Tag: CAF II Reverse Auction

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Regulation - What is it Good For?

How FCC Policies Hurt Communities

I was recently looking at one of the counties where the winner of the CAF II reverse auction was Viasat, a satellite broadband provider. There are many other rural counties with an identical outcome. As I thought about these counties, I came to realize that a series of FCC policies and decisions have hurt these counties in their search for better broadband. There is no single FCC action that hurt them, but a cascading series of individual decisions have made it harder for them to find a broadband solution.

The first FCC decision that created the current situation is when the current FCC declined to consider an increase in the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps. That definition was set in 2015 and there is ample record on file in FCC proceedings that 25/3 is already an obsolete definition of broadband.

The most recent evidence comes from OpenVault. The company just released its Broadband Industry Report for 4Q 2019 that shows the average subscribed speed in the US grew from 103 Mbps in 2018 to 128 Mbps in 2019. That result is largely being driven by the cable companies and the fiber providers that serve more than 2/3 of all of the broadband customers in the country. The FCC is stubbornly sticking to the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband even as a large majority of households in the country are being given speeds greater than 100 Mbps.

The decision to stick to the outdated 25/3 Mbps then created a second problem for rural America when the outdated FCC speed definition is used to award federal grants. The FCC decided in the CAF II reverse auction grants that any technology that met the 25/3 Mbps speed was acceptable. The FCC boxed themselves in since they couldn’t set a higher speed threshold for grants without admitting that the 25/3 Mbps threshold is inadequate. That auction awarded funding for technologies that can’t deliver much more than 25 Mbps. What’s worse is that the winners don’t have to finish building new networks until 2025. When the FCC blessed the use of the 25/3 threshold in the reverse auction they also blessed that 25/3 Mbps broadband will still be adequate in 2025.

The next FCC decision that is hurting these specific counties is when the FCC decided to allow satellite broadband companies to bid for scarce federal broadband grant monies. The FCC probably thought they had no choice since the satellite providers can meet the 25/3 Mbps speed threshold. This was a dreadful decision. Satellite broadband is already available everywhere in the US, and a grant given to satellite broadband brings no new broadband option to a rural area and only pads the bottom line of the satellite companies – it doesn’t push rural broadband coverage forward by a millimeter.

Finally, the FCC recently rubbed salt in the wound by saying that areas that got a previous state or federal broadband grants won’t be eligible for the additional federal grants out of the upcoming $20.4 billion RDOF grant program. This means that a county where a broadband grant was given to satellite provider is ineligible for grant money to find a real broadband solution.

Such counties are possibly doomed to be stuck without a broadband solution due to this chain of decisions by the FCC. I’m sure that the FCC didn’t set out to hurt these rural counties – but their accumulated actions are doing just that. Each of the FCC decisions I described was made at different times, in reaction to different issues facing the FCC. Each new decision built on prior FCC decisions, but that culminated in counties with a real dilemma. Through no fault of their own, these counties are now saddled with satellite broadband and a prohibition against getting additional grant monies to fund an actual broadband solution.

A lot of this is due to the FCC not having a coherent rural broadband policy. Decisions are made ad hoc without enough deliberation to understand the consequences of decisions. At the heart of the problem is regulatory cowardice where the FCC is refusing to acknowledge that the country has moved far past the 25/3 Mbps broadband threshold. When 2/3 of the country can buy speeds in excess of 100 Mbps it’s inexcusable to award new grant monies for technologies that deliver speeds slower than that.

It’s obvious why the FCC won’t recognize a faster definition of broadband, say 100 Mbps. Such a decision would instantly classify millions of homes as not having adequate broadband. There is virtually no chance that current FCC will do the right thing – and so counties that fell through the regulatory cracks will have to find a broadband solution that doesn’t rely on the FCC.

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Current News Regulation - What is it Good For?

Federal Subsidies for Satellite Broadband

In December, the FCC awarded $87 million from the CAF II Reverse auction held last summer for satellite broadband. The bulk of the satellite awards went to Viasat, which will supposedly use the money to bring broadband to 123,000 homes in seventeen states. The grant awards are meant to bring 25/3 Mbps broadband to areas that don’t have it today.

