The Fiber Land-Grab

It’s becoming clear that we are now deep into a fiber land-grab. By that, I mean that companies that overbuild fiber are moving as quickly as possible into markets to build fiber. The biggest ISPs have publicly discussed their plans for building a lot of fiber in 2023. Following are some of the latest projections for 2023:

  • AT&T plans to build past 2 – 2.5 million new passings.
  • Frontier plans to pass 1.3 million new homes.
  • Altice is aimed for 900,000 new fiber passings.
  • Brightspeed is planning on 600,000 new passings.
  • Verizon hasn’t announced a number, but built 550,000 new passings in 2022.
  • MetroNet is aiming for 500,000 new passings.
  • Lumen plans to build 500,000 passings.
  • Consolidated Communications is planning on 350,000 passings.
  • Charter announced plans for 300,000 passings.
  • Comcast announced plans to pass more than 200,000 homes.
  • TDS plans on 175,000 new passings.

This list doesn’t include the numerous smaller companies that are building fiber. The largest among the rest include fiber builders like Bluespeak, Clearwave, Omni Fiber, Surf Internet, WOW!, and Ziply Fiber. I would guess that there are a few hundred other companies with aggressive fiber plans. This also doesn’t even count the fiber being built by over 200 electric cooperatives.

I call it a land grab because these ISPs are all hoping to get to towns and neighborhoods first in order to dissuade anybody else from building fiber. Since most places getting fiber are already served by a cable company, most of this land grab is not going to create monopolies – but these fiber builders all think they can win a significant share of the market away from the cable competitor.

It doesn’t always work out the way that the fiber overbuilders hope. I talked to somebody in Lansing, Michigan who was amazed that there were three different fiber providers in their alley offering fiber broadband. As somebody who builds fiber business plans, I have to wonder about the third company that constructed fiber when there were already two other competitive fiber providers on the poles. Will any of the three ISPs get enough customers to be successful? But most markets are not seeing that kind of competition, although some of the announced plans on the list above must be in markets where somebody else has already built fiber.

This level of fiber construction bodes poorly for cable companies. Every one of these fiber providers will tell you that they will get at least a 30% market share, and most are hoping for 50%. They are all banking on the current public sentiment that fiber is the superior technology compared to cable company coaxial networks. These ISPs almost all have lower broadband prices than the big cable companies.

Of course, cable companies are rushing to fight back by upgrading upload speeds to become symmetrical. You can expect when that happens to see a huge blitz everywhere talking about symmetrical gigabit speeds. Cable companies also compete by offering very low introductory rates intended to win or keep customers from leaving for fiber. But much of the public has gotten tired of that cycle of having to renegotiate rates every few years.

Only time will tell if cable companies will be successful with this strategy. If enough of the public believes fiber is superior, then any cable marketing plan is going to fall on deaf ears for some portion of every market.

Rural fiber land grabs are different because anybody building fiber in a rural market probably will have a monopoly for fast landline broadband. It’s hard to think that many companies will consider building a second fiber network in places with low housing density. The rural fiber builders will likely face competition from WISPs deploying the latest radios. Just like with competition with cable companies in cities, it’s going to be interesting to see who wins that battle. It’s likely going to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood battle. I suspect local WISPs with good local reputations will fare well against fiber built by the giant telcos or cable companies. On the flip side, local cooperatives and other local fiber builders will likely do extremely well against the giant WISPs. It’s going to be an interesting battle to watch.

I have no idea how Starlink and FWA cellular wireless fit into this battle. Fiber and fixed wireless with the newest radios will both be faster than these two technologies, and the market battle might come down to prices. The next decade is going to be an epic battle for broadband customers, and a boon to ISP marketers.

Working at Home Here to Stay

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report in June that indicates that the percentage of people working at home, which grew rapidly during the pandemic, is still much higher today than before the pandemic.

The U.S. Census and the Bureau gather this data by interviewing thousands of workers and asking how they spent the previous 24 hours. The survey not only gathers information on work habits, but also statistics on time spent on leisure, housework, and other activities.

