Tag Archives: FCC

How Good is Rural Cellular Coverage – Part II

Yesterday’s blog looked at AT&T cellular coverage in a typical rural county in Illinois and included the following map. The map shows where AT&T can provide 5G coverage in a moving vehicle in the dark areas, and where somebody standing stationary outdoors could get a 5G signal in the lighter colored areas.

Let’s look at the maps for the other two major carriers in the same areas. The first map below is T-Mobile, and the second is Verizon.

These maps show typical coverage. The two carriers support 5G in moving vehicles in and close to towns and cities. The light colored areas are where somebody standing outdoors can likely get a 5G signal. An indoor cellular coverage map would likely not be a lot larger than the dark areas.

Taken altogether, these maps show a typical rural story of cellular coverage. Cell carriers rarely share towers, and each carrier is on different towers and has different coverage. All three carriers have areas where they have no 5G coverage, and somebody subscribed to any one carrier in this county would find a lot of dead zones. All three carriers have little or no coverage in the northwest sector. These maps show something that every rural delivery driver knows – to work in rural America means carrying multiple cellphones subscribed to different carriers.

When Chairman Carr says that 96.8% of households have 5G coverage, we have to put that into perspective. Over 80% of Americans live in cities and suburbs and likely have good cell coverage. Another substantial percentage live in smaller towns that happen to have at least one cell tower. In this particular county, 60% of people live in incorporated towns and villages, meaning there are a lot of rural residents.

What’s the point of these two blogs? The FCC considers this County to have good 5G coverage. That assumption comes largely from looking at the combined coverage of the three carriers shown for somebody standing stationary outdoors. The light colored areas of the three maps combined cover most of the county.

If the FCC ever decides to finally launch the 5G Fund for Rural America, this county will likely not be a candidate for a grant to build new cell towers. That’s unfortunate, because I estimate that 30% of the residents of this county would say they have poor cellular coverage. They will say that they don’t have good coverage indoors, and no matter which carrier they subscribe to, they hit dead spots when they drive around the county. The FCC’s assertion that 96.8% of homes have good 5G coverage can be supported by the FCC maps – but those maps don’t show the reality of the way that people judge cellular coverage.

How Good is Rural Cellular Coverage – Part I

The FCC has opened a docket that periodically looks at ways to improve the FCC’s broadband and cellular maps. As part of that docket, Chairman Brendan Carr issued the following statement: On the mobile side, 96.8 percent of locations have access to mobile 5G services of at least 7/1 Mbps.

To put that into perspective, there are roughly 116.7 million total passings counted in the FCC maps, and the Chairman is saying that all except 3.7 million have good access to 5G. The Chairman’s statement can be supported by the FCC cellular maps, but I think the reality in rural areas is far different than what is shown on the maps. I’m not saying that the FCC maps are a lie – because I think it’s likely that the maps represent what the FCC asked carriers to report. But I think the maps tell a different story than what Chairman Carr is pushing, and I don’t think anywhere near 96.8% of folks in the country would say they have good cellular coverage.

Let’s look at the FCC maps for 5G coverage in an actual county in Illinois. I didn’t pick this county because it doesn’t have good cell coverage. The coverage in the counties around it would all tell the same story. One thing to note about this county is that there are homes located in all parts of the county – the areas with no coverage on these maps are not parklands or forests.

The following map shows AT&T 5G coverage from the FCC cellular maps. The FCC asks carriers to show coverage in two ways. The darker orange areas are where AT&T claims that 5G coverage will work in a moving vehicle. The lighter areas are where AT&T says that a customer can receive 5G when standing stationary outdoors. AT&T is claiming no 5G coverage in the gray areas.

This AT&T map is typical of rural cell coverage. Cell towers are located roughly in the center of the dark-colored areas, and those areas mostly covering towns and cities. Anybody who understands cellular technology understands that speeds drop quickly with distance from a cell site. The cellular download data speeds at the center of the dark areas could easily be as fast as 300 Mbps. But within two miles of a tower, speeds drop to around 25 Mbps. 5G speeds and coverage in the light-colored areas are a lot slower and spottier, and as you get to the outer parts of the light-colored areas, farthest from the towers, it’s likely that somebody would have to move around in their yard to find the sweet spot where they could make a call.

