Tag Archives: cellular coverage

A Rural Cellular Story

I was looking through the FCC cellular map in Buncombe County, North Carolina, where I live. For those not fully familiar with the FCC broadband maps, the agency publishes two maps: the more familiar one that shows broadband coverage and a second that shows cellular coverage. You can toggle between the two maps at the FCC’s map website.

It struck me while looking at the details in the maps that rural cellular coverage is changing, and not in a good way. I started by looking at a small section of the county that is on the outer fringe of where the Asheville outer suburbs turn rural. According to the FCC cellular map, the area I selected has the following cellular coverage:

These two tables tell me the following:

  • AT&T and Verizon have some 4G coverage. But the Verizon coverage is likely very weak since they don’t claim it will work in a moving vehicle. While AT&T claims its 4G coverage will work in a moving vehicle, it’s curious that AT&T doesn’t have 5G. This tells me that the AT&T signal is also likely weak since it is outside the 5G coverage area.
  • The only carrier claiming relatively solid 5G (35/3 Mbps) is Project Genesis, which is EchoStar. The company has exited the facility-based cellular business and is in the process of dismantling cell sites.
  • T-Mobile claims both 4G and 5G for outdoor cellular coverage, but doesn’t claim it can work in a moving vehicle, meaning the coverage is also probably weak.
  • The last carrier listed is UScellular, which claims 7/1 speeds on 5G, but doesn’t claim to be able to provide coverage in vehicles. UScellular was purchased by T-Mobile, and the rumor is that any UScellular towers that already duplicate T-Mobile coverage are likely to be decommissioned.

The bottom line is that this particular neighborhood has weak cell coverage. The only carrier that claimed to be able to deliver 5G to a moving vehicle is now out of business.

I picked this neighborhood at random, but I think I would find the same story in most of the areas on the fringe of the metropolitan area. The coverage in areas that are completely rural is worse. The story I gleaned from this neighborhood is troublesome for several reasons.

  • The folks who live here don’t have a lot of options. The only carrier that might work in the way people need cellular to work is AT&T, but this neighborhood is outside the AT&T 5G coverage, and the 4G coverage is likely weak.
  • It looks like decent coverage was finally becoming available from EchoStar, but that’s now gone.
  • The speeds shown in the table are for outdoor coverage, and speeds inside homes are typically half of outdoor speeds.
  • When you look at the details in the FCC cellular map you quickly understand how the advertised national footprints of the big carriers are exaggerated.
  • The bad news is that the FCC considers this neighborhood to be served by cellular. That means if the FCC finally launches the 5G Fund for Rural America, this neighborhood will not be considered for funding to add a new cell tower.

A Rural Polycrisis?

A polycrisis is a situation where multiple distinct problems interact and amplify each other, resulting in a more severe outcome than the sum of the individual crises. The term is being used to describe the complex interconnections between related problems, which can lead to cascading and overwhelming ompacts. The term is mostly applied to large geopolitical issues, but perhaps it can also be applied to more local issues.

Consider the numerous problems that plague rural America today. Every rural area is a little different, but much of rural America already had problems with access to healthcare, which are magnified as rural hospitals and clinics are closed. Rural America struggles with low incomes that are the result of globalization and the closure of many factories over the last decades. Much of rural America has a population crisis, in that populations are shrinking from the out-migration of younger residents, leaving an aging remaining population. Rural America has a connectivity problem since many rural areas have inadequate broadband, and even more have nonfunctional cellular coverage. The populations in rural America tend to have lower levels of achieved education. I have to think that all of these problems collectively create a polycrisis.

It’s never easy to fix a polycrisis because the problems interact with each other. As I’ve worked around the country in rural areas over the last decade or two, I’ve talked to many local governments that put high hope that better broadband can improve many of the issues that plague their area. Consider what fast, affordable broadband can mean to a rural community.

  • Telehealth becomes essential when local hospitals and clinics close. Even when they don’t close, telehealth can enable residents to consult with specialists in distant cities when the need arises. Lack of telehealth can lead to numerous negative repercussions, such reduced ability to work and earn a living.
  • A lot of communities have told me that allowing residents to work from home is the primary benefit after a rural area gets good connectivity. Working from home can allow people to find work when there are no local jobs. Working from home can mean higher household incomes, which has a positive multiplier effect across the whole community.
  • Reliable connectivity means improved education opportunities. Several studies have shown that K12 students in homes with broadband significantly outperform students in homes with no broadband. Broadband also brings the opportunity to pursue training and advanced degrees online, which improves the opportunity for higher earnings.
  • Good connectivity increases the opportunity for entrepreneurship. For example, the Etsy platform, where people can sell homemade goods and products, says that being an Etsy seller increases household income by an average of 11%.
  • Good broadband has become essential to rural agriculture, and farming communities without broadband are at a significant disadvantage to peer communities with good broadband.

