection because I bought a home in the shadow of one of their towers. I was on this service for almost a decade. It was reliable, and my average download speed at the end was around 5 Mbps – fast enough for working from home at the time.

When I moved back to the States, I bought a house that didn’t have broadband, but I wasn’t worried since Comcast had a pedestal at the end of my driveway. In a story that I am sure is familiar to many, Comcast customer service said my house couldn’t be served, and it took a few week of calls to convince them otherwise. Comcast wouldn’t sell me standalone broadband and forced me to buy a basic video package – the cable box went into the closet and was never used. My recollection is that my speed was 60 Mbps, and I got a notice after a while that speeds were unilaterally going to be upgraded to 100 Mbps.

I moved to Asheville, North Carolina and got Charter broadband – no other bundled products were required. My initial speed was 100 Mbps, but it eventually got upgraded to 200 Mbps, and we upgraded to 700 Mbps to try to get better WiFi distribution in our hundred-year old home.

Of all of the broadband products I’ve purchased, I think the 1 Mbps DSL modem from Verizon was my favorite. It was 30 time faster than dial-up and, for the first time, I felt freed from the limits of the connection technology. At the time, that was enough speed to do anything I wanted. I’m also still nostalgic about the beeps and boops of my first modem.

Feel free to share your broadband journey in the comments.

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.