I have several problems with this award. First is that the satellite companies already cover these areas today and have been free to sell and market in these areas. The federal grant money doesn’t bring a new broadband alternative to anybody in rural America.

Second, the satellite companies aren’t required to connect any specific number of new customers as a result of the grant awards. They are largely free to just pocket the grants directly as profits. Even when they do connect a new customer, they don’t build any lasting broadband infrastructure, but only install an antenna at each new customer.

Third, rural residents don’t seem to want satellite broadband. In a large survey by the Census Bureau in 2017, 21% of people in the US described their neighborhood as rural (52% chose suburban and 27% said urban). In the quarter ending in June 2019, Viasat claimed 587,000 rural customers in the US, which represents only 2.2% of the 128 million households in the country.  If those customers are all in rural America, then the company has roughly a 10% market penetration.

CCG has been doing broadband surveys for twenty years and I don’t know that we’ve ever talked to a satellite customer who was happy with their broadband. In every survey, we seem to encounter more people who dropped satellite service than those that still have it. Customers complain that satellite costs too much – Viasat claimed in their most recent financial report that the average residential broadband bill is $84.26. Customers also hate the high latency, which can be 10 to 15 times higher than terrestrial broadband. The latency is due to the satellite which is parked almost 22,200 miles above earth – it takes a while for a round trip communication over that distance.

The primary complaints about satellite broadband are tiny monthly data caps. The company’s products that would satisfy the FCC grant speed requirements start with the Unlimited Silver 25 plan at $70 with speeds up to 25 Mbps with a monthly data cap of 60 gigabytes of data usage. The fastest plan is the Unlimited Platinum 100 plan for $150 with speeds up to 100 Mbps and a data cap if 150 gigabytes. Unlike cellular plans where a customer can buy more broadband, the Viasat plans throttle customers to speeds reported to be less than 1 Mbps once a customer reaches the data cap. To put those plans into perspective, OpenVault announced recently that the average US home uses 274 gigabytes of data per month. The average cord cutting home uses 520 gigabytes per month. The satellite broadband is impractical for anybody with school students in the home or for anybody that does even a modest amount of video streaming.

Viasat won the grant funding due to a loophole in the grant program. The program funding was available to anybody that offers broadband of at least 25 Mbps. The grant program intended to deliver a new broadband alternative to rural households – something that satellite broadband does not do. The funding was provided under a reverse auction, and the satellite companies likely placed bids for every eligible rural market – they would have been the default winner for any area that had no other bidder. Even where there was another bidder, a reverse auction goes to the lowest bidder and there is no amount that is too small for the satellite companies to accept. The satellite companies don’t have to make capital expenditures to satisfy the grants.

Giving money to satellite providers makes no sense as broadband policy. They don’t bring new broadband to anybody since the satellite plans are already available. The plans are expensive, have high latency and low monthly data caps.

The much larger RDOF grant program will award $16.4 billion in 2020 for rural broadband and the satellite companies must be ecstatic. If the FCC doesn’t find a way to keep the satellite companies out of this coming auction, the satellite companies could score a billion-dollar windfall. They can do so without offering any products that are not already available today.

To put these grants into perspective, the $87 million grant award is roughly the same size as the money that has been awarded over several years in the Minnesota Border-to-Border grant program. The Minnesota grants have helped funds dozens of projects, many of which built fiber in the state. There is no comparison between the benefits of the state grant program compared to the nearly total absence of benefit from handing federal money to the satellite companies.

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Regulation - What is it Good For?

FCC Further Defines Speed Tests

The FCC recently voted to tweak the rules for speed testing for ISPs who accept federal funding from the Universal Service Fund or from other federal funding sources. This would include all rate-of-return carriers including those taking ACAM funding, carriers that won the CAF II reverse auctions, recipients of the Rural Broadband Experiment (RBE) grants, Alaska Plan carriers, and likely carriers that took funding in the New York version of the CAF II award process. These new testing rules will also apply to carriers accepting the upcoming RDOF grants.

The FCC had originally released testing rules in July 2018 in Docket DA 18-710. Those rules applied to the carriers listed above as well as to all price cap carriers and recipients of the CAF II program. The big telcos will start testing in January of 2020 and the FCC should soon release a testing schedule for everybody else – the dates for testing were delayed until this revised order was issued.