Broadband alone doesn’t automatically make these things better for everybody, and communities are learning that they must pursue all aspects of solving the digital divide to make a real difference. That means not just making better broadband available. It means having broadband at affordable rates. It means making sure that everybody has access to computers and devices and knows how to use them. Communities that make a concerted effort to tackle all of the aspects of good broadband should see improvements over time in some of the issues that trouble them.

This is not to say that broadband is a panacea, and that broadband alone can fix an ailing rural community. But bringing good, affordable broadband can make things better if the community fully embraces what good broadband can bring.

Businesses Still Need Landlines

There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that noted that the business world still uses a lot of landline telephones. Landline telephones have been steadily disappearing from homes, but are still not gone. I see ISPs still selling a telephone line to 10% or more of passings, and surveys show that the average residential landline penetration rate is still somewhere between 15% and 20%.

Some homes keep landlines because of poor or no cellular coverage. Even in areas where outdoor cellular coverage is good enough to make calls, indoor coverage might be poor. For most homes, indoor cellular coverage is typically half as good as the coverage just outside the home. While homes with broadband can use WiFi for making phone calls, those with erratic or unreliable broadband might keep a landline to be certain of having a connection to 911. Many older people keep a landline because they are more comfortable talking on a handset.

The WSJ article points out that a lot of businesses still have landlines. Some businesses, like hotels, don’t have a choice and are legally required to provide a landline in every room for guests to be able to call 911. Hotel guests also like the feature of using the landline to easily connect to the front desk or room service. It doesn’t seem likely that hotels will stop using landlines in the foreseeable future. Many hospitals keep landlines for similar reasons.

Other businesses keep landlines for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest reasons is the ease of using landlines for using abbreviated dialing to reach extension numbers within a business. It’s also a lot easier for employees to use a business landline for functions like putting calls on hold, transferring calls, or bridging multiple employees into a call.

Employees of large businesses favor landlines instead of business cellphones since a landline allows them to walk away from taking work calls after the end of the workday. Many businesses prefer landlines for a similar reason since it can create a clear differentiation between business calls and personal calls. There are also some security concerns. A lost or stolen company cellphone can give access to company systems and records.

The WSJ article points out that some large businesses are slowly weaning themselves from landlines. They quote the CTO of New York Life, who says that every employee still has a landline at their desk today but may not within a year. He notes that the transition to company cellphones won’t be  easy since it means a lot of reeducation of employees on how to perform routine business phone functions on a smartphone – something that isn’t always as easy or intuitive to use as the buttons on business desk phones.

I’ve had many ISP clients consider ditching the telephone business completely, and a few have done so. But many have decided to keep the telephone option because of business customers. It’s a lot harder to sell broadband to a business if it doesn’t also come bundled with telephone service. Many businesses have learned the painful lesson over the years of having different voice and data providers, which can turn into finger-pointing when something goes wrong with the voice connection.

The landline business also still has an attractive margin for companies that buy voice switching on a bulk wholesale basis. ISPs that ditch voice have made the ultimate transition to be a dumb pipe provider – something many of them have been leery of for many years.

Attributes and Benefits of Good Cellular Coverage

Somebody asked me recently for a list of the primary benefits of having good cellular coverage. I was surprised to find out that I had never thought about this before. Following are the benefits I could think of, and I’m sure I’m missing plenty more.

