Tag Archives: 10/1 Mbps

A Huge FCC Giveaway

Is there is a way to take the worst broadband subsidy program ever and make it worse? The FCC just answered that question by extending the CAF II program for a seventh year.

The CAF II program paid the large price-cap telcos to supposedly upgrade rural broadband to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. Over $11 billion was paid out over six years starting in 2015 and completing this year. This money went to the big telcos like AT&T, CenturyLink, Frontier, Windstream, Consolidated, and a few others. Buried in the original awards was a provision that the carriers could elect to extend payments for a seventh year – and of course, they are doing so.

Why do I call this subsidy plan a failure? Even in 2015, it was ludicrous to spend money to build 10/1 Mbps broadband. 2015 is the same year that the FCC increased the definition of broadband to 25/3 Mbps and so the FCC was investing in new Internet infrastructure in 2015 that didn’t qualify as broadband at the time of the award of funding. Worse, the FCC gave the big telcos six years to complete the construction of the upgraded 10/1 Mbps architecture – which is this year. The FCC is still paying money in 2020 to upgrade rural customers to speeds of 10/1 Mbps.

But that’s not the worst of it because it doesn’t look like a lot of the upgrades were ever done. Our company helps rural counties assess the condition of broadband, and it’s rare in many rural places that were covered by CAF II to find even a single customer getting broadband speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. We’ve done speed tests in counties this year where the average download speeds are 4 to 5 Mbps, with a significant number of customers getting speeds under 1 Mbps. The big telcos have been cheerily reporting progress to the FCC on implementing CAF II, but in the real world, it’s hard to find any evidence that many upgrades have been made.

I have seen the DSL in rural county seats get faster, and I suppose this was done with CAF II money – even though the funding was supposed to be used for rural customers. When DSL is upgraded in a county seat, the only rural customers that see any benefit have to be within a mile or so from the town.

To improve rural DSL to 10/1 Mbps requires building a significant amount of rural fiber so that customers are within four or five miles of a fiber node equipped with DSL gear. We’ve driven whole counties looking for evidence of such upgrades and have rarely found the needed new fiber construction or electronics huts. There is no need to take my word for this – states like Georgia and Minnesota have created broadband maps that are showing no evidence for most of the CAF II upgrades.

And now the FCC is going to pay a seventh year of funding to these same telcos – only this time the companies don’t have to spend the seventh year funds to improve broadband. Instead this money is seen as ‘support’ to the telcos. This is a straight giveaway that means $503 million for CenturyLink, $427 million for AT&T, and $313 million for Frontier – straight to the bottom line. This is the most blatant handout of federal broadband funds I’ve ever seen – because these funds won’t improve broadband for any rural customer. This will just help AT&T make its dividend payments and help ease Frontier coming out of bankruptcy. 

The original plan in 20i5 included the provision for the seventh year of payout – but the FCC could have changed that rule at any time in the last six years. This is over a billion dollars being wasted  that could instead be added to the RDOF fund to build rural fiber or put into some other worthwhile broadband grant fund. The FCC would benefit rural communities more if they just walked around handing out this cash to rural folks during the pandemic.

This FCC has been pro-big carrier from the start – but adding a seventh year of CAF II is hard to see as anything other than federal waste being done openly. The companies getting this money didn’t meet the obligations of the original CAF II funding and are now perversely getting rewarded for their failure. This kind of waste makes me ill when I do the math and realize that this money could instead be used to build fiber for everybody living in the poorest 40 counties in the country. I guess it’s more important to ‘support’ AT&T instead of rural households with no broadband. 

The Rush to Complete CAF II

I’ve noticed that the big telcos are talking about efforts they are making this year to complete their obligations under the CAF II grant rewards that gave them over $9 billion to improve rural broadband to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. The telcos have had six years to make the upgrades and those upgrades must be finished by the end of this year.

It’s easy to understand why the telcos want to finish the required upgrades for which they’ve been paid. The FCC’s Universal Service statutes define the penalties for failure to comply with the mandates of CAF II in 47 CFR § 54.320 – Compliance and Recordkeeping for the High-cost Program.

The rules outline that the FCC can withhold USF payments to the telcos for missing interim deadlines. For example, CenturyLink reported to the FCC at the end of last year that it had not met all of the required upgrade goals that were to be completed by the end of 2019. The FCC should have responded to that notification by withholding some of the 2020 payments to CenturyLink until the company comes into compliance with its obligations. But as long as the telco finished the required upgrades by the end of 2020, it eventually will receive all of the CAF II funding.

But failure to meet the final milestone in 2020 obligations brings harsh penalties. If a telco doesn’t complete the CAF II construction by the end of this year, the FCC is obligated in these rules to recover 1.89 times the amount of subsidy provided to the telco to make the upgrades, plus 10% of the total support provided to a carrier over the term of the program.