The FCC made the following changes to the testing program:

  • Modifies the schedule for commencing testing by basing it on the deployment obligations specific to each Connect America Fund support mechanism;
  • Implements a new pre-testing period that will allow carriers to become familiar with testing procedures without facing a loss of support for failure to meet the requirements;
  • Allows greater flexibility to carriers for identifying which customer locations should be tested and selecting the endpoints for testing broadband connections. This last requirement sounds to me like the FCC is letting the CAF II recipients off the hook by allowing them to only test customers they know meet the 10/1 Mbps speeds.

The final order should be released soon and will hopefully answer carrier questions. One of the areas of concern is that the FCC seems to want to test the maximum speeds that a carrier is obligated to deliver. That might mean having to give customers the fastest connection during the time of the tests even if they have subscribed to slower speeds.

Here are some of the key provisions of the testing program that were not changed by the recent order:

  • ISPs can choose between three methods for testing. First, they may elect what the FCC calls the MBA program, which uses an external vendor, approved by the FCC, to perform the testing. This firm has been testing speeds for the network built by large telcos for many years. ISPs can also use existing network tools if they are built into the customer CPE that allows test pinging and other testing methodologies. Finally, an ISP can install ‘white boxes’ that provide the ability to perform the tests.
  • Testing, at least for now is perpetual, and carriers need to recognize that this is a new cost they have to bear due to taking federal funding.
  • The number of tests to be conducted will vary by the number of customers for which a recipient is getting support; With 50 or fewer households the test is for 5 customers; for 51-500 households the test is 10% of households. For 500 or more households the test is 50 households. ISPs declaring a high latency must test more locations with the maximum being 370.
  • Tests for a given customer are for one solid week, including weekends in each quarter. Tests must be conducted in the evenings between 6:00 PM and 12:00 PM. Latency tests must be done every minute during the six-hour testing window. Speed tests – run separately for upload speeds and download speeds – must be done once per hour during the 6-hour testing window.
  • ISPs are expected to meet latency standards 95% of the time. Speed tests must achieve 80% of the expected upland and download speed 80% of the time. An example of this requirement is that a carrier guaranteeing a gigabit of speed must achieve 800 Mbps 80% of the time. ISPs that meet the speeds and latencies for 100% of customers are excused from quarterly testing and only have to test once per year.
  • There are financial penalties for ISPs that don’t meet these tests.
  • ISPs that have between 85% and 100% of households that meet the test standards lose 5% of their FCC support.
  • ISPs that have between 70% and 85% of households that meet the test standards lose 10% of their FCC support.
  • ISPs that have between 55% and 75% of households that meet the test standards lose 15% of their FCC support.
  • ISPs with less than 55% of compliant households lose 25% of their support.
  • The penalties only apply to funds that haven’t yet been collected by an ISP.
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Regulation - What is it Good For?

Comparing FCC Broadband Programs

I think it’s finally dawning on the big telcos that the days of being able to milk revenues from rural America while ignoring rural copper networks is finally ending. This becomes apparent when looking at the two most recent subsidy programs.

The original CAF II program was a huge boon to the big telcos. Companies like AT&T, CenturyLink, and Frontier collected $11 billion of subsidy to boost their rural copper networks up to speeds of at least 10/1 Mbps. This was a ridiculous program from the start since the FCC had established the definition of broadband to be at least 25/3 Mbps even before awarding this money. Perhaps the craziest thing about CAF II is that the telcos are still making the upgrades – they were required to be 60% complete with the required CAF II upgrades by the end 2018 and to be 100% complete by the end of 2020.

The big telcos report broadband customers to both the FCC and to stockholders, but the reporting is not in enough detail to know if the CAF II money has made any difference in rural America. All of the big telcos are losing broadband customers, but it’s hard to look under the hood to know if they are making any significant customer gains in the CAF II areas. We see little hints from time to time. For example, in the second quarter of this year, CenturyLink lost 56,000 net broadband customers but reports that it lost 78,000 customers with speeds below 20 Mbps and added 22,000 customers with speeds faster than that. That’s the first time they provided any color about their gains and losses. But even that extra detail doesn’t tell us how CenturyLink is doing in the CAF II areas. It’s obvious by looking at the customer losses that telcos aren’t adding the hundreds of thousands of new customers one would expect to see as the result of an $11 billion capital expenditure program. If CAF II is delivering broadband to areas that didn’t have it before, there should be a flood of new rural customers buying better broadband by now. I could be wrong, but when looking at the aggregate customers for each big telco I don’t think that flood of new customers is happening. If it was I think the telcos would be bragging about it.