  • Mobility. The original and still primary benefit of cellular coverage is mobility. Kids won’t believe this, but thirty years ago, it was virtually impossible to communicate with others if you were away from a landline. Family members did not communicate during the day. Business travel was massively challenging and there were long lines at payphones. Cellphones introduced the reality of ‘communicate anywhere’ that revolutionized the way that people live and work.
  • It’s the Newest Utility. I think cellular coverage is the newest utility because everybody expects it. In 2023, 98% of adults had a cellphone. The average American connects to the Internet just over 7 hours per day, with the usage split almost evenly between cellphones and other devices like computers or tablets.
  • It’s How We Talk. Cellular has displaced landlines. In the 2000 U.S. Census, 97.6% of homes had a landline. At the end of 2023, home landline penetration was under 30%. People don’t just talk using cellular phone calls. We use cellphones for talk-to-text, for one-on-one video connections like Apple’s FaceTime, or for group discussions on apps like Teams. People can also talk directly through various apps.
  • Public Safety. The ability to locate a 911 caller on a cellphone was a huge technology breakthrough. Public safety got even better when 911 centers began accepting texts. 80% of all calls to 911 in 2023 came from a cellphone.
  • Payments. Money has moved to cellphones for many people. Some interesting statistics for the U.S. from 2023. 48% of consumers used a digital wallet. 73% of consumers use mobile banking. 45% of all payments to another person were made using a mobile device. 27% of all bills were paid using a mobile device. Contactless payments are estimated at $220 billion.
  • Health Monitoring. Millions of people routinely monitor sugar levels, blood pressure, and sleep issues with their smartphones. It’s now routine medicine to send people home from surgery with devices and an app to monitor vital signs.
  • Back-up for Home Broadband. While roughly 90% of homes have broadband, people scramble and use cellar broadband any time there is a glitch or outage in the broadband connection.
  • Back-up for Communities During and After Disasters. During and after disasters, the cellphone often becomes the only broadband.
  • For Some, it’s the Only Form of Connectivity. Depending on the community, between 5% and 10% of adults have no access to landline broadband at home or the office, and the cellphone is their only source of connectivity.
  • Fewer Dropped Calls or Service Interruptions. Good cellular coverage means a higher quality of connection, meaning fewer dropped voice calls and less interruptions of broadband connections.
  • Better Battery Life. Cellphones expend a lot of power looking for a stronger signal when coverage is poor. My experience after Hurricane Hellene was that my phone lasted only three hours on a charge when the only cellular was one bar of 4G.
  • Businesses / Landlords want Good Coverage. Landlords need good cellular coverage to find and keep tenants. Businesses of all types say they lose customers if cellphones won’t work inside their business.
  • Employees Expect It. Employers with poor indoor cell coverage report they have a harder time finding and retaining employees.
  • Apps Have Revolutionized the Economy. Entire new industries like Uber and DoorDash only exist because of cellphones. Practically everybody has become reliant on GPS to navigate when driving. A large percentage of smart farming and smart farm machinery rely on cellular connectivity. People who build infrastructure rely on geolocating to document the exact position of objects.
  • Paperless IDs. One of the newer applications is to use a cellphone app to prove identity and age. This got a jumpstart during the pandemic to prove people were vaccinated but has expanded greatly for other identity purposes.
  • Entertainment. A huge percentage of entertainment is consumed on cellphones. This includes things like streaming music, gaming, and streaming video. A huge percentage of social media is consumed on cellphones. People now document everything they do with pictures and video clips. There is seemingly an app for everything – you can use a smartphone to identify a constellation, a bird call, a song, or a flower.
  • FWA Cellular is Now Home Broadband. For the 10 million households using FWA broadband, cellular now also brings the many benefits of home broadband – an entirely other list.

The Rural Cellular Crisis

Over the last few years, I have helped dozens of counties get ready for the upcoming giant broadband grants. We’ve been very successful in helping counties identify the places in their County that don’t have broadband today – which is often drastically different than what is shown by the FCC maps. We then help county governments reach out to the ISPs in the region and open up a dialog with the goal of making sure that all rural locations get better broadband. This takes a lot of work – but it’s satisfying to see counties that are on the way to finding a total broadband solution.

In working with these counties, one thing has become clear to me. Some of these counties have a bigger cellular coverage problem than they do a broadband problem. There are often a much larger number of homes in a county that don’t have adequate cellular coverage than those who can’t buy broadband.

The counties I’ve helped have reached out to me – either directly or through an RFP looking for a consultant. Only a tiny number of the Counties identified their cellular problem up front when they hired me. Yet, when I talk to residents and businesses in the County – I hear more horror stories about poor cellular coverage than I do about poor broadband coverage.

I always knew that the cellular coverage maps published by the big cellular carriers were overstated. You might recall back before cellular advertising was all about 5G that the cellular carriers would all claim to have the best cellular coverage. They would proudly show their coverage map in the background on ads and on their websites to show how they covered most of the country.

I’ve come to learn that those maps were pure garbage. They weren’t just an exaggeration, and when you drilled down to look at specific counties, they were outright fabrications. I’ve worked recently with two counties that are the homes of major universities and one state capital. In all three of these counties, cellular coverage dies soon after people leave the biggest urban center.