Here are some of the key statistics from that report:

  • 34% of workers did some or all of their work from home in 2022. That has dropped – during the pandemic, 42% of workers worked at home in 2020 and 38% in 2021. But before the pandemic, the percentage of workers who worked at home was 24% in 2018 and 2019.
  • Working at home seems to be tied to having higher levels of education. 54% of adults over 25 years old with a bachelor’s degree or higher worked at home in 2022 compared to 18% of those with a high school diploma or no degree.
  • Women are more likely to work from home. 41% of women worked from home in 2022 compared to 28% of men.
  • The average person who said they were working from home did so for 5.4 hours per day.

Most labor experts are interpreting the survey results to mean that there has been a permanent shift in the way that people work. In 2022, there were 42% more people working at home than before the pandemic. To put that statistic into perspective, there are roughly 164 million adults in the U.S. workforce. This means that in 2022, almost 56 million people worked at home, up from 39 million before the pandemic. That’s an increase of over 16 million additional people working from home.

It’s possibly a little early to predict where the percentage of those working from home will stabilize, but it seems unlikely that the percentage will ever return to the pre-pandemic levels.

The statistics show a big gap in those working at home by education level. There are three times as many people with a bachelor’s degree or higher working at home than those without. It’s not too hard to conjecture that a lot of those working from home are likely to be working on computers and needing a good broadband connection.

The disparity between the percentage of men and women working at home probably has a lot to do with the daycare crisis in the country. I’ve read numerous articles describing the cost and the difficulty of finding daycare. In those articles, many women talk about working at home as a way to cope with daycare issues.

I’ve seen several other surveys over the last year that have interviewed generation Z and millennial workers, and a large percentage of these generations do not want to work in the classic office environment. I have to think over the next decade that this trend will continue to nudge the percentage of folks who work at home even higher.

My consulting firm conducts a lot of interviews about broadband usage, and we are still finding a lot of homes that don’t have adequate broadband for working at home or for students doing homework. I regularly participate in online discussions with folks working from home with a poor broadband connection who struggle to maintain an online chat session. I have to think that as we bring better broadband to millions of rural locations, the percentage of homes that will include somebody working at home will continue to climb.

FWA Mapping and BEAD Grants

There is one mapping issue that unfortunately messed up the NTIA’s count of eligible passings for BEAD, grants and that is going to be a real concern for folks who file BEAD grants. Over the last year, both T-Mobile and Verizon have activated rural cell sites that can deliver home broadband using licensed cellular spectrum that can be 100/20 Mbps or a little faster. According to the way that the NTIA and the BEAD grants determine grant eligibility, these locations are considered as served.

There are several reasons why this is going to be a practical problem in the BEAD grant process. First, the claimed areas claimed by the cellular carriers on the FCC maps are not accurate. Cellular broadband signal strength decreases with the distance between the cell tower and a customer. The easiest way to explain that is with an example. I talked to a farmer in Illinois who has the T-Mobile FWA broadband and is thrilled with it. The T-Mobile tower is on his farm and he’s getting over 200 Mbps download speed. He bragged about the technology to his neighboring farmers. One of his neighbors over a mile away is getting download speeds over 100 Mbps. But another neighbor over two miles away is getting speeds closer to 50 Mbps and doesn’t like the product.

At some future point, the FCC is supposed to require heat maps around each cell site to more accurately show the actual speeds that can be delivered, But for now, T-Mobile and Verizon are typically claiming speeds of 100/20 Mbps or faster for a sizable area around each cell site. This speed is true for the folks close to the tower, but at the outer fringe of each claimed circle are customers who are not able to receive 100/20 Mbps broadband. Those areas should be eligible for BEAD grant funding. I have no idea how State Broadband offices are going to deal with this. Any Grant office that decides to stick with the FCC maps will be condemning small pockets of folks to have worse broadband than everybody around them.

This is also another problem to deal with for an ISP seeking BEAD grants. I’ve described in the past how RDOF carved up the unserved and underserved areas in many counties into a jumbled mess, and FWA cellular coverage makes it that much harder to put together a BEAD serving area that makes both engineering and financial sense.