The CAF II reverse auction took a different approach and awarded funding in those areas where the big telcos didn’t take the original CAF II funds. These subsidies were auctioned off in a reverse auction where the company willing to take the lowest amount of subsidy per customer got the funding. In the auction, most bidders offered to deploy broadband of 100 Mbps speeds or faster – a big contrast to the 10/1 Mbps speeds for CAF II. Some of the grant winners in the reverse auction like electric cooperatives are using the money to build fiber and offer gigabit speeds.

The original CAF II subsidy awards are probably the dumbest decision I’ve ever seen an FCC make (rivaling the recent decision to stop regulating broadband). If the original CAF II awards had been open to all applicants instead of being handed to the big telcos, then many of the homes that have been upgraded to 10/1 Mbps would have instead gotten fiber. Maybe even worse, CAF II basically put huge swaths of rural America on hold for seven years while the big telcos invested in minor tweaks to DSL.

The FCC will soon be handing out $20.4 billion for the new RDOF program to build better rural broadband. It should be press headlines that this money is going to many of the same areas that got the original $11 billion CAF II subsidies – the FCC is paying twice to upgrade the same areas.

Dan McCarthy, the CEO of Frontier Communications recently complained about the new RDOF grant program. He realizes that Frontier has little chance of winning the grants in a reverse auction.  Frontier doesn’t want to invest any of its cash for rural broadband and in an auction would be competing against ISPs willing to invest significant equity to match the RDOF grants. Frontier also recognizes that anything they might propose as upgrades can’t compete with technologies that will deliver speeds of 100 Mbps or faster.

At least the FCC is not handing the RDOF money directly to the big telcos again. It’s been five years since the start of CAF II and I’m still perplexed by the last FCC’s decision to hand $11 billion to the big telcos. Unfortunately, this FCC is still repeating the mistake of awarding grant money to support obsolete speeds. The FCC is proposing that RDOF money can be used to build broadband capable of delivering 25/3 Mbps broadband. In a recent blog, I predict that this is going to go into the books as another short-sighted decision by the FCC and that they’ll again be funding broadband that will be obsolete before it’s completed eight years from now. Hopefully most of the RDOF money will go towards building real broadband. Otherwise, in eight years we might see another giant FCC grant program to improve broadband for a third time in the same rural areas.

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Improving Your Business Regulation - What is it Good For?

A Roadmap to Better Broadband Grants

I’ve been thinking about the effectiveness of federal broadband grant programs. We’ve had three recent major sets of federal grant awards – the stimulus grants of 2007, the first CAF II grants in 2015 and the recently awarded CAF II reverse auctions. We also have an upcoming e-Connectivity grant program for $600 million. I think there are lessons to be learned from studying the difference in the results between these grants. These lessons apply to State grant programs as well as any new federal programs.

Don’t Reward Slow Broadband Speeds. Probably the most bone-headed decision made by the FCC in my memory was handing out billions in CAF II to upgrade rural copper to 10/1 Mbps. This wasn’t considered decent broadband at the time of this decision and yet these upgrades continue to be funded today. The FCC could still take back the remaining CAF II money and redirect these funds to a reverse auction, which we just saw produced much faster speeds in areas with far less density than the CAF II footprint.

Keep Politics Out of It. The CAF II decision to give all of the funding to the big telcos was purely political and resulted in a huge waste of money that could have created many real broadband solutions. The FCC is supposed to be an independent agency, and it’s shameful that lobbyists were able to kill the reverse auction originally planned for CAF II. We are seeing politics back on the table with the e-Connectivity grants where Congress created a feel-good grant program, but then saddled it with a restriction that no more than 10% of homes in a study area can have existing 10/1 Mbps speeds. The reason for this provision was not even hidden, with the big telcos saying they didn’t want federal grant money to be used to compete against them.