The amount of CAF II awards vary by locality, but the average CAF II grants were for between $2,000 and $3,000 per household in the CAF II areas, meaning the penalties would be between $3,800 and $5,700 per household that didn’t see a CAF II upgrade plus 10% of the total support for a given area. That’s a substantial and permanent penalty and it’s no wonder that the telcos are pushing to complete CAF II.

Once a telco has certified that the CAF II upgrades are complete there are other penalties if the upgraded areas don’t deliver the speeds required by the CAF II program – in this case, speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. Compliance with these rules is verified with FCC-mandated speed tests.

The testing rules are weighted heavily in the ISP’s favor. To keep full funding, a telco must achieve 80% of the expected upland and download speed 80% of the time. This means that the big telcos must only achieve a download speed of 8 Mbps for 80% of customers to meet the CAF standard. The 10/1 Mbps target was low enough, but the FCC testing rules make it a lot easier for ISPs to meet the CAF II obligations. There are financial penalties for ISPs that don’t meet the FCC tests. For example, ISPs that have between 85% and 100% of 80% threshold lose 5% of their FCC support. At the upper extreme, ISPs with less than 55% of the 80% threshold lose 25% of their support.

Consider what these two sets of rules mean for the big telcos. The big penalties come if a telco is honest and tells the FCC that they didn’t complete the CAF II build-out at the end of 2020. In that case, the telco would have to give back more than two times the subsidy it received for each household that doesn’t get upgraded.

However, if a big telcos says they met the buildout requirements, their potential penalty is reduced to 25% of the CAF II subsidy for areas where there were no upgrades. And that penalty assumes that the areas that weren’t upgraded are tested by the FCC. The FCC testing rules allow the telcos to provide inputs on where to test.

I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal evidence that that Frontier and a few other telcos didn’t make some of the needed CAF II upgrades. There are whole counties where recent wide-spread speed testing didn’t find any rural customers getting speeds faster than 5 Mbps download. The telcos still have until the end of this year to complete CAF II, so it’s premature to know that these areas won’t get CAF II upgrades. But if the rumors I’ve been hearing are true, the telcos can falsely declare to the FCC that they made the upgrades and then take their chances during the testing process that the full extent of their cheating won’t be detected.

There are huge parts of rural America that seemingly have been shortchanged by the CAF II program. The sad consequence of this is that these households would have been able to eke by during the COVID-19 crisis if they had been provided with 10/1 Mbps broadband. What I heard from all over the country is that households in the CAF II areas have seen no improvements in DSL over the six years of the CAF II program.

If the FCC really wants to do the right thing it would ask for local feedback at the end of the CAF II program at the end of this year. The FCC can map every household on Google Maps that should have gotten a CAF II upgrade, and there are local officials all over rural America who would love to verify if these upgrades brought anything close to 10/1 Mbps speeds. Instead, I expect the FCC to quietly sweep the whole CAF II topic under the rug, and we’ll likely never hear much about it after the end of this year.

Enough is Enough

CenturyLink recently petitioned the FCC to allow them to be late in implementing the CAF II upgrades where the FCC doled out $11 billion to upgrade rural broadband speeds to 10/1 Mbps. The ostensible reason for the delay is the COVID-19 pandemic, but CenturyLink was already behind and notified the FCC earlier this year that they hadn’t completed their 2019 CAF II installation in 23 out of 33 states.

I say enough is enough. It’s time for the FCC to demand a reckoning of CAF II and begin handing out draconian penalties to the telcos that didn’t meet their obligations. I’m positive that if this was assessed fairly that the FCC will find that the vast majority of big telco customers have never gotten an upgrade to 10/1 Mbps.

Let’s start by looking at CenturyLink’s request. There is no reasonable explanation they can offer for not meeting their obligations in 2019. That was the fourth of a five-year buildout obligation, and the company has known for years what’s needed to be done – and they had the federal money in their pocket to make the upgrades. The claim for this year is also largely bogus. I have a lot of clients that are being cautious now about entering customer premises, but I don’t know any carrier that has stopped doing work outside of customer homes. I can’t think of any practical reason that COVID-19 would cause a delay for CenturyLink. Even if they upgrade somebody’s DSL, they could mail them a new modem – telcos have been having customers self-install DSL modems for twenty years.

It’s time to stop the pretense that CenturyLink or the other big telcos have been busy upgrading rural DSL. I don’t know anybody who thinks that’s happened. I have anecdotal evidence that it hasn’t, My company has been helping rural counties with broadband feasibility studies for many years. In the last four years, we’ve been asking rural customers to take speed tests – and I’ve never seen even one rural DSL connection that transmits at a speed of 10/1 Mbps. I’ve haven’t seen many that have tested above 5 Mbps. I’ve seen a whole lot that tested at less than 3, 2 or even 1 Mbps. Many of these tests have been in areas that are supposed to have CAF II upgrades.

