Tag Archives: Brattle Group

Monopsony in the Wireless Labor Market

NATE, the Communications Contractors Association, recently sponsored a report by the Brattle Group titled Market Failure in the Wireless Communications Infrastructure Service Industry. The report describes how the three national mobile networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) dominate the labor market for wireless contractors in a way that is undermining the development and retention of the workforce for this critical infrastructure.

The Brattle report calls the situation a monopsony. That is an economic term for a market where a buyer, or a small universe of buyers, has significant market power over vendors who serve the industry. Brattle believes the term applies since the three big cellular carriers collectively control 97% of the cellular market. The contractor market that sells labor to the carriers is comprised of numerous small companies.

The Brattle report describes how the three carriers collectively harm the contractor industry. The three carriers dictate the prices they are willing to pay for service. Contractors complain that the prices offered don’t account for local issues like labor rates, terrain, and weather. 80% of the contractors that responded to a Brattle survey say that prices offered by the carriers don’t cover their costs. The rates don’t cover costs like warehousing of materials, third-party compliance, or training costs for technicians.

The report also shows some interesting graphs that show that the carriers are slow to pay, further adding to the cost of working with them. They have charts that contrast the carriers and show that Verizon pays 75% of invoices within 30 days, while T-Mobile only pays 17%, and AT&T pays 15%. AT&T doesn’t pay more than 45% of its invoices for more than 60 days. Slow payments put a lot of pressure on contractors that must meet payrolls.

The behavior of the carriers is having a big impact on the contractor industry. 54% have downsized during the past three years. A lot of contractors have exited the market and are looking for work outside the cellular market. Attrition of knowledgeable technicians is killing institutional knowledge. The contractors fear that they won’t be able to respond to emergencies or support any effort in a few years to deploy 6G networks.

The Brattle report does not accuse the three big carriers of collusion but says that the desire of each to drive down operating costs is having the same impact as if they were colluding. The report warns that the industry is seeing a noticeable decline in institutional capacity. It takes time and on-the-job experience to train tower climbers – this is not a position that can be quickly ramped up. They warn that loss of experienced tower climbers is not only a concern for the industry but is a national security concern.

The report makes an interesting comparison to another monopsony industry, the companies that build airplanes. The airline industry has learned that it is most efficient if it pays enough to keep experienced workers, because that significantly reduces the time needed to build a new airplane.

The report believes that corrective action is needed. Brattle doesn’t know the best way to fix the problem, which could be done through policy, regulation, or the carriers deciding to change their practices.

This situation is a big contrast to the fiber construction industry because there are hundreds of companies building fiber, which creates significant competition to find a contractor for a project. However, there is a danger after the big spending on grants is completed that the number of companies building new fiber networks will shrink to be similar to the wireless industry.

Broadband and Rural Real Estate

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America. They universally tell me that it’s gotten exceedingly hard to sell rural homes that don’t have good broadband.

I’ve also written a few blogs over the years about people who moved to a rural home and were shocked to find they couldn’t buy broadband. They probably moved from a place where broadband is ubiquitously available, and they never imagined that there were places without broadband. The most famous such story in my neck of the woods involves Brian Rathbone, who owns the broadband consulting company Broadband Catalyst. When he found his new home didn’t have fiber, he undertook nearly a decade-long effort to get it, including building the fiber to reach from the road to his remote home.

The Brattle Group released a study late last year that concluded that bringing fiber to a home might add as much as 14% to the value of the home. They undertook the study by comparing the prices for homes in 2023 that didn’t have fiber to prices in the same neighborhoods in 2024 after getting fiber. This was a time period with some significant inflation, so the increase can’t be attributed entirely to fiber, but there is no doubt that getting fiber added significant value to homes. Over the last decade, I recall estimates made by others that estimated the increase in home value for getting fiber of 6% to 8%.

The value of bringing fiber to a rural home has to be greater than for an urban home. How do you quantify the value of adding fiber to a rural home if it suddenly makes the home marketable? In my mind, a house that is put up for sale and gets no offers can be said to have no value. Some rural real estate agents have told me stories of homes without broadband that sat vacant for years after the owners left the home for some reason.

Of course, fiber isn’t the only form of rural broadband. When real estate agents talk about homes without broadband, they include homes served by rural DSL, cellular hotspots, or high orbit satellite broadband. In rural areas, I’ve run across numerous residents who tried and abandoned each of these options as inadequate and not worth the cost.

The rural broadband landscape has gotten more complicated in recent years. For example, most counties now have a few cell towers that provide FWA home cellular broadband. But the coverage areas for decent broadband from towers are small, perhaps two miles, and in the counties I’ve examined, FWA typically covers 20% or less of the area.

WISPs have been stepping up their game in many markets with new radios and better backhaul. It wasn’t unusual three or four years ago to find counties where all WISP customers saw speeds of 10 Mbps or slower. WISPs are often now delivering much faster speeds in these same places.

The big wildcard is Starlink. There are rural customers who rave about it, particularly those for whom Starlink brought the first really workable broadband. But I’ve talked to Starlink customers who complain that the quality of broadband varies throughout the day, making it a challenge to work from home. Many people moving from a cable company or fiber connection are likely to be skeptical of satellite broadband.

Of course, the advantages of bringing better broadband to rural homes go far beyond just the value added to the real estate. The counties I know that have worked hard to get better broadband have several other major goals. They understand the boost to the local economy when rural folks can make good incomes working from home. Counties are universally desperate to keep young residents from leaving the County to find jobs, and they hope that better broadband opens up local opportunities. Good broadband is also key to attracting retirees to move from cities. It’s nearly impossible to put a dollar value on these benefits.