There is a more subtle issue that is even more troubling. The cellular carriers have no intention of serving everybody within the range of a cell site. There are constraints on the number of people they are willing to serve. This is similar to the constraints that Starlink has with serving too many people in a given small geographic area. This makes it hard to understand why NTIA rushed to define this technology as qualifying as served broadband. The willingness and ability to serve everybody ought to be one of the most prominent factors when declaring a technology to be creating served areas.

Even worse, T-Mobile says in the terms of service that it reserves the right to throttle usage on the FWA service. The bread and butter product for cellular companies is people with cell phones, and they are giving those customers priority access to the bandwidth at each tower. Any time cellular traffic demand gets too high, the usage to FWA customers will be restricted. That may not be a problem for low-population cell towers – but customers at any tower that has this restriction are going to be unhappy if broadband slows to a crawl in the evening.

My final issue with FWA cellular technology is that is expanding rapidly. Soon, it won’t just be Verizon and T-Mobile deploying the technology. UScellular, DISH, and AT&T are likely to start popping up in rural areas. I’ve been scratching my head wondering how State Grant offices and ISPs are going to deal with the technology if it’s activated during the grant review process. Cellular companies have every motivation in the world to intervene in grant applications and declare that areas are served and ineligible for grants. If the FWA carriers are allowed to make this claim for new cell sites, I can foresee numerous ISPs walking away from BEAD applications if the serving areas get carved up too badly.

This is a new technology, and, in my opinion, the NTIA rushed to accept these areas as served. The technology is so new that there was almost nobody served with cellular FWA back when the IIJA legislation enabled the BEAD grants. For the reasons I’ve discussed, it makes no sense to give cellular companies little broadband monopolies around their cell sites.

The Worsening Labor Supply Chain

I’m not sure what other people are seeing, but I’m starting to see situations where a shortage of construction labor is causing problems for some ISPs. Everything I’m hearing says that the supply chain issues for materials have largely been solved but that the supply chain for construction contractors is a worsening situation for many ISPs.

To give an example, I know an ISP with a long history of building networks that recently went to bid for two projects that are being funded by local ARPA grant funding. The ISP went to its normal pool of fiber contractors, many that it has worked with for many years, and got zero responses. Nobody was willing to even bid on the projects. The ISP called and talked to a lot of contractors and then reissued the bid package a second time. This time the ISP got two bids – one that is 50% higher than rates it has been paying for fiber construction and one that was almost double.

When the ISP talked to the two bidders and others that didn’t bid, it was told that contractors already have their construction schedules filled for the next two years. The two contractors that bid a high price would only take on the work if this ISP was willing to pay more than other projects. The ISP was also told that its projects were too small and that it would have gotten a much better response if it had a project that guaranteed several years of solid work.

Another story comes from an electric cooperative. Its strategy for its electric grid, and now for its fiber network, has always been to minimize the amount of contractor labor needed by doing a lot of the work inhouse. For example, with fiber construction, the coop planned to tackle all of the make-ready and drop construction and only bring in contractors to hang fiber on poles or to bury fiber.

The coop never had a hard time finding qualified technicians because it offered decent wages for the local economy and the stability for technicians to be able to stay home with their families. It always had seen a steady stream of technicians asking if there were openings.

But over the last year, the coop has lost a number of its most experienced technicians who were lured away to higher-paying jobs. The coop also found itself suddenly unable to attract new technicians. Over the last year, there has been a total flip of the technical workforce situation. The company doesn’t know how it’s going to stick with its original plans.

At first, I thought these were local situations – but I’m starting to hear similar stories across the country. I know a bunch of ISPs and contractors who are struggling to hire experienced technicians. I haven’t seen any other bids that were double what was expected, but I’m hearing that the cost of projects is increasing steadily.

Not all ISPs are having a problem. There are many ISPs who have locked down construction firms for large grant projects or other major upgrades. It seems likely that the biggest ISPs all have multiyear contracts with contractors and are mostly able to find crews. However, even AT&T cited labor shortages as one of the reasons the company trimmed the planned fiber passings for 2023.