What this map doesn’t measure, and the FCC doesn’t ask about, is indoor cellular coverage. It’s a general rule of thumb that indoor speeds are roughly half of outdoor speeds. You can easily test this by taking an outdoor cellular speed test and then an indoor test away from a window (turn off your WiFi). If the carriers were to map expected indoor cellular coverage, the areas with indoor coverage would be a lot smaller than the light-colored areas shown for outdoor coverage.

When you ask a rural resident what good cell coverage means, they will define it as working in their home and working in their car. With that definition, AT&T doesn’t have great 5G coverage in the county for people who live or drive outside the dark circles.

Tomorrow’s blog will compare AT&T’s coverage to T-Mobile and Verizon to show the overall picture of cell coverage in this county.

Sunsetting the High Cost Fund

SpaceX recently filed comments in the FCC’s open docket looking at the Universal Service Fund (USF) with a recommendation that the FCC should sunset the High-Cost Fund and eventually eliminate it. This is one of the four major components of USF, with an annual budget of $4.5 billion.

SpaceX argues that Starlink has now solved rural broadband connectivity issues with ubiquitous broadband available throughout the country. SpaceX argues that ongoing subsidy payments to support rural voice and broadband networks are no longer needed.

To put the SpaceX comments into perspective, let me start by reviewing the stated goals of the High Cost Fund:

  • Preserve and advance universal availability of voice service.
  • Drive universal availability of modern networks capable of providing voice and broadband service to homes, businesses, and community anchor institutions.
  • Drive universal availability of modern networks capable of providing advanced mobile voice and broadband service.
  • Ensure that rates for broadband and voice services are reasonably comparable in all regions of the nation.
  • Contain administrative costs and minimize the universal service contribution for consumers and businesses through efficient, effective program management.

The High-Cost Fund is the home to a multitude of different subsidy programs:

  • It’s the home of six different Connect America (ACAM) funding mechanisms.
  • This fund is still making the annual subsidy payments for RDOF, which were spread over ten years.
  • The fund has separate funds to support Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
  • The fund includes the Mobility Fund that pays subsidies to cellular carriers that operate in very rural markets.
  • There are also legacy funds that provide subsidies to regulated telcos operating in high-cost markets.

SpaceX’s recommendation to sunset the various programs refers to the fact that many of the subsidy programs will expire if not renewed. For example, RDOF payments end after the tenth year of payments.

This is not a surprising recommendation. SpaceX and Starlink have been claiming in other forums that satellite broadband technology has solved the universal service problem and that everybody in the U.S. now has access to broadband. That’s been a problematic argument to some extent, since Ookla has been reporting a lot of Starlink speed tests below the FCC’s definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps. Ookla reported earlier this year that average Starlink speeds had exceeded the 100 Mbps download test and recently reported that Starlink is close to meeting the uplink speed threshold.

However, there is still one troubling aspect of declaring Starlink to be a universal solution everywhere, which is the affordability issue. It’s hard to argue that a product priced at $120 per month, and which requires the purchase of the receiver, is affordable for low-income households. However, there has been no federal effort to define an affordable broadband rate. In the early days of BEAD, before the Benefit of the Bargain changes, various State Broadband Offices around the country were considering a definition of affordable rates between $30 and $50.

There has been a lot of criticism of some of the High-Cost Fund programs over the years. I wrote many times about the ludicrous billions of dollars paid to the largest telcos in the CAF II program that required that rural broadband speeds be increased to 10/1 Mbps – with payments that started months before the FCC raised the definition of broadband to 25/3 Mbps. But there has also been a lot of demonstrable benefits from some of the programs. You don’t have to look much further than the fiber networks built by numerous rural electric cooperatives that were jump-started with the RDOF subsidy.

Abandoned Rural Calls

I’m hearing an increasing number of stories from rural ISPs and telcos about voice calls that are not completing to their customers. People place a call to customers on a rural network and give up when they don’t hear the phone ringing at the receiving end of the call in a reasonable amount of time. The industry term for this phenomenon is an abandoned call, which generally occurs when the caller assumes the call didn’t work.