I’ve also never talked to any County officials who have heard from the telcos that their county got rural broadband upgrades. One would think the telcos would brag locally when they were finished with upgrades as a pitch to get new customers. After all, customers that have only had slow DSL or satellite service should be flocking to 10/1 DSL. I’ve also not seen a marketing campaign talking about faster speeds due to CAF II. I’ve been searching the web for years to find testimonials from customers talking about their free upgrade to 10/1 Mbps, but I’ve never found anybody who has ever said that. This is not to say there have been zero upgrades in the CAF II areas, but I see no evidence of widespread upgrades.

The reality is that CenturyLink got new leadership a few years ago who immediately announced that the company was going to stop making ‘infrastructure return’ investments. We have Frontier that miraculously recently found 16,000 Census blocks that now have speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps when I’m still looking for proof that they upgraded places to 10/1 Mbps. Go interview folks in West Virginia if you think they’ve made any CAF II upgrades.

The FCC has a choice now. They can wimp out and grant the delay that CenturyLink is requesting, or the agency can come down on the side of rural broadband. There is no middle ground when it comes to CAF II. This FCC didn’t make the original CAF II decision – but they are the ones that are supposed to make sure the upgrades are done, and they are supposed to be penalizing telcos that failed to make the upgrades.

The response to CenturyLink’s request should be a giant penalty for missing the 2019 deadlines and a reminder that the company is still on the hook for 2020 unless they want more fines.

The FCC also needs to aggressively start testing in the areas that have supposedly gotten CAF II upgrades. This doesn’t have to be a big expensive testing program. We know exactly where CAF II should have been implemented – the FCC has made it easy by overlaying the CAF II footprint over Google maps. The FCC could ask County administrators across the US to solicit a speed test at CAF II locations – the Counties would be glad to oblige. If the FCC wanted to know the truth about CAF II they could get massive feedback within a few weeks about the abject failure of the CAF II program.

The ultimate penalty ought to be the return of CAF II money to the Universal Service Fund for areas that aren’t upgraded to 10/1 Mbps. Then the money could finally be given to somebody that will upgrade to real broadband. The CAF II program was ill-conceived, but the big telcos should have used that money to bring rural speeds up to 10/1 Mbps. Had they done so, we’d have millions of more homes that wouldn’t be struggling so hard during COVID-19. This FCC has a chance to do their job and set things right.

How’s CAF II Doing in Your County?

The CAF II program was tasked with bringing broadband of at least 10/1 Mbps to large parts of the country. I’ve been talking to folks in rural counties all over the country who don’t think that their area has seen much improvement from the CAF II plan.

The good news is that there is a way to monitor what the big telcos are reporting to the FCC in terms of areas that have seen the CAF II upgrades. This web site provides a map that reports progress on several different FCC broadband plans. The map covers reported progress for the following programs:

  • CAF II – This was the $11 billion subsidy to big telcos to improve rural broadband to at least 10/1 Mbps.
  • CAF II BLS – This was Broadband Loop support that was made available to small telcos. Not entirely sure why the FCC is tracking this using a map.
  • ACAM – This is a subsidy given to smaller telcos to improve broadband to at least 25/3 Mbps, but which many are using to build gigabit fiber.
  • The Alaska Plan. This is the Alaska version of ACAM. Alaska is extremely high cost and has a separate broadband subsidy plan.
  • RBE – These are the Experimental Broadband Grants from 2015.

Participants in each of these programs must report GIS data for locations that have been upgraded, and those upgraded sites are then shown on the map at this site. There is, of course, some delay between the time of completing upgrades and getting information onto this map. It’s now been 4.5 years into the six-year CAF II plan, and the carriers have told the FCC that many of the required upgrades are completed. All CAF II upgrades must be finished by the end of 2020 – and likely most will be completed sometime earlier next year during the summer construction season that dictates construction in much of the country.

The map is easy to use. For example, if you change the ‘Fund’ box at the upper right of the map to CAF II, then all of the areas that were supposed to get CAF II upgrades are shown in light purple. In these areas, the big telcos were supposed to upgrade every residence and business to be able to receive 10/1 Mbps or better broadband.

The map allows you to drill down into more specific detail. For example, if you want to see how CenturyLink performed on CAF II, then choose CenturyLink in the ‘Company Name’ box. This will place a pin on the map for all of the locations that CenturyLink has reported as complete. As you zoom in on the map the upgraded locations will show as dark purple dots. You can zoom in on the map to the point of seeing many local road names.