The ISPs most at risk for not finding construction crews are ones with small projects or ones that haven’t built fiber in a while. These are the companies that are going to be quoted the highest prices for getting a contractor if they can find anybody at all. How will these ISPs handle the cost overruns compared to the original budget?

The other concern for a lot of ISPs is the ticking clock of grant timelines. For example, many state grants require that projects get built within two years. The date for finishing ARPA-funded projects will be here in a few years. It’s looking like a lot of ISPs will be asking for waivers to extend construction timelines – but in many cases where the money was guaranteed by legislation, extensions might not be possible.

I don’t know if it is time yet to call this a crisis since there are ISPs that say they have the construction crews they need. But I think there is a growing list of ISPs that are seeing real problems arising from a shortage of technicians – and this is likely to only get worse when BEAD money finally hits the market.

 

The FCC’s Environmental Obligations

I think a lot of ISPs will be surprised by this blog. The FCC has a specific set of environmental rules that must be followed when building any telecommunications infrastructure. ISPs that haven’t built on park lands or were funded by certain federal broadband grants probably never heard of these rules. But the rule apply to all telecommunications construction.

The FCC’s Environmental rules are codified in section 47 C.F.R. § 1.1307 of FCC regulation. These rules require that an environmental review may be required for infrastructure being proposed in the following circumstances:

  • Facilities to be located in an officially designated wilderness area.
  • Facilities to be located in an officially designated wildlife preserve.
  • Facilities that may affect listed threatened or endangered species or designated critical habitats
  • Facilities that may affect districts, sites, buildings, structures, or objects, significant in American history, architecture, archeology, engineering, or culture, that are listed, or are eligible for listing, in the National Register of Historic Places.
  • Facilities that may affect Indian religious sites.
  • Facilities to be located in a floodplain, if the facilities will not be placed at least one foot above the base flood elevation of the floodplain.
  • Facilities whose construction will involve a significant change in surface features (e.g., wetland fill, deforestation, or water diversion).
  • Antennas or supporting structures that will be equipped with high-intensity white lights and located in residential neighborhoods.

The reason ISPs probably haven’t heard about these specific rules is that the FCC has largely put ISPs on the honor system to meet these guidelines. The only times that an ISP might be required to follow these rules is if they were funded by a federal broadband grant or if they tried to get a permit to build on federal land. Those situations often require some level of environmental review to get the funding or the permit. Many of the ISPs who will be pursuing the BEAD grants will be required to comply with these rules.

There are a few specific FCC rules for notifying the public before building a new cell tower – but there are no specific public notification requirements for building other kinds of infrastructure. Carriers often flaunt the cellular notification rules. ProPublica recently wrote about the public outcry in New York City when a carrier erected large three-story tall wireless towers on city streets. After the intervention from the public and local politicians, the FCC eventually halted the construction for not complying with the rules, but only after 200 towers had been erected.

The obligation for the FCC to enforce environmental rules was put in place in 1969. The agency has rarely taken its environmental obligations seriously and didn’t issue any fines for breaking the rules until the early 2000s. Even today, the FCC only learns about most infractions after infrastructure has been built. The agency only issues fines in about 10% of the cases brought before it by local governments, states, or the public.

There are parts of the country where companies routinely build through flood plains or near wetlands to lay fiber. I’m sure many ISPs have unwittingly build close to areas that are home to endangered species. While the FCC hasn’t issued a lot of fines for flouting the rules, but ISPs ought to at least be aware that these rules exist.

Disclosing Hidden Fees

The FCC recently proposed a requirement that companies that sell traditional cable TV must disclose the full cost of video to customers. I’ve written about hidden fees many times over the years, and the fees have grown to become a big issue for customers.

Hidden fees are those that a cable provider doesn’t disclose when they advertise to attract new customers. At best, these fees are mentioned vaguely in the small print but are often difficult or impossible to find.