If anything, I think that cellular coverage has gotten worse with the introduction of the spectrum that the carriers are all claiming as 5G. These are new frequency bands that have been introduced in the last few years to relieve the pressure on the 4G LTE networks. It makes sense that coverage would be reduced with the higher frequencies because one of the first rules of wireless technology is that higher frequencies tend to dissipate more quickly than lower frequencies. When I hear the complaints in these counties, I have to think that the 5G spectrum is not carrying as far into the rural areas.

This is a problem that is well-known to everybody in the industry, including the FCC. Back before the pandemic, the FCC came up with a plan to spend $9 billion from the universal service fund to build and equip new rural cellular towers – using a reverse auction method much like RDOF. This process derailed quickly when the biggest cellular companies produced bogus maps that Showed decent coverage in rural areas that were close to some of the smaller cellular carriers. The FCC was so disgusted by the lousy maps that it tabled the subsidy plan.

The FCC finally reconsidered this idea in 2021. Now the cellular carriers are required to produce maps every six months at the same time as ISPs report broadband coverage. If you haven’t noticed, you can see claimed cellular coverage on the same dashboard that shows the broadband map results. I haven’t spent much time digesting the new cellular maps since all of my clients are so focused on broadband. But I checked the maps in the region around where I live, and the maps still seem to exaggerate coverage. This is supposed to get better when wireless carriers are supposed to file heat maps for the coverage around each transmitter – we’ll have to see what that does to the coverage. It’s going to get harder for a wireless carrier to claim to cover large swaths of a county when it’s only on a tiny handful of towers.

There is a supposed way for folks to help fix the cellular maps. The FCC has a challenge process that requires taking a speed test using the FCC cellular speed test app. Unfortunately, this app requires a lot of speed tests in a given neighborhood before the FCC will even consider the results. I’m doubtful that most rural folks know of this app or are motivated enough to stop along the side of the road and repeatedly take the speed tests. And frankly, who knows if it will make any real difference even if they do?

The big cellular companies have clearly not invested in many new rural cell towers over the last decade because they’d rather have the FCC fork out the funding. I haven’t the slightest idea if $9 billion is enough money to solve the problem or even put a dent in it. No doubt, the FCC will saddle the program with rules that will add to the cost and result in fewer towers being built. But whatever is going to happen, it needs to start happening soon. We are not a mobile society, and it’s outrageous that a lot of people can’t make a call to 911, let alone use all of the features that are now controlled by our cell phones.

Rural Cellular Coverage

When working in rural areas, I find invariably that any county that has poor rural broadband also has poor cellular coverage. If you plot a 2 or 3-mile circle around the existing cell towers in many counties, it becomes quickly obvious that cell coverage is non-existent in many places. The real cellular coverage in rural areas is drastically different than the national coverage maps that cellular carriers have been advertising for years.

The FCC announced a process to address this issue in October 2020 when it announced the creation of a 5G Fund for Rural America. This will be a $9 billion fund that comes from the Universal Service Fund and that will provide subsidies for wireless carriers to build and equip new rural cell towers. This fund would work through a reverse auction in the same manner as RDOF, with the only bidders in the auction being licensed cellular carriers. The first reverse auction will be for $8 billion, with the rest specifically set aside for tribal areas.

The FCC tried this a few years earlier and abandoned the process when it became obvious that the cellular coverage maps created by the big cellular companies had little to do with reality. As part of that effort the FCC required cellular carriers to submit maps of cellular coverage as a prelude to launching this fund. The smaller cellular companies all complained that the big cellular company maps were wrong and were aimed at locking them out of the reverse auction. The FCC agreed and canceled plans for the fund until the 2020 announcement.

I haven’t been following this issue closely enough at the FCC to understand why it’s taking so long to launch the endeavor, but I have to think that mapping is still a primary issue. Then FCC has now included cellular coverage in the same BDC mapping process used for broadband. When the new maps were released there were a lot of public complaints that the new FCC cellular maps still overstate rural coverage.

There is a map challenge process for the public to provide feedback to try to fix the cellular maps by taking speed tests from rural locations – but the process is cumbersome, and it’s likely that few people know about it or are providing the speed tests in the specified way. The speed tests must be logged through an FCC app.