The map has an additional feature that many will want to see. Down on the left bottom of the map under ‘Boundaries’ you can set political boundaries like County borders.

Most counties are really interested in the information shown on the map. The map shows the areas that were supposed to see upgrades along with areas that have been upgraded to date. This information is vital to counties for a number of reasons. For example, new federal grants and most state grant programs rely on this data to determine if an area is eligible for additional funding. For example, the current $600 million Re-Connect grants can’t be used for areas where more than 10% of homes already have 10/1 Mbps broadband. Any areas on this map that have the purple dots will probably have a hard time qualifying for these grants. The big telcos will likely try to disqualify any grant requests that build where they say they have upgraded.

Probably the most important use of the map is as a starting point for counties to gather accurate data about broadband. For example, you might want to talk to folks that live in the upgraded areas to see if they can really now buy 10/1 Mbps DSL. My guess is that many of the areas shown on these maps as having CAF II upgrades are still going to have download speeds less than 10/1 Mbps. If you find that to be the case I recommend documenting your findings because areas that didn’t get a full upgrade should be eligible for future grant funding.

It’s common knowledge that rural copper has been ignored for decades, often with no routine maintenance. It’s not surprising to anybody who has worked in a DSL environment that many rural lines are incapable of carrying faster DSL. It’s not easy for a big telco to bring 10/1 Mbps broadband over bad copper lines, but unfortunately, it’s easy for them to tell the FCC that the upgrades have been done, even if the speed is not really there.

This map is just one more piece of the puzzle and one more tool for rural counties to use to understand their current broadband situation. For example, it’s definitely a plus if the big telcos really upgraded DSL in these areas to at least 10/1 Mbps – many of these areas had no DSL or incredibly slow DSL before. On the flip side, if the big telcos are exaggerating about these upgrades and the speeds aren’t there, they are going to likely block your region from getting future grant money to upgrade to real broadband. The big telcos have every incentive to lie to protect their DSL and telephone revenues in these remote areas. What’s not tolerable is for the big telcos to use incorrect mapping data to deny homes from getting better broadband.

The Status of the CAF II Deployments

The Benton Foundation noted last month that both CenturyLink and Frontier have not met all of their milestones for deployment of CAF II. This funding from the FCC is supposed to be used to improve rural broadband to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. As of the end of 2018, the CAF II recipients were to have completed upgrades to at least 60% of the customers in each state covered by the funding.

CenturyLink took funding to improve broadband in 33 states covering over 1 million homes and businesses. CenturyLink claims to have met the 60% milestone in twenty-three states but didn’t make the goal in eleven states: Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Frontier received CAF II funding to improve broadband to over 774,000 locations in 29 states. Frontier says they’ve met the milestone in 27 states but haven’t reached the 60% deployment milestone in Nebraska and New Mexico.  There were a number of other large telcos that took CAF Ii funding like AT&T, Windstream, and Consolidated, and I have to assume that they’ve reported meeting the 60% milestone.

Back in 2014 when it looked like the CAF II program might be awarded by reverse auction, we helped a number of clients take a look at the CAF II service areas. In many cases, these are large rural areas that cover 50% or more of most of the rural counties in the country. Most of my clients were interested in the CAF II money as a funding mechanism to help pay for rural fiber, but all of the big telcos other than AT&T announced originally that they planned to upgrade existing DSL. AT&T announced a strategy early on to used fixed cellular wireless to satisfy their CAF II requirements. Since then a few big telcos like Frontier and Windstream have said that they are also using fixed wireless to meet their obligations.

To us, the announcement that the telcos were going to upgrade DSL set off red flag alarms. In a lot of rural counties there are only a small number of towns, and those towns are the only places where the big telcos have DSLAMs (the DSL hub). Rural telephone exchanges tend to be large and the vast majority of rural customers have always been far out of range of DSL that originates in the small towns. One only has to go a few miles – barely outside the towns – to see DSL speeds fall off to nothing.

The only way to make DSL work in the CAF II areas would be to build fiber to rural locations and establish new DSL hub sites. As any independent telco can tell you who deployed DSL the right way, this is expensive because it takes a lot of the rural DSLAMs to get within range of every customer. By electing DSL upgrades, the big telcos like CenturyLink and Frontier had essentially agreed to build a dozen or more fiber DSLAMs in each of the rural counties covered by CAF II. My back-of-the-envelope math showed that was going to cost a lot more than what the companies were receiving from the CAF fund. Since I knew these telcos didn’t want to spend their own money in rural America, I predicted execution failures for many of the planned DSL deployments.