Consider the hidden fees that Comcast charges (I can make a similar list for any of the big cable companies). Comcast’s hidden fees differ by market, and the following is from a market we recently studied.

  • The broadcast fee is $28.70 per month. This is a fee where Comcast accumulates increases in programming costs each year instead of billing the cost increases into the price of cable.
  • The regional sports fee in the market we looked at is $6.10 per month – the fee varies depending upon the local sports networks carried. This fee accumulates increases in sports programming fees that Comcast has chosen not to include in the advertised price of cable TV.
  • Comcast charges $9.00 extra for each settop box – a fee that is not mentioned in advertised prices.

For Comcast, these fees are almost $43 per month in this market for a customer with one settop box. A customer that signs up for a $40 special promotion for video on the web will be shocked when the first bill shows up at $83.

The FCC is the federal regulator for cable TV, and it has always had the full authority to require cable companies to do disclose honest rates. What I find disappointing is that they’ve done nothing until now. This announcement is clearly in response to President Biden criticism of hidden fees in many industries, including airline and online ticket prices. Why hasn’t the FCC tackled hidden fees for cable TV until now? In this example, the hidden fees are greater than the advertised special price for the cable service. I think the average person would think that hidden fees probably mean paying a few extra bucks – not a fee that is more than the advertised price of the purchased service.

This topic has been taken on a few times at the state level. In 2018, Lori Swanson, the Attorney General of Minnesota, sued Comcast and asked for refunds for all cable customers who were billed hidden fees, retroactive to 2014, in violation of the states Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The suit concentrated on the Broadcast TV fee and the regional sports fee. In January 2020, Comcast settled with the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and agreed to pay $1.4 million in refunds to 15,600 Minnesota customers. That’s a pretty small penalty for a practice that must net the company a huge cash flow nationwide.

To be fair to Comcast and the other cable providers, there are underlying costs that are covered by these fees, so the fees are not extra profit. Local television stations, nationwide TV networks, and sports programming have continued to increase the cost of programming at a much faster pace than inflation. Comcast has no choice but to pass on these costs to subscribers. What the FCC is finally criticizing is that cable companies sign new customers to a year-long contract based on advertised low rates and then surprise them with these giant hidden fees.

It’s troubling that the FCC could have done something about this at any time and never acted until now. But even more annoying, at least to me, is that FCC has this authority for cable TV but can’t ask similar questions about broadband rates. The price for broadband from the big ISPs has been rising at a rapid pace. As an example, I looked recently at some rate research I did in 2016, and the broadband prices for Charter have more than doubled since then. Unlike cable TV programming, there are no big underlying costs that have driven the big cable companies to increase broadband rates, and those increases were far in excess of inflation.

The FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai killed the agency’s ability to do anything about broadband prices when it killed Title II regulation. The FCC recently opened an inquiry into data caps, which might be a hopeful sign that the FCC is thinking about getting back into broadband regulation. The history of the FCC tells me to be cautious with any optimism when it comes to regulating the biggest companies in the industry. We’ve watched the FCC do nothing for years about hidden cable fees while it also killed its own ability to regulate broadband – two moves that clearly favor the big monopoly providers over the public.

Revisiting the Impact of Killing Net Neutrality

Ajit Pai recently wrote an article in the National Review where he talks about how his decision as head of the FCC to repeal net neutrality was the right one. He goes on to claim that repealing net neutrality was the driver behind the current boom in building fiber and upgrading other broadband technologies. He contrasts the progress of broadband in the U.S. with Europe and says that the FCC’s action is the primary reason we are seeing a fiber boom in the U.S.

He points out that his opponents who wanted to keep net neutrality made all sorts of crazy claims about how killing net neutrality would mean killing most of what people like about the Internet. He’s right that the arguments for keeping net neutrality got wrapped into politics, and most of the predicted consequences of ending net neutrality were exaggerated by those in favor of net neutrality. But the claims of the benefits for killing net neutrality were also badly exaggerated by the big carriers.