You might assume that this means that something is wrong with the PSTN (public switched telephone network) that is stopping calls from being completed. That would be a huge problem, and one that would also affect calls made to urban areas. From what I’m hearing, this is strictly a rural problem. The telephone environment has changed a lot over the years. Telephone calls today originate from a dizzying array of different sources. While people can still make phone calls from landline telephones and cellphones, they can also place calls from numerous online platforms, applications, and devices.

I think it is far more likely that this is happening for financial reasons and is related to the fees charged to terminate long-distance calls. Rural carriers still charge a fee, called an access charge, to terminate a long-distance call made into their local network. Access charges were created in 1983 when the FCC approved Part 69 rules that were put into place after the divestiture of AT&T into several regional Baby Bell telephone companies, with AT&T remaining as a long-distance company. Access charges were the mechanism by which long-distance companies compensated the telcos that owned the local infrastructure needed to reach customers and complete long-distance calls.

Access charges were originally fairly expensive, and I recall access charges in 1984 being around five cents per minute, even in some of the Bell companies. That may sound high, but at that time, most long-distance rates ranged between twelve and fifty cents per minute. Over time, The FCC forced a series of drastic reductions in access charge rates, and today the rate to terminate a call in urban areas is at, or just barely above, zero. The cost to terminate a call in most rural areas has been reduced to a small fraction of a penny per minute. Most people probably think that long-distance call are a thing of the past since they no longer pay by the minute to call, but long-distance is still very much real, and companies like cellular carriers charge customers a flat rate to cover the cost of the calls.

I think the resurgence of abandoned calls is due to least-cost routing. Anybody company with customers who originate calls, be that a telco, cable company, VoIP provider, or some online app, must pay to have that call terminated at the other end. This has historically been done by using long-distance carriers that carry the call between the call originator and the called party. However, there is an industry segment that few people know about. There are a lot of companies generically referred to as intermediate carriers that provide the function of carrying calls between carriers.

That’s where least-cost routing comes in. Long-distance companies use real-time software to determine the lowest cost to get a call completed. The long-distance carrier might deliver many of the calls using its own network. But it will hand calls off to an intermediate carrier that charges less than its own cost to complete the call. I think the dropped calls are happening because intermediate carriers also have least-cost tables, and they also hand off some calls to another intermediate carrier if that saves them money. This process is automated, and it’s possible for a call to be handed off multiple times to different intermediate carriers. Each transfer between carriers takes time, and the customer making the call abandons the call when nothing is happening.

The phenomenon of abandoned calls to rural areas is not new. This was an issue in 2017, and the FCC implemented rules from the Improving Call Quality and Reliability Act of 2017 (RCC). Those rules did not forbid using multiple carriers to route a call, but established regulations to ensure reliability and accountability, particularly to prevent rural call completion issues. In those rules, the originating carriers were held responsible for making sure that calls are completed. The rules required intermediate carriers that touch calls to be registered with the FCC, and it was forbidden to hand calls to an unregistered carrier.

The FCC needs to deal with this issue again, because something has broken down. There might be new, unregistered carriers in the mix. Or maybe AI is now involved and is making poor routing decisions. But it’s a problem that must be fixed. If not, rural residents won’t be able to receive calls, and rural businesses will be at a huge disadvantage.

Restart on Digital Discrimination Rules

On May 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the FCC’s digital discrimination rules. The discrimination rules were required by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The FCC took an interesting approach to the issue and defined discrimination in two ways. The FCC prohibited intentional discrimination – meaning that ISPs can’t have policies and practices that are clearly intended to discriminate against any portion of the public. The FCC also prohibited disparate discrimination, which measures discrimination by looking at the results of ISP practices in the market rather than trying to judge the intentions of ISPs.

As was expected for almost all FCC orders these days, ISPs quickly banded together and sued to stop the FCC order. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce brought the first suit in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in January on behalf of big ISPs like AT&T, Charter, Comcast, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Twenty industry groups like NCTA, WISPA, ACA Connects, and US Telecom entered the fray, and the suits were eventually joined into one case in the Eighth Circuit.