I believe the big telcos are now facing a huge dilemma. They’ve reached 60% of customers in many places (but not all). However, it is going to cost two to three times more per home to reach the remaining 40% of homes. The remaining customers are the ones on extremely long copper loops and DSL is an expensive technology use for reaching these last customers. A DSLAM built to serve the customers at the ends of these loops might only serve a few customers – and it’s hard to justify the cost of the fiber and electronics needed to reach them.

I’ve believed from the beginning that the big telcos building DSL for the CAF II program would take the approach of covering the low hanging fruit – those customers that can be reached by the deployment of a few DSLAMs in a given rural area. If that’s true, then the big telcos aren’t going to spend the money to reach the most remote customers, meaning a huge number of CAF II customers are going to see zero improvements in broadband. The telcos mostly met their 60% targets by serving the low-hanging fruit. They are going to have a huge challenge meeting the next milestones of 80% and 100%.

Probably because I write this blog, I hear from folks at all levels of the industry about rural broadband. I’ve heard a lot of stories from technicians telling me that some of the big telcos have only tackled the low-hanging fruit in the CAF builds. I’ve heard from others that some telcos aren’t spending more than a fraction of the CAF II money they got from the FCC and are pocketing much of it. I’ve heard from rural customers who supposedly already got a CAF II upgrade and aren’t seeing speeds improved to the 10/1 threshold.

The CAF II program will be finished soon and I’m already wondering how the telcos are going to report the results to the FCC if they took shortcuts and didn’t make all of the CAF II upgrades. Will they say they’ve covered everybody when some homes saw no improvement? Will they claim 10/1 Mbps speeds when many households were upgraded to something slower? If they come clean, how will the FCC react? Will the FCC try to find the truth or sweep it under the rug?

What’s Next for Rural Broadband?

Now that most of the CAF II money and A-CAM money has been awarded, what’s next for rural broadband? If you ask the FCC that question they are likely to answer that there might yet be one more CAF II auction to fund the 261,000 homes that went unclaimed in the last auction. However, I think this is a much bigger question.

There are still tens of millions of homes that don’t have a broadband option that meets the FCC’s current definition of 25/3 Mbps. That includes all of the places that were funded by the CAF II funds provided to the big telcos and that were only required to provide broadband with speeds of 10/1 Mbps. It also includes numerous other homes that don’t have fast broadband and that are mis-categorized by the inadequate FCC broadband maps that are populated falsely by the big ISPs.

One of CCG’s products is performing surveys and related market research in rural areas. We’ve done a lot of surveys and also asked people to take speed tests in rural communities where the actual speeds at homes are significantly lower than the advertised speeds and the speeds shown on the FCC maps. I’m not just talking about rural farms, but also in sizable towns like county seats where the broadband is still pretty crappy.

It’s obvious that this FCC is working hard to be able to claim that they have taken care of the rural broadband problem. They want to say that they’ve funded broadband everywhere and that their job is done. What they are never going to admit is that the job will never be done until rural areas have the same kind of broadband infrastructure as cities.

This particular FCC is pretending that the need for broadband is sitting still, when in fact the demand for household broadband, both for speeds and for total download volumes keep doubling every three or four years. By the time the current FCC chairman has been in his seat for four years, the comparative quality of rural broadband will have halved due to this increase in demand.

Don’t interpret what I just said to mean that I have disdain for the current FCC. The last FCC under Chairman Tom Wheeler was a huge contributor to the problem when they awarded billions of dollars to the big telcos to make broadband upgrades over seven years to 10/1 Mbps – at a time when 10/1 Mbps already didn’t meet the definition of broadband. That was obviously a political decision since the original plan was to award all of the CAF II funds by reverse auction – which would have helped to fund a lot of rural fiber.

Even if the FCC was highly motivated to solve the rural broadband gap they don’t have the tools to do so. The FCC’s only tool for funding more broadband is the Universal Service. I wrote a blog last week noting how this fund is already overcommitted. Since I wrote that blog I looked at my own cellphone bills and my family alone is contributing several hundred dollars per year towards the USF fund. We are not going to get the many billions we need to expand broadband by taxing landline and cellphone users.

The fix needs to come from Congress. That doesn’t seem likely from the current Congress that already approved a $600 million fund for rural broadband grants and then added on a provision that made the grants nearly impossible to implement. Clearly influenced by lobbyists, Congress added a provision that the grants couldn’t be used in areas where more than 10% of homes already have 10/1 Mbps broadband – and there are very few such areas.

I honestly have a hard time understanding Congress’s reluctance to address rural broadband. When I go to rural counties these days I’m told that getting better broadband has become the number one local issue. I know that rural folks and rural politicians are pleading with their state and national representatives to find broadband funding.

I also know that most politicians say they are in favor of rural broadband. I’ve only seen a handful of politicians in the last decade who told their constituents that they don’t support rural broadband funding. I’ve also found that rural broadband is a nonpartisan issue and at the local level politicians of both parties understand that communities need better broadband.