Why is he writing this now? With the possibility of seating a fifth Commissioner, he knows that the issue of reinstating net neutrality and Title II authority is going to be raised at the FCC. Killing net neutrality was his crowning achievement at the FCC, and he’s defending it as a way to lobby against bringing back net neutrality. I think we’re going to see a lot of this kind of rhetoric this year about how repealing net neutrality was the right thing to do. The big ISPs will be repeating the same rhetoric being told by Pai.

But Pai is not telling the real story. Industry insiders and experts didn’t expect much change to come from repealing net neutrality. The CEOS of all of the big cable companies admitted that keeping or killing net neutrality would have almost no impact on their businesses.

The real purpose of killing net neutrality was to kill Title II authority over broadband. That is an esoteric policy wonk issue and rarely got discussed during the debate. The Ajit Pai FCC gave up all rights of the agency to regulate broadband except for a few rules that are mandated by Congress. While there was a huge noise on both sides of the argument about killing net neutrality, the big ISPs only cared about killing regulation. That was the number one agenda item for Ajit Pai, and he handed the big ISPs everything on their wish list. If you want to understand the net neutrality issue from the big ISP perspective, substitute the word regulation for net neutrality every time they talk about the topic.

Pai cannot say with a straight face that there have been no repercussions about the end of broadband regulation. Consider Comcast and Charter, the two largest ISPs that together have over half of the broadband market. Since the end of Title II regulation, Comcast has raised rates for basic broadband to around $100, Charter is over $90 and is in the process of catching up to the Comcast rates.

At the same time, the FCC dropped all semblance of representing the public. The FCC complaint process for broadband customers might as well not even exist since nothing happens when a customer complains about mistreatment by an ISP.

Pai is taking credit for the boom in broadband competition. I’ve been advising ISPs on their expansion plans for decades, both before and after the death of Title II regulation, and I’ve never heard an ISP consider regulation as part of any discussion of expanding to a new market. Perhaps Pai can take credit for making it easier for others to compete against big cable companies since they have been free to raise rates at will – but I don’t think that’s something he wants to claim out loud. The real impetus for broadband competition came from the pandemic when many millions of customers found out that their broadband was inadequate. That experience has convinced people that they need fiber broadband and faster speeds, and fiber overbuilders are reacting to that market demand. The cable companies are rushing to upgrade speeds in response to the pressure from fiber competition.

None of the fiber boom is due to killing regulation. All that killing regulation did was allow big ISPs to run roughshod over customers without consequences. The FCC can’t even pull ISPs in to talk about their bad broadband behavior.

Ajit Pai’s accomplishment was not killing net neutrality – it was handing the reins of the broadband business to the big ISPs by allowing the ultimate regulatory capture of having the FCC walk away from its regulatory responsibilities. I’m sure that Pai is quite happy with that outcome, but you’ll never see Pai talking about what really happened.

Those Crazy Critters

I don’t expect a lot of readers on the day before the Fourth of July, so I’m updating my most popular blog ever.

Most people don’t realize the damage done every year to fiber and other wired networks by animals.

Squirrels. These cute rodents are the number one culprit for animal damage to aerial fiber. To a lesser degree, fiber owners report similar damage by rats and mice. Squirrels mainly chew on cables as a way to sharpen their teeth. Squirrel teeth grow up to 8 inches per year, and if squirrels aren’t wearing their teeth down from their diet, they look for other things to chew. There has been speculation that squirrels prefer fiber to other cables due to some oil or compound used in the fiber manufacturing process that attracts them.

Level 3, before they were part of CenturyLink, reported that 17% of their aerial fiber outages were caused by squirrels. A Google search turns up numerous outages caused by squirrels.

Companies use a wide variety of techniques to try to protect from squirrel damage – but anybody that has ever put out a bird feeder knows how persistent they can be. One deterrent is to use hardened cables that are a challenge for squirrels to chew through. However, there have been cases reported where squirrels partially chew through such cables, which still lets in water and can cause future damage.