The ISP industry threw a number of arguments against the wall, hoping one would stick. The primary complaint was that Congress didn’t intend to impose a disparate discrimination test, and that disparate discrimination is rarely applied anywhere in the regulatory world. The ISPs also argued that the FCC violated the major questions doctrine with its ruling. This concept was based on recent Supreme Court rulings that prohibit federal agencies from adopting regulations that have “vast economic and political significance” without clear authorization from Congress. ISPs argued that the FCC went further in its discrimination rules than was specifically authorized by Congress. Finally, ISPs said the ruling was too widely applied, and should only have been applied to last-mile ISPs, while the FCC rules applied to a wider market, such as MDU owners who provide broadband in their buildings.

The Court made a number of rulings. It said the FCC had overreached its authority since Congress had not explicitly allowed a disparate discrimination test. The Court also ruled that the FCC had exceeded its authority by applying the discrimination rules to entities other than last-mile ISPs.

The Court completely vacated the FCC’s 2023 discrimination order, which means it is the same as if it didn’t exist. The FCC is still obligated by the IIJA to implement discrimination rules, so we can expect the FCC to restart the process. Any new FCC proposed rules will undoubtedly acknowledge the Court rulings.

The natural question to ask is what the court order means in the market. There should be little immediate impact since the FCC’s 2023 discrimination rules never went into effect when they were immediately challenged in court.

There will be repercussions since the Court considerably weakened the 2023 FCC order by only allowing the intentional discrimination test. It seems likely that it will be nearly impossible to prove that an ISP intentionally discriminated against some subset of customers. The proof would have to be some sort of written documentation or public statement that proves the ISP’s intention to discriminate. The Court eliminated the disparate discrimination test, which is basically an “if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck” test. That’s the kind of test that has routinely been applied to housing discrimination complaints, as was ordered by the Fair Housing Act. The revised rules will also let landlords off the hook since they will not be subject to broadband discrimination complaints.

Satellite Update April 2026

There is so much news and activity in the satellite sector that I find myself gathering a pile of news items each month. Here are some of the highlights from April.

Amazon Entering Direct-to-Device Market. Amazon announced it has signed an agreement to buy Globalstar for $10.8 billion. Globalstar is one of the early leaders in developing technology for providing direct-to-device services to smartphones and other devices. Globalstar currently has about two dozen satellites in orbit.

Jeff Bezos Enters the Space Data Center Race. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin has applied to the FCC to launch a data center in space. The application asks for approval to launch 51,600 satellites that would constitute a huge AI data center. The company argues that a data center in space will complement terrestrial data centers and will give the U.S. the edge in machine learning, autonomous systems, and predictive analytics. The satellites would be placed between 300 and 1,100 miles above Earth, with most of them higher than broadband satellites. This announcement follows a proposal from SpaceX and Elon Musk to put a million data center satellites in space.

Growing Feud Between SpaceX and Amazon Leo. We’re seeing a budding regulatory rivalry between the two American broadband satellite companies. It seems that both SpaceX and Amazon Leo file comments about anything filed by its rival at the FCC. Earlier this month, SpaceX filed comments at the FCC complaining that Amazon Leo is violating the FCC’s orbital space debris mitigation plans. SpaceX claims that Amazon Leo placed several satellites 90 kilometers higher than authorized by the FCC. In a similar complaint, Amazon LEO accused SpaceX of placing satellites too low into its authorized space. Both companies have made negative comments on the other’s plans to create a satellite-based AI data center in space.

Will Starlink Honor BEAD? A group of House Democrats sent a letter to the NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth that raises concerns that SpaceX might not meet its BEAD obligations. The letter was prompted by letters sent by SpaceX to various state broadband offices that said the company doesn’t want to comply with various BEAD reporting requirements. The legislators fear that Starlink will walk away from BEAD, leaving locations with no broadband alternative (although these customers can buy satellite broadband regardless of the BEAD grants).

Failed Satellite Launch. A Blue Origin rocket failed to place a satellite for AST Space Mobile into the proper orbit, and the satellite had to be de-orbited. It was expected that insurance would be used to recover the cost of the lost satellite.

Amazon Leo to Launch Service in Mid-2026? The company said earlier this month that it is still planning to begin offering broadband service by mid-2026. That seems like an extraordinary claim since the company still had around 240 satellites in orbit as of the date of this blog. By comparison, Starlink had almost 900 satellites in service when it began beta tests with customers. At the time, the beta test customers described noticeable gaps in coverage between satellites. What’s most interesting about the announcement is that Amazon has asked the FCC for a two-year delay in meeting the full deployment obligation for its first constellation of over 3,200 satellites.