I wish I could end this blog by suggesting a solution for the problem, but there isn’t any unless the states and the federal government decide at some point to help. State broadband programs providing matching grants have seen some success. I’m sure that federal matching grants would also help as long as they weren’t structured to be giveaways to the big ISPs.

Is Broadband ‘Wildly Competitive’?

The FCC is in the process of creating its first report to Congress required by the Ray Baum Act, which is the bill that reauthorized the FCC spending for 2019 and 2020. That bill requires the FCC to create a report every two years that, among other things assesses the “state of competition in the communications marketplace, including competition to deliver voice, video, audio, and data services among providers of telecommunications, providers of commercial mobile service, multichannel video programming distributors, broadcast stations, providers of satellite communications, Internet service providers, and other providers of communications services”.

The FCC accepted comments about what should be included in its first report, and as you might imagine received a wide variety of comments from the industry and other interested parties.

In typical big carrier fashion, the NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, the lobbying group representing the largest ISPs filed with the FCC arguing that the broadband marketplace is already ‘wildly competitive’. The big ISPs have a vested interest in the FCC reaching such a conclusion, because that would mean that the FCC wouldn’t have to take actions to create more competition.

The reasoning the big carriers are using to make this claim is ironic. They argue that the FCC shouldn’t use its own 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband since the FCC is currently spending billions of dollars in the CAF II program to deploy broadband that meets a lower standard of 10/1 Mbps. They say that if US broadband is examined for the amount of competition at the lower 10/1 threshold that most markets in the US are competitive. That’s ironic because the FCC was pressured into giving all of the CAF II money to the big telcos after intense lobbying and the funds were originally intended to be awarded through a reverse auction where ISPs would have been rewarded for building broadband capable of delivering speeds up to 1 Gbps.

Further, if the FCC was to accept the idea that 10/1 Mbps is acceptable broadband then the FCC would probably be obligated to count cellular broadband as an economic substitute for landline broadband since it delivers speeds in the same range as the CAF II deployments.

However, making that same determination is impossible at faster speeds. Even the FCC’s own highly-skewed mapping data shows there are not many households in the country with two options for buying 100 Mbps service. Where households have two choices for buying 25/3 Mbps broadband the second option is almost always DSL, which the big telcos are letting die a natural technological death, and which often delivers speeds much slower than advertised. As I’ve written about in this blog, my firm has done surveys in numerous communities where the delivered speeds for both cable modems and DSL were significantly slower than the advertised speeds and certainly slower than the data in the FCC database that is collected from the big ISPs and used to create the FCC’s broadband coverage maps and other statistics.

The only way to claim that broadband is ‘wildly competitive’ is to count broadband speeds slower than the FCC’s 25/3 Mbps definition. If the FCC was to accept cellular broadband and satellite broadband as the equivalent of landline broadband, then a large majority of homes would be deemed to have access to multiple sources of broadband. I would restate the NCTA’s ‘wildly competitive’ claim to say that a majority of homes in the country today have access to multiple crappy sources of broadband.

We’ll have to see what the FCC tells Congress in their first report. I suspect their story is going to be closer to what the big ISPs are suggesting than to the reality of the broadband marketplace. This FCC already seriously considered accepting cellular and satellite broadband as an equivalent substitute for landline broadband because doing so would mean that there are not many places left where they need to ‘solve’ the lack of broadband.

The FCC finds itself in an unusual position. It gave up regulation of broadband when it killed Title II regulation. Yet the agency is still tasked with tracking broadband, and they are still required by law to make sure that everybody in the country has access to broadband. Let’s just hope that the agency doesn’t go so far as to tell Congress that their job is done since broadband is already ‘wildly competitive’.

FCC to Hide the Digital Divide?

The next big decision on the FCC’s agenda is to consider the agency’s definition of broadband and to also consider if cellular data should be considered as broadband as part of that definition. This is slated to come up for a vote on February 3. The FCC raised the issue back in August and asked for feedback on the two issues.

To put this discussion into context, the FCC previously defined the speed of broadband while issuing mandated reports to Congress about the national state of broadband. These mandated broadband reports are issued every year and discuss major broadband issues, as well as quantifying the number of households that are considered to have broadband.

The FCC used the annual broadband report in 2015 to increase the definition of landline broadband to 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload. The FCC is thinking about using this year’s report to revise the definition of broadband lower again. At least two of the Commissioners are in favor of lowering the definition for landline broadband back to the old speed threshold of 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload.

Further, the FCC is considering counting cellular data speeds as a substitute for landline broadband, using a 10/1 Mbps definition. This would mean that a customer who can receive either cellular data or landline data that meets the appropriate speed would be considered to have broadband available.