A more common solution is adding a barrier to keep squirrels away from the cable. There are barrier devices that can be mounted on the pole to block squirrels from moving higher. There are also barriers that are mounted where cables meet a pole to keep the squirrels away from the fiber. There are companies that have tried more exotic solutions, like deploying ultrasonic blasters to drive squirrels away from fiber. In other countries, the fiber providers sometimes deploy poisonous or obnoxious chemicals to keep squirrels away from the fiber. These techniques are frowned upon or illegal in the US.

Gophers. Buried fiber also has a gnawing pest in the pocket gopher. There are thirteen species of pocket gophers that range from 5 to 13 inches in length. The two parts of the country with the most pocket gophers are the Midwest plains and the Southwest. Gophers live on plants and either eat roots or pull plants down through the soil.

Pocket gophers can cause considerable damage to fiber. These rodents will chew almost anything, and there have been reported outages from gophers that chewed through buried gas, water, and electric lines. Gophers typically dig between 6 and 12 inches below the surface and are a particular threat to buried drops.

There are several ways to protect against gophers. The best protection is to bury fiber deep enough to be out of gopher range, but that can add a lot of cost to buried drops. I have a few clients that bore drops rather than trench or vibrate them for this reason. Another protection is to enclose the fiber in a sheathe that is over 3 inches in diameter. A tube of that size is too big for the gophers to bite. Again, this is an expensive solution for buried drops. Another solution is to surround the buried fiber with 6 – 8 inches of gravel of at least 1-inch size – anything smaller gets pushed to the side by gophers.

There are examples of even more exotic animal damage to fiber. Large birds of prey have sharp talons that can create small cuts in the sheathe and allow in water. Flocks of birds repeatedly sitting on a fiber can cause sag and stretching of the fiber. I can remember living in Florida and seeing end-to-end birds sitting on wires – that has to add a lot of weight to a 200-foot fiber between poles. Over the last year I’ve seen several reports of sharks chewing on undersea fibers.

Finally, although not directly animal related, a common cause of rural fiber cuts happens when farmers hit fiber with a backhoe when burying dead livestock. They typically bury wherever an animal died, including in the buried fiber right-of-way.

Interesting Science Summer 2023

I ran across two interesting new technologies.

Power Out of Humidity. Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, published a paper in Advanced Materials that shows that energy can be pulled from the moisture in the air using material that has been harvested from bacteria. The study says that almost any material can be used for this purpose as long as the material can be smashed into tiny particles and then reformed to include microscopic pores that are less than 100 nanometers in size. The tiny holes work by allowing water vapor to pass through the device in a way that creates an electric charge imbalance between the top and bottom of the device, Each nanotube is effectively a tiny battery that can continuously produce electricity.

The test devices created by the Jun Yao team have been labeled as Air-gen. One Air-gen unit is about the size of a fingernail and as thin as a hair. One unit can produce continuous energy that is strong enough to power a dot on a computer screen.

Jun Yao refers to the Air-gen as creating a tiny man-made cloud. The next step for the team is to determine the materials that produce the most electricity. There are also challenges to efficiently harvesting and storing the power from multiple Air-gen units. Making this into a useful technology will mean somehow stacking large numbers of these units together.

The potential for the technology is immense if it can ever be scaled. This would enable power to be generated locally in a way that produces no waste or byproducts. Since humidity drives the electric power generation, this would best be used in places with high humidity instead of in deserts. The ideal clean energy technology has always been described as one that can pull power out of nature – and this technology might become the ideal source of power if it can pull electricity out of the water vapor in the air.

The Anti-Laser. Physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Vienna University of Technology have developed what is being dubbed the anti-laser. This is a device that traps light until it is fully absorbed.

There are a lot of uses for technologies that can absorb light. Photovoltaic cells would be increasingly efficient if all light can be absorbed and turned into electricity. Light sensors could be far more precise by eliminating stray light signals. The ability to capture faint light images with a telescope could be enhanced by eliminating spurious light.

The technology takes advantage of the quantum properties of electromagnetic waves, where waveforms can undergo destructive interference if combined in an exact way. The scientists have created a device that pulses light in a way to enhance the interference. This is accompanied by a set of mirrors and lenses that trap light inside a cavity and bounce it over and over again until the light is absorbed by light-absorbing materials.