Don’t Fund Inadequate Technologies. AT&T is using LTE cellular broadband to satisfy CAF II. This technology will never provide adequate broadband. In the recent reverse auction we saw money going to high-altitude satellite companies. Regardless of speeds that can be delivered with these satellites, the latency is so poor that it limits the ability to use the broadband for important activities like working at home or taking on-line classes.

Don’t Stress Anchor Institutions over People. The stimulus grants required middle mile providers to pop off of highways to build expensive last mile fiber to a handful of anchor institutions – schools, libraries, etc. While these anchor institutions need good broadband, so do the neighborhoods around them. This requirement added a lot of cost to the middle-mile projects as well as made it harder for anybody else to build a last mile network since the biggest bandwidth users in a community already have fiber.

Build to Industry Practices. The stimulus grants required that fiber builders conduct expensive environmental studies and historic preservation studies. That was the first time I ever saw those requirements in my forty years in the industry. Since telecom infrastructure is built almost entirely in existing public right-of-way these restrictions added a lot of cost but zero value to the projects.

Penalize Companies that Cheat. There needs to be repercussions for companies that cheat on grant applications to win the funding. The biggest area of cheating is claiming speeds that the technology can’t deliver. The FCC follows up grants with a decent speed-test program, but the worst repercussion in failing these tests is to not get funding going forward. A carrier that badly fails the speed tests should have to return the original grant funding. I’m also hearing rumors that the many rural households covered by CAF II will not get the promised upgrades – and if so, the big telcos should be forced to return a proportionate amount of that funding for homes that don’t get the promised upgrades.

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Regulation - What is it Good For?

Winners of the CAF II Auction

The FCC CAF II reverse auction recently closed with an award of $1.488 billion to build broadband in rural America. This funding was awarded to 103 recipients that will collect the money over ten years. The funded projects must be 40% complete by the end of three years and 100% complete by the end of six years. The original money slated for the auction was almost $2 billion, but the reverse auction reduced the amount of awards and some census blocks got no bidders.

The FCC claims that 713,176 rural homes will be getting better broadband, but the real number of homes with a benefit from the auction is 513,000 since the auction funded Viasat to provide already-existing satellite broadband to 190,000 homes in the auction.

The FCC claims that 19% of the homes covered by the grants will be offered gigabit speeds, 53% will be offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps and 99.75% will be offered speeds of at least 25 Mbps. These statistics have me scratching my head. The 19% of the homes that will be offered gigabit speeds are obviously going to be getting fiber. I know a number of the winners who will be using the funds to help pay for fiber expansion. I can’t figure what technology accounts for the rest of the 53% of homes that supposedly will be able to get 100 Mbps speeds.

As I look through the filings I note that many of the fixed wireless providers claim that they can serve speeds over 100 Mbps. It’s true that fixed wireless can be used to deliver 100 Mbps speeds. To achieve that speed customers either need to be close to the tower or else a wireless carrier has to dedicate extra resources to that customer to achieve that speed – meaning less of that tower can be used to serve other customers. I’m not aware of any WISPs that offer ubiquitous 100 Mbps speeds, because to do so means serving a relatively small number of customers from a given tower. To be fair to the WISPs, their CAF II filings also say they will be offering slower speeds like 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps. The FCC exaggerated the results of the auction by claiming that any recipient capable of delivering 100 Mbps to a few customers will be delivering it to all customers – something that isn’t true. The fact is that not many of the households over the 19% getting fiber will ever buy 100 Mbps broadband. I know the FCC wants to get credit for improving rural broadband, but there is no reason to hype the results to be better than they are.

I also scratch my head wondering why Viasat was awarded $122 million in the auction. The company is the winner of funding for 190,595 households, or 26.7% of the households covered by the entire auction. Satellite broadband is every rural customer’s last choice for broadband. The latency is so poor on satellite broadband that it can’t be used for any real time applications like watching live video, making a Skype call, connecting to school networks to do homework or for connecting to a corporate WAN to work from home. Why does satellite broadband even qualify for the CAF II funding? Viasat had to fight to get into the auction and their entry was opposed by groups like the American Cable Association. The Viasat satellites are already available to all of the households in the awarded footprint, so this seems like a huge government giveaway that won’t bring any new broadband option to the 190,000 homes.