Even if the FCC doesn’t lower the landline definition of broadband, adding cellular broadband into the test will mean that millions of homes would now be considered to have adequate broadband. That is a significant change, because by law, the FCC is mandated to work towards bringing broadband to any parts of the US that don’t have it. In effect, by a definition change the FCC will have done away with a lot of the digital divide. And if they lower the definition of landline broadband they will categorize even more homes as having adequate broadband.

There are a lot problems with using cellular data speeds to define broadband.  Here are several major ones to consider:

Hard to Measure Cellular Speeds. In the real world cellular speeds are nearly impossible to accurately measure. First, speeds differ by distance from a cell site, much like DSL. Customers more than a few miles from a given cell site get significantly slower speeds. Cellular data speeds also suffer from the same kind of interference as any wireless technology. For instance, homes behind a hill or tall building won’t get speeds as fast as those with a clear line-of-sight. Cellular data speeds change with variations in temperature or with precipitation. And most cell sites are still capable of making both 4G and 3G connections – which obviously has a major impact on speed.

Broadband Speeds are Reported by the Carriers. The cellular carriers are likely to report speeds by cell site, meaning that they will ignore all of the variations of speeds listed above. Further, there is more than one way to measure broadband speeds, which I have discussed before in this blog. There is over a 100% difference in reported cellular broadband speeds between Ookla and Akamai, the two major entities tracking data speeds. The carriers typically use the higher Ookla numbers when bragging about their speeds.

Makes No Assessment of Affordability. There is a monstrous difference in price between landline and cellular data. A household using 100 gigabytes of cellular data in the month might pay nearly $1,000 per month. Most ISPs report that the average US household now uses between 150 and 200 gigabytes of broadband per month. It’s hard to think of cellular broadband as a substitute for landline broadband with such disparate pricing.

Ignores Latency. One of the problems with cellular broadband is latency. This is one of the major reasons that downloading a web site on a cellphone sometimes seems to take forever. (The other reason is that cellular operating systems aren’t really designed to maximize web browsing). The poorer latency means that a 10 Mbps landline connection will feel much faster than 10 Mbps cellular connection.

Takes the FCC Off the Hook. But the major reason that counting cellular data as equivalent to landline data is that it’s going to largely take the FCC off the hook for promoting broadband. They currently have directed billions from the Universal Service Fund to help build faster broadband networks, mostly in rural America. They can discontinue such programs and not expand their effort if most of rural America is considered to have broadband. With a simple vote a large percentage of rural homes on the wrong side of the digital divide will suddenly have broadband. That’s going to be big news to rural people who already understand that cellular broadband is not really broadband.

California Lowers the Definition of Broadband

California Governor Jerry Brown just signed a bill into law that lowers the official definition of broadband in the state while also providing state funding to upgrade rural broadband. The bill, AB 1665, goes into effect immediately. It lowers the definition of broadband in the state to 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. But it goes even further and lowers the definition of an unserved customer to somebody who can’t get speeds of 6 Mbps and 1 Mbps up.

The bill reinstates a telecom tax that will provide a $300 million fund intended to be used to improve rural broadband. The California press believes that the fund will largely go to AT&T and Frontier, which both lobbied hard for the bill. My reading of the bill is that the incumbent carriers have first shot at the funding and anybody else only gets it when they don’t take it. In practical terms, assuming those two companies take the funding, almost none of this money would be made available to anybody who wants to build something faster in unserved areas.

We know that state funding done the right way can be a tremendous boon to broadband expansion. Consider, for example, the Minnesota DEED grants that have coaxed dozens of telecom providers to expand fiber networks deep into unserved and underserved areas of the state. It’s commonly understood that it can be hard to justify bringing fiber to rural areas, but some grant funding can be an effective tool to attract private money to fund the rest.

We also understand today that there are huge economic benefits for areas that have good broadband. The farmers in Minnesota that benefit from the grant program there are going to have a competitive advantage over farmers elsewhere that have little or no broadband. I’ve been looking at the IOT and other fiber-based technologies on the horizon for farming that are going to vastly increase productivity.

We also know that having good broadband benefits the small communities in rural America as well. These communities have been experiencing brain drain and economic flight as people are forced to go to metropolitan areas to find work. But broadband opens up work-at-home opportunities that ought to make it possible for families to thrive in rural America.

This move by California is a poor decision on many levels. First, it funnels money to the incumbent providers to make tiny tweaks to the existing networks so that existing broadband is just a little better. The new 10/1 Mbps broadband definition is also nothing more than a legislative definition of broadband and has no relevance in the real world. Many homes need more broadband than that, and as household broadband demand grows, a 10/1 Mbps connection will become inadequate for every home.