There is no question that something like this funding is badly needed. It’s hard to justify building rural cell towers and installing radios at a tower will only see a handful of homes. Remote rural cell sites can’t possibly generate enough money to justify the cost of the radios and backhaul, let alone the towers. One of the issues that the FCC is going to have to face is that any subsidy for this issue might need to be permanent if the goal is to keep cell towers operating where few people live.

Poor cell coverage is devastating to an area. There are huge swaths of the country where folks can’t reach 911 by cellphone. We can’t get serious about smart agriculture without the bare minimum network to provide connectivity. No cell coverage makes it hard to do tasks that the rest of us take for granted.

One of the interesting things about the timing of this effort is how the rural cellular industry will benefit from the BEAD grants. There is no fiber near many of the best spots for rural towers, and the BEAD grants will fund the construction of a lot of fiber in rural areas that could be used to provide backhaul to new cell sites.

Interestingly, one of the things that was missed in creating the BEAD rules was any requirement for BEAD grant winners to provide fiber connectivity to rural cell towers at a fair price. That would have been a good opportunity for these different federal programs to mesh together for the benefit of both wireless and wireline rural broadband. One of the legitimate complaints made by cellular companies is that they are often quoted extremely high prices for broadband connectivity at cell towers – a lot of ISPs look at cell towers as a chance to make a lot of money.

Communities with poor cellular coverage need to keep an eye on this FCC program to make sure that some cellular carrier seeks the funding for building in their county. Just like with the BEAD grants, I have no idea of $9 billion is enough to get cellular coverage everywhere – but it is a good start.

Poor Rural Connectivity Costs Lives

The Washington Post wrote an article recently that talked about how poor rural connectivity cost lives during a tornado in Louisiana. Around the country there are now elaborate alerts systems in areas subject to tornados and other dangerous weather events. These alerts have been shown to save lives since they give folks enough time to seek shelter or get out of the path of a storm. I apologize that the article is behind a paywall, but here is the link for anybody who can read it.

This story is not unique, and the same thing plays out whenever a bad storm passes through areas with poor broadband and cellular coverage. In this case, a family was killed by the storm because they didn’t see the storm alerts, and other people were unable to reach them to tell them about the alerts. In this particular case, a husband and wife tried to repeatedly to warn the family about the storm. But their landline connection was terrible, they didn’t have good broadband, and the cellular coverage was inadequate – so nobody was able to reach the family that ultimately got killed by the storm.

I’ve created lists many times of the benefits of rural broadband, but until I read this article, I never thought to say that good broadband saves lives. The government has spent a lot of money creating emergency alert systems for various purposes, including storm warnings. I live in a city, and I get alerts from the City for all sorts of things, including storm alerts. Living in a city means I have the option to receive alerts by text, email, or even an automated voice call – and the alerts reach me.

AT&T has collected billions of federal funding to create the First Responder Network Authority as part of the larger FirstNet effort. AT&T told the Washington Post that it added 60 small cellular sites in Caddo Parish in recent years, where this storm struck. But it’s likely that most of these sites were placed to beef up the network where most folks live and do not extend far in the rural parts of the parish.

My consulting firm administers a lot of broadband surveys every year in rural counties. These surveys are mostly aimed at helping to define areas that have inadequate broadband. But in practically every rural survey we have ever done, we find 30% of more homes saying that they don’t have home cellular coverage – sometimes a much higher percentage.

There are some potential solutions being considered to help solve this problem, but like everything the FCC gets involved in, it’s complicated. The FCC announced a $9 billion 5G fund at the end of 2020 that is aimed at improving rural cellular coverage. The mechanics of that subsidy fund have not yet been announced, and like other broadband initiatives, it seems like FCC wants to see better cellular coverage maps before trying to fund a solution. My first take is that the cellular coverage in the new FCC mapping system is probably in worse shape than the landline broadband maps.

The idea of using federal funds to improve rural cellular coverage is further complicated by the huge amounts of federal funding that are aimed at improving rural broadband. It would be extremely wasteful to give the cellular carriers money to extend fiber networks to rural cell sites when other funding should  be building the same fiber routes. The big funding for rural broadband seems likely to eliminate the need to fund fiber for most rural cell sites. It still makes great sense to provide subsidies to build towers and open rural cell sites because it’s nearly impossible to make a business case for a rural cell tower that only reaches a small number of households.

None of these solutions are going to be fast, so there is no quick fix in the immediate future. But the FCC ought to be able to figure out a way to get solid cellular signals to folks like the ones in Caddo Parish who really need it. But I despair if getting this right means getting the FCC maps right, something I’m doubtful will ever happen.