Overall the outcome of the auction was positive. Over 135,000 rural households will be getting fiber. Another 387,000 homes will be getting broadband of at least 25 Mbps, mostly using fixed wireless, with the remaining 190,000 homes getting the same satellite option they already have today.

It’s easy to compare this to the original CAF II program that gave billions to the big telcos and only required speeds of 10/1 Mbps. That original CAF II program was originally intended to be a reverse auction open to anybody, but at the last minute the FCC gave all of the money to the big telcos. One has to imagine there was a huge amount of lobbying done to achieve that giant giveaway.

Most of the areas covered by the first CAF II program had higher household density than this auction pool, and a reverse auction would have attracted a lot of ISPs willing to invest in faster technologies than the telcos. The results of this auction show that most of those millions of homes would have gotten broadband of at least 25 Mbps instead of the beefed-up DSL or cellular broadband they are getting through the big telcos.

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Regulation - What is it Good For?

Carrier of Last Resort

Every once in a while I see a regulatory requirement that makes me scratch my head. One of the requirements of the current CAF II reverse auction is that every winner must become an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) before receiving the funding – and I wonder why this is needed? This requirement is coupled with another puzzling requirement that anybody taking this funding must provide telephone service in addition to broadband. Since the purpose of the CAF II program is to expand rural broadband these requirements seem incongruous with the purpose of the program.

The ETC regulatory status was created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Congress created this new class of carriers to mean any carrier that is willing to provide basic services within a specified geographic area (and in 1996 this was specified as providing voice service) and for that willingness to serve would be eligible to receive any available subsidies.

While this is not in writing anywhere, I’m guessing that these requirements are part of the ongoing plan to erode the rural carrier of last resort obligation (COLR) for the big telcos. Carrier of last resort is a regulatory concept that is applied by regulators to utility infrastructure providers including telco incumbents, electric, gas and water providers. The textbook definition of carrier of last resort is a utility provider that is required by law to serve customers within a defined service area, even if serving that customer is not economically viable. Further a COLR is required to charge just and reasonable prices and generally has legal hurdles that make it difficult to withdraw from serving within the defined service area.

We are seeing rural carrier of last resort obligations eroding all over the place. For example, the FCC is proposing rules that will allow copper providers to tear down copper networks with no obligation to replace them with some alternate technology.

I think this requirement in the CAF II reverse auction is along the same vein. All of the areas covered by this auction are within the historic regulated footprint of one of the large telcos. Except for the Verizon service areas, where Verizon did not accept the original CAF II funding, these are the most remote customers in this auction are in very rural areas. These are the customers at the far end of long copper lines who have no broadband, and likely no quality telephone service.

Anybody accepting the CAF II reverse funding must file for ETC status for those census blocks where they are getting funding. This is a requirement even if the auction winner is only going to be serving one or two people within that census block. Census blocks are areas that generally include 600 – 800 homes. In cities a census block might be as small as a block or two, but in rural areas a census block can be large.

My bet is that the large telcos are going to claim that they no longer have carrier of last resort in any rural area where there is now a second ETC. They will ask regulators why they need to serve a new home built in one of these areas if there is another carrier with similar obligations. If that’s the case, then this reverse auction is going to remove huge chunks of rural America from having a carrier of last resort provider. It’s likely that incumbent telcos will use the existence of a second ETC to avoid having to bring service to new homes.

I have an even more nagging worry. ETC status is something that is granted by state regulatory commissions. In granting this status it’s possible that some states are going to interpret this to mean that a new ETC might have some carrier of last resort obligations. If the incumbent telco tears down the copper network, it’s not unreasonable to think that state regulators might turn to the new ETC in an area to serve newly constructed homes and businesses.

I would caution anybody seeking ETC status as part of getting this funding to make sure they are not unknowingly picking up carrier of last resort obligations along with that status. If I was making such a filing myself I would query the regulators directly to get their response on the record.

I will be the first to tell you that I could be off base on this – but this feels like one of those regulatory requirements that could have hidden consequences. I can’t think of any reason why this program would require a new provider to supply telephone service other than for letting the large telcos off the hook to do so. I know that many companies going after this funding would think twice about taking it if it means they become the carrier of last resort.

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