Interestingly, this mimics a phenomenon in nature. When a flashlight is shined in the eyes of animals with night vision, like owls, the light appears to be reflected back. This is due to a reflective layer that sits behind the retina of such animals. Reflecting the light back out allows two chances for the retina to capture what is being seen in the near-dark.

When the researchers started this experiment, they found that light entering the trap from different angles was not fully absorbed, and some light escaped. They solved the problem by arranging the mirrors in a way to force all light into a circular path until it is fully absorbed.

The FCC’s 12 GHz Decision

One of the hardest things that the FCC does is to decide spectrum policy. The agency has full authority to determine the details of how we use each slice of available spectrum. Most importantly, the agency can determine who can use spectrum – and that’s why the task is challenging.

In the last decade, it’s hard to think of any spectrum deliberation and decision that didn’t have to weigh the interests of multiple spectrum users. There is almost always somebody using spectrum that must be considered. The FCC must decide if there is more national benefit in allowing others to use the spectrum, and in doing so, the FCC has to decide if the current users can somehow stay in place. If not, the FCC has to find existing users a new slice of spectrum and cover the cost of moving existing users to the new frequencies.

There are multiple users of spectrum that want more spectrum than they have today. Probably first on this list are the cellular carriers who say they need scads more spectrum to keep up with the demands of our connected world. Satellite carriers are now clamoring for spectrum as they continue to add more users onto satellite broadband – and as they contemplate launching IoT and cellular services. The U.S. government and the military insist on having bands of spectrum for a wide variety of uses. WISPs want more spectrum for rural broadband. The companies that make WiFi equipment want more free spectrum for public use. Then there are the important niche players like connected automobiles, GPS, weather satellites, etc.

Finally, as odd as it sounds, there are also investors who have purchased spectrum in the past and who lobby the FCC to increase the value of their ownership – only in America would this be one of the underlying reasons to deliberate on the use of spectrum.

The recent FCC decision on the use of the lower 12 GHz spectrum is a good example of the FCC deliberation process on spectrum. This spectrum sits in the middle of the range of spectrum that the FCC recently dubbed as 6G. This spectrum has great characteristics – it can carry a lot of data while still being transmitted for decent distances. In general, the higher the frequency, the shorter the effective distance of a broadcast transmission.

This spectrum has been used for satellite broadband connections. At the prompting of others in the industry, the FCC decided to investigate if there are other ways to use this spectrum to satisfy more national needs.

  • Dell owned a lot of the 12 GHz spectrum and was lobbying to expand the use of the spectrum to improve its value.
  • DISH was hoping to use the 12 GHz spectrum as part of its nationwide roll-out of a new cellular network.
  • The other big cell companies jumped in with the suggestion that the spectrum be sold at auction for FWA broadband.
  • WISPs jumped in and suggested they could coexist with the other users and use the spectrum for rural broadband.
  • The WiFi coalition asked that the spectrum be allowed for free indoor usage.

As is usual in FCC spectrum proceedings, the various parties all filed testimony from experts that demonstrated that their proposed use could work. In this case, many of the proposals tried to show that the FCC could order terrestrial use of the spectrum without interfering with satellite base stations. The experts on both sides of the argument said that the arguments on the other side were incorrect.

The spectrum engineers at the FCC are left to somehow glean the truth from the conflicting arguments. Meanwhile, the FCC commissioners have to wrangle with the policy and lobbying aspects of the issue since all of the players do their best to bring pressure to bear on such FCC decisions.

The FCC decision was that the lower 12 GHz spectrum should continue to be used for satellite backhaul. The big winner in the decision was Starlink, and the biggest loser was DISH.

But the FCC left the door open to other uses and will continue its investigation. The FCC is still interested in hearing more about the use for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless connections. That would serve as backhaul between towers and could be used to connect FWA and WISP customers. The FCC is also willing to consider the free unlicensed use of the spectrum for indoor use. So, as is often the case, the debate continues.