Environmental Protesters. Residents who live close to SpaceX’s Starbase launch site recently protested during a meeting centered on SpaceX’s planned IPO. The residents of the area complained about the repeated vibrations and pollution caused by regular rocket launches, along with concern about possible fires set in the arid South Texas landscape.

Denied Spectrum Sharing. The FCC recently denied requests from multiple satellite companies that wanted to share in spectrum bands already being used by other entities. As an example of the rejection, SpaceX had asked to share in the 1.5 GHz, 1.6/2.4 GHz, and 2 GHz bands. Other satellite companies had asked to share other spectrum bands. The FCC rejection said these requests were premature and that the agency needs to revise the way it allocates spectrum to accommodate direct-to-device service.

EchoStar versus Tower Owners

One of the more interesting conflicts in the telecom industry right now is EchoStar’s fight with tower owners. The fight comes from EchoStar walking away from billions of dollars of long-term leases of cell towers to support its facility-based cellular business.

This story requires some background. This started when Dish purchased a significant amount of cellular spectrum and also the customers of Sprint’s prepaid brands, which included Boost Mobile. The sale to Dish was a requirement of the FCC agreeing to allow T-Mobile to buy the Sprint cellular business. The FCC wanted Dish to become the next facility-based cell carrier as a replacement for Sprint.

Dish borrowed billions of dollars to add to its existing debt to build a nationwide cellular network. As Dish’s satellite television business faded, the company agreed to merge with EchoStar. However, as the roll-out of the new cellular business bogged down, Dish was faced with looming problems over its $26 billion in debt and was in peril of default. In 2025, the FCC also put a lot of pressure on EchoStar and accused it of spectrum squatting, since much of its spectrum was sitting unused. EchoStar decided to walk away from the cellular business, and that involved defaulting on the many leases for cell tower space and backhaul. EchoStar realized a cash windfall when it was able to sell spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX for more than $42 billion.

A coalition of more than forty tower owners, led by the Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA) and NATE: The Communications Infrastructure Contractors Association, has asked the FCC to force EchoStar to pay for the abandoned cell tower leases. These losses are estimated to be worth as much as $9 billion. The biggest companies in this group include American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA Communications, and Vertical Bridge.

WIA and the tower owners are asking the FCC to withhold the transfer of EchoStar spectrum to AT&T and SpaceX until the tower obligations have been satisfied.

EchoStar counters that the leases are a contractual dispute and that private contracts are outside of the FCC’s jurisdiction. It further argues that its cancellation of the leases was out of its control, making it a force majeure event, since the company was pressured by the FCC to abandon the cellular business.

This is an interesting dilemma for the FCC. There have regularly been defaults on leases of fiber, towers, and other infrastructure, and the FCC has never gotten involved in these kinds of disputes before. I have to think that if it wasn’t for the associated transfer of the spectrum, the FCC would never consider this issue.

It’s an interesting chess game. If the FCC sides with the tower owners, then the payments to EchoStar for the spectrum will be held up. Even though EchoStar would certainly take a negative FCC decision to court, the big delays in getting paid for the spectrum would likely drive the company to reach a compromise with the tower owners. If the FCC doesn’t rule for the tower owners, they will almost certainly take this to court, and may get an eventual settlement.

There was an interesting report written by the Brattle Group for WIA related to the case. The report says that the damages to the tower industry would be severe and would likely result in an increase of 5.7% to 10.7% to others who lease towers. It also warns that this would ripple through the cellular industry and would put a crimp on future capital spending for towers and related infrastructure. The tower leases are not the only dispute related to EchoStar’s decision to abandon the cellular business, and other vendors are also seeking relief by going straight to court.

 

The FCC Opens the 900 MHz Band

The FCC voted in its recent open meeting to expand the use of 900 MHz spectrum. The order opens up the full 10 MHz available in the 900 MHz spectrum bands 896–901 and 935–940 MHz, for licensed broadband services. 900 MHz is an attractive band for users since the signals carry a long way and are good at penetrating buildings.

