ArsTechnica – POTs and PANs

States Fight Back Against CAF II

Jon Brodkin of ArsTechnica wrote a recent article about the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC) notifying the FCC that AT&T had failed to meet its CAF II requirements in the state. AT&T had taken over $49 million per year for six years ending this December and was supposed to use that money to upgrade broadband to almost 144,000 residents in the state to at least 10/1 Mbps broadband.

The PSC notification informs that FCC that they don’t believe the upgrades have been done or that many of those homes were able to get faster broadband. AT&T has certified to the FCC that the CAF II work has been completed on schedule. AT&T has stonewalled the PSC on data requests to find out how many homes have successfully been able to access faster broadband.

The FCC is supposed to begin testing CAF II homes in 2021 and is supposed to fine the big telcos like AT&T if homes in the CAF II area aren’t getting the faster speeds. However, that testing program is badly flawed in that the telcos are going to have some say about which homes get tested, and they’ll certainly funnel the testing into places that meet the speed test.

AT&T elected to use the CAF II funding to upgrade speeds by offering fixed cellular service to customers that formerly had slow DSL service. From what I can see, AT&T has not widely advertised the new wireless product and it’s unlikely that they have added many people to the cellular technology in Mississippi or anywhere else. The company is refusing to tell the state how many homes are on the new product.

Unfortunately, what AT&T is doing in Mississippi is not unusual. AT&T took $2.57 billion nationwide for CAF II and it’s likely It hasn’t made many upgrades in other states as well. I’ve seen a lot of evidence that Frontier ($1.7 billion) and CenturyLink ($3.03 billion) have also failed to upgrade rural customers. Those two companies elected to mostly upgrade rural DSL to the faster speeds. We’ve recently had engineers in counties where Frontier and CenturyLink were supposed to make CAF II upgrades and we could find no evidence of upgraded DSL anywhere in the rural parts of these counties. We’ve also helped counties to solicit speed test from citizens and we’ve studied a number of counties where no rural DSL service tested even close to the 10/1 Mbps goal of CAF II.

To make matters even worse, the FCC recently decided to award these big telcos a seventh year of subsidy. That means AT&T will get $428 million in 2021, Frontier will get $283 million, and CenturyLink will get $506 million. The companies have no obligation for this addition funding and don’t have to use it to improve rural broadband.

While 10/1 Mbps broadband isn’t great, it’s a lot better than the DSL that was in these rural areas in 2015 when the CAF II payments began. The CAF II areas are remote and most customers who could even get DSL saw speeds under 1 or 2 Mbps download.

The impact of AT&T’s failure to make the upgrades became apparent this year when millions of students were sent home during the pandemic. A student might be able to squeak out a school connection on a 10/1 Mbps broadband connection, but students cannot function on the slower DSL that is still in place due to lack of upgrades. The actions of the FCC and the greed of the big telcos robbed millions of rural homes from getting better broadband.

The failure of CAF II rests entirely on the FCC. The last FCC under Chairman Wheeler awarded the funding to upgrade to 10/1 speeds, even though the definition of broadband at the time was 25/3 Mbps. The current FCC under Chairman Pai has turned a blind eye to the non-performance of the big telcos and absurdly is awarding them with an additional year of CAF II funding. The overall CAF II program handed out over $10 billion in funding for improving rural broadband that might as well have been flushed down the drain. The FCC could have awarded this money instead to broadband grants that could have brought better broadband in the CAF II rural areas.

I hope the Mississippi PSC does more than just write a letter. I’d like to see them ask for AT&T to refund the CAF II money to the state to use for broadband grants. And I’d love to see other states do the same and take back the billions of CAF II broadband funding that was wasted.

Broadband Interference

Jon Brodkin of ArsTechnica published an amusing story about how the DSL went out of service in a 400-resident village in Wales each morning at 7:00 am. It turns out that one of the residents turned on an ancient television that interfered with the DSL signal to the extent that the network collapsed. The ISP finally figured this out by looking around the village in the morning with a spectrum analyzer until they found the source of the interference.

It’s easy to think that the story points out another weakness of old DSL technology, but interference can be a problem for a lot of other technologies.

This same problem is common on cable company hybrid-fiber coaxial networks. The easiest way to understand this is to think back to the old days when we all watched analog TV. Anybody who watched programming on channels 2 through 5 remembers times when the channels got fuzzy or even became unwatchable. It turns out that there are a lot of different devices that interfere with the frequencies used for these channels including things like microwave ovens, certain motors like power tools and lawnmowers, and other devices like blenders. It was a common household occurrence for one of these channels to go fuzzy when somebody in the house, or even in a neighboring home used one of these devices.

This same interference carries forward into cable TV networks. Cable companies originally used the same frequencies for TV channels inside the coaxial wires that were used over the air and the low TV channels sat between the 5 MHz and 42 MHz frequency. It turns out that long stretches of coaxial wires on poles act as a great antenna, so cable systems pick up the same kinds of interference that happens in homes. It was pretty routine for channels 2 and 3, in particular, to be fuzzy in an analog cable network.

You’d think that this interference might have gone away when cable companies converted TV signals to digital. The TV transmissions for channels 2 through 5 got crystal clear because cable companies relocated the digital version of these channels to better frequency. When broadband was added to cable systems the cable companies continue to use the low frequencies. CableLabs elected to use these frequencies for the upload portion of broadband. There is still plenty of interference in cable networks today – probably even more than years ago as coaxial networks have aged and have more points for interference to seep into the wires. Until the pandemic, we didn’t care much about upload bandwidth, but it turns out that one of the major reasons that cable companies struggle to deliver reliable upload speeds is that they are using the noisiest spectrum for the upload function.

The DSL in the village suffered from the same issue since the telephone copper wires also act as a big outdoor antenna. In this village, the frequency emanating from the old TV exactly matched the frequencies used for DSL.

Another common kind of interference is seen in fixed wireless networks in a situation where there are multiple ISPs using the same frequencies in a given rural footprint. I know of counties where there are as many as five or six different wireless ISPs, and most use the same frequencies since most WISPs rely on a handful of channels in the traditional WiFi bandwidth at 2.4 MHz and 5 MHz. I’ve heard of situations where WiFi is so crowded that the performance of all WISPs suffer.

WiFi also suffers from local interference in the home. The WiFi standard says that all devices have an equal chance of using the frequencies. This means that a home WiFi router will cycle through all the signals from all devices trying to make a WiFi connection. When a WiFi router connects with an authorized device inside the home it allows for a burst of data, but then the router disconnects that signal and tries the next signal – cycling through all of the possible sources of WiFi.

This is the same issue that is seen by people using WiFi in a high-rise apartment building or a hotel where many users are trying to connect to WiFi at the same time. Luckily this problem ought to improve. The FCC has authorized the use of 6 GHz spectrum for home broadband which opens up numerous new channels. Interference will only occur between devices trying to share a channel, but that will be far fewer cases of interference than today.

The technology that has no such interference is fiber. Nothing interferes with the light signal between a fiber hub and a customer. However, once customers connect the broadband signal to their home WiFi network, the same interference issues arise. I looked recently and can see over twenty other home WiFi networks from my office – a setup ripe for interference. Before making too much fun of the folks in the Welsh village, there is a good chance that you are subject to significant interference in your home broadband today.

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