Another reason this is a bad idea is that the incumbents there are already making improvements to increase broadband to the 10/1 Mbps level. AT&T took $361.4 million of FCC CAF II funding that is to be used to upgrade broadband to 141,500 homes in California. That works out to $2,554 per home passed. Frontier took another $36.6 million, or $2,853 per home passed to improve broadband to 12,800 homes. That federal money requires that speeds increase to the 10/1 Mbps speed. This state funding will be an additive to those large federal amounts that these two companies have already received from the government.

AT&T has also already said that it plans to meet its CAF II obligations by upgrading rural cellular speeds. Frontier is mostly going to improve DSL on ancient copper and also is now looking at using point-to-point wireless technology to meet the CAF II obligations.

I don’t know how much it’s going to cost these companies to upgrade their rural customers to 10/1 Mbps. But the federal funding might be enough to pay for all of it. Adding the state funding means it’s likely that these two companies will make an immediate profit from upgrading rural customers to barely adequate broadband speeds. As we’ve seen many times in the past, this bill is good evidence that the big companies get value out of their lobbying efforts. The losers in all of this are the homes that won’t get anything faster than CAF II broadband. This $300M could have been used as matching grants to bring much faster broadband to many of these homes.

 

AT&T’s CAF II Plans

att-truckWe’ve known all along that AT&T was likely to use its cellular network to satisfy CAF II requirements to bring broadband to rural America. But we are now starting to see it happening. AT&T presented its plan recently in California and is probably in the process of doing so elsewhere.

In California AT&T proposes to provide fixed cellular broadband. Many of the rural areas affected by CAF II have not yet been upgraded to 4G LTE, and so AT&T’s first step will be to upgrade cell sites to the higher bandwidth capability. Once that is done, AT&T will offer fixed data to homes and businesses in the effective area using the LTE bandwidth. They will provide a receiver about the size of a dinner plate that will receive LTE data in the same way that cell phones do today. This wireless router will be connected to the home’s broadband network, probably a WiFi router provided by customers.

So it looks like AT&T will use the CAF II money to upgrade cell sites to LTE (something they were certainly going to do anyway). They also might build a few new rural cell sites and build some fiber to feed them. Finally, they will buy the customers the LTE receivers. My guess is that they are going to have a very hard time showing that they spent all of the CAF II money and so I expect some overinflated reporting of CAF II costs to the FCC. But these upgrades are far less costly than the rural DSL upgrades being contemplated by CenturyLink and Frontier.

AT&T promises that the bandwidth will meet the 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up speeds required by the FCC’s CAF II order. They also promise that there will be no monthly data caps smaller than 150 gigabits, also a threshold set by the CAF II rules. They have not yet specified specific prices, but say that prices will be at ‘market rate’ for broadband.

Even though we’ve seen this coming, this is a giant disappointment. Already today a 10/1 Mbps connection is inadequate for a large percentage of households. Cisco recently published statistics showing that the average home in the US today wants 24 Mbps to meet their needs, just a hair under the FCC definition of broadband. Cisco predicts that by 2020 that the average household demand is going to grow to 54 Mbps. That means the 10/1 speeds are going to feel really slow even by the end of the CAF II period ending in 2021.

These upgrades will improve broadband in the affected areas, but only by a small amount. Some residents in these areas today can get very slow DSL, under 1 Mbps. There are also numerous WISPs operating in the area offering speeds under 5 Mbps. And everybody always has the option of satellite broadband, which is universally disliked due to the latency and data caps.

The really bad news for these areas is that this upgrade is going to be in place for a long time. The FCC is probably not going to think about the CAF II areas again until well past the end of the CAF timeline, perhaps not until 2025. By 2025 the average household in the country is going to probably want a 100 Mbps connection if the current broadband growth trends continue. The folks in these areas will be just as far behind the rest of the country by then as they today. This whole CAF II program seems like a political sham that pretends to be bringing broadband to rural America, but it’s really nothing more than a temporary bandaid that only makes a marginal change in bandwidth delivery.

I also have no doubt that AT&T is going to use the CAF II upgrades as the excuse to walk away from the copper lines in the affected area. The FCC recently created rules for disconnecting copper, and once the CAF II wireless network is in place people are going to be forced onto the wireless network if they still want landline service.

This is all such a shame. We’ve seen in states like Minnesota that even modest government investments in broadband can bring amazing results. There are dozens of rural fiber networks being built in the state due to modest amounts of grant money from the state’s DEED grant program. The FCC could have used this CAF money to seed huge amounts of rural fiber construction – a solution that would have provided broadband for the next century. Instead they are helping AT&T pay for cellular upgrades that they would have done anyway and are abetting them in cutting down the rural copper networks. As I’ve said a number of times, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a more wasteful use of federal money.