The licensed portion of the spectrum is not of interest to WISPs due to the small size of the channels, which won’t deliver the kinds of speeds expected by home broadband users. But the spectrum can easily support smartphone applications and is of interest to those wishing to deploy private 5G network.

This FCC change does impact the other bands of 900 MHz spectrum. For example, there are numerous uses allowed for the spectrum between 902 and 928 MHz, including ham radio, FM radio repeaters, alarm and security camera systems, video surveillance for law enforcement missions, and transmission of infrared scanner imagery during overflights of disaster areas. Some of these uses are restricted in Texas and New Mexico since this spectrum is also used to monitor the border.

The primary users of the expanded-use bands will be electric, gas, and water utilities that have been using the spectrum for automated meter reading and other network monitoring devices. The purpose of the FCC’s change is to provide more bandwidth and expanded capacity to utilities. The FCC order predicts that the changes to the spectrum usage will promote better smart metering, grid modernization, and network security and resilience. Under the former rules, transmissions in the band were restricted to 5 MHz licenses, which limited the ability for utilities to launch private 5G and LTE networks.

The new order provides different options for a current license holder to:

  • Continue to use the legacy configuration of 20 wideband channels and 200 narrowband channels.
  • Operate two paired 3 MHz channels and two segments of the remaining 4 MHz of spectrum to operate 159 narrowband channels.
  • Operate two paired 5 MHz channels to deploy more broadband use cases.

This change largely benefits Anterix. The company purchased a nationwide license for 6 MHz of the spectrum from Sprint in 2014. Anterix has been selling and leasing that spectrum to utilities to create private wireless networks. This new order gives the company the use of all 10 MHz of the spectrum.

One of the most interesting aspects of the new order is that it anticipates that the spectrum will be made available to others through voluntary negotiations and market-based transactions. The Anterix spectrum today is largely deployed on a county-by-county basis, and this order opens the door for entities other than utilities to license the spectrum to create local private 5G networks. This could be used by corporations or local governments looking for a private and secure wireless network outside of the public cellular networks.

I recently noted how the public cellular networks crashed in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. While a number of cell sites sustained physical damage, many were still operational, but still failed since the backhaul fiber lines feeding the region were damaged or destroyed. While the lack of cell signal was a major inconvenience for the public, it was a crushing blow to first responders who found themselves unable to communicate. A private in-county 5G network for first responders using 900 MHz could have continued to work locally on the functional cell towers. This would have greatly benefited the search and rescue effort and the overall coordination of first responder resources.

It will take a while to see if this is a giveaway to Anterix or if this will really open up new opportunities for first responders and other local private wireless network providers.

The FCC’s Ability to Levy Fines

Today’s blog takes a deeper dive into the upcoming case at the Supreme Court concerning appeals by AT&T and Verizon over fines levied by the FCC. The original appeals followed an FCC finding that all three major U.S. cellular carriers were liable for violating customer privacy by selling access to customer location data. This data showed every place that a customer visited during the day, something that should make every cell customer uncomfortable. The FCC fined AT&T $50 million, T-Mobile  $80 million, and Verizon $47 million, with smaller fines against a few other carriers. The case at the Supreme Court looks specifically at the FCC’s ability to levy fines against the carriers for violating consumer privacy rights.

AT&T and Verizon appealed the FCC fines. Both companies were emboldened by two recent Supreme Court rulings that weakened the FCC’s authority. The first was Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, which said that courts don’t have to defer to expertise at federal agencies when deciding lawsuits. The second case was SEC v. Jaresky, which said that federal agencies should give defendants a chance to have a trial by jury in a federal court rather than levying fines.

As usually happens with cases that make it to the Supreme Court, lower courts issued conflicting opinions about the FCC fines. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the fines levied against AT&T, while the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FCC’s fines against Verizon.

One of the more interesting things about both appeals was that the carriers did not deny their bad actions – they had clearly allowed access to customer location data. Both appeals relied on the Supreme Court ruling in SEC v. Jaresky and argued that the FCC should have offered the carriers the chance to take the cases to court and hold a jury trial as an alternative to the FCC fines.

It’s clear that the carriers are trying to weaken or break the FCC’s ability to levy fines and are willing to go through this process as a way to avoid future fines. I find it unbelievable that the carriers would have chosen to take this specific case to a jury if they had been given that option. It’s impossible to seat a jury of people who don’t use cellphones, and I would wager that a jury would be unhappy that a carrier would sell the data to track them 24/7. It’s easy to imagine that a jury would assess damages much larger than the FCC fines if these cases had instead gone straight to court.

It will be interesting to see what the carriers do if they win this case. Winning doesn’t take them off the hook for selling customer data, and the cases would likely be remanded back to the FCC to give the carriers the option for a jury trial. As silly as it sounds, I’m dubious that, even with a second chance, the carriers would choose the jury trial. Again, the real goal of the carriers in this case is to weaken the FCC’s options in future disputes.

It will be unfortunate if the Supreme Court sides with the carriers and hobbles the FCC’s ability to levy fines. The FCC typically fines regulated companies for two reasons, for failing to comply with FCC rules or for abusing the general public. The first type of fines is generally relatively small and the big fines are saved for companies engaged in abuse and fraud of the public. In a recent action, the FCC fined Telnyx LLC for allowing foreign scam robocalls into the U.S. telephone network.

Protecting the public is one of the major roles of a regulatory agency. A policy shift that makes it difficult or impossible to hold large corporations accountable for abuses against the public would be a terrible outcome.

The Regulatory Death Knell for Copper?

In March, the FCC issued an order in docket WC 25-209 and 25-208 that may signal the final regulatory death knell for telephone copper networks. The docket is titled Reducing Barriers to Network Improvements and Service Changes / Accelerating Network Modernization.

The stated purpose of the order is to speed up the transition from the TDM technology used in copper telephone networks to all IP-based networks used by fiber and other newer technologies. The secondary purpose of the docket is to override state regulations that are slowing down the transition away from copper networks.

The order comes in eight parts:

  1. Adopt one consolidated rule applicable to all efforts to discontinue services and applications, eliminating all prior rules.
  2. Give blanket authority to grandfather copper services, meaning telcos don’t have to accept new orders for these services.
  3. Allow ISPs to use technologies other than copper T1s to connect to 911 centers.
  4. Give carriers the right to discontinue wholesale products provisioned over copper.
  5. Create a 31-day automatic grant of a request to discontinue services.
  6. Clarify discontinuance requests to ensure they do not adversely affect the public.
  7. Revise the rules applicable to emergency discontinuance of services during and after disasters.
  8. Eliminate redundant rules and regulations related to discontinuing services.

In probably the most consequential part of the order, the FCC is preempting all state laws and processes that hinder telcos from decommissioning copper networks.

Taken as a whole, these new rules greatly reduce the paperwork involved with decommissioning copper networks and related services, which should speed up the stated intent of the big telcos to get out of the copper business.

There are instant impacts on the public. Telcos no longer have to sell telephone service or DSL provided over copper lines. Somebody moving into a rural home with no cell service will no longer be able to count on buying a traditional telephone line.While the FCC order didn’t explicitly state it, this new requirement just killed the carrier of last resort responsibility for copper-based telcos.

The new FCC rules still retain the requirement that customers must be provided an alternative when their copper services are discontinued. However, under the new rules, a telco doesn’t have to provide the services if they can point to alternative from a different provider. I’m envisioning telcos telling the FCC and customers that the alternative is satellite broadband for voice and data – eliminating the need for the telco to provide an alternative.

One of the biggest concerns of discontinuing rural copper is connectivity to 911. A lot of rural residents still buy landlines to have a sure way to connect to 911. Consider the many people who live in rural areas with little or no cellular coverage. If these households don’t have broadband, either by choice or because of affordability, they will lose the ability to call 911. Even customers buying broadband do not automatically have connectivity to 911 through their broadband connection. Rural broadband customers have to buy an online VoIP product to be able to safely guarantee they can register their home address for identification to 911 through the broadband connection.

We’ve known this was coming for a long time, and the FCC just took the steps to make it quick and painless for telcos to walk away from copper, including in states like California that have still been enforcing copper regulations. It’s going to take a few more years for telcos to abandon copper. For example, AT&T has a goal of being out of the copper business by 2030. But this order makes it clear that the end of copper is on the horizon.