Tag Archives: FCC

FCC Robocall Filing Due for All Voice Providers

The FCC adopted new rules for voice providers that are part of the FCC’s effort to curtail robocalls. The new rules apply to every voice provider that sells a retail voice product to end-user customers, along with other categories of providers like voice wholesalers and international providers. The new rules were effective on February 5.  The key new rules include the following:

  • Every voice service provider (VSP) has to register in the Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) by March 1. Any VSP that is already in that database must update its information by that date.
  • The FCC issued a stern warning to any VSP that doesn’t register as required. There are fines of as much as $10,000 for not registering or for submitting false or inaccurate information to the RMD. The FCC also established a $1,000 fine for any late registrations or updates.
  • VSPs will also now need to renew the registration annually.
  • Finally, VSPs must update the FCC within 10 business days any time they make a change that affects their information in the FCC’s CORES database.

The mechanics of the new rules are that every VSP must have a unique token that gets associated with the call records that identifies the VSP. In past filings, a lot of VSPs simply reported that they rely on the tokens from another upstream provider. The new rules make it clear that every company that sells voice needs to have its own token.

These new rules are going to catch a lot of ISPs and CLECs off guard. It’s likely that most companies that still operate a voice switch knew about these rules in the past – and if they didn’t, the FCC plans to hunt down non-compliant carriers through the databases.

But the big change is that this applies to ISPs that buy wholesale VoIP and repackage it to their customers. These VSPs must comply with the new rules.

The FCC plans to implement an annual $100 filing fee to accompany the annual certification. However, that hasn’t been implemented yet, and VSPs can file for free right now.

The CCG team can help with any aspect of these filings, so contact me at blackbean2@ccgcomm.com if you need help.

Winning the 6G Race

In December, the White House issued a short Presidential Memorandum titled “Winning the 6G Race”. The document states that 6G technology will be “foundational to the national security, foreign policy, and economic prosperity of the United States. 6G will play a “pivotal role in the development and adoption of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and implantable technologies. 6G will also provide faster, more resilient, and more secure communication networks that can be utilized for national security and public safety purposes.”

The report begins with an interesting statement, “It is the policy of the United States to lead the world in 6G development.” This memorandum suggests that the path for the U.S. to achieve this goal is to play a significant role in the development of international standards and to identify a significant volume of spectrum that can be harmonized for 6G networks internationally.

The memorandum goes on to direct several federal agencies to make sure the U.S. gets involved in the development of standards. This is something that U.S. scientists and engineers routinely participate in. Congress already ordered the FCC to begin looking for 800 MHz of midrange spectrum to put to auction. This is the sweet spot for cellular traffic, and it seems likely that cellular companies will buy most of any such spectrum that hits an auction.

What I find most interesting about the memorandum is the use of the phrase ‘6G Race’. This brings back memories of the same rhetoric being used to tout the introduction of 5G. In looking back, I see that the term 5G race entered the vernacular in 2018. It was a phrase introduced by the big cellular carriers as part of a massive lobbying campaign to get the FCC to hold auctions for cellular spectrum. The 5G race was supposedly between the U.S. and China to become the leader in 5G technology.

The lobbying effort was intense, and you couldn’t go to any sizable industry event without being bombarded by discussions about the U.S. winning the 5G race. I wrote several blogs on the topic at the time, and there were articles in the industry press about the 5G race on a weekly basis. This reached such a fever pitch that by 2020, there was talk of the U.S. government buying either Nokia or Ericsson so that the U.S. would own a 5G company.

What’s funny is that there was no 5G race then, and there is no 6G race now. That’s not how technology advances. For both 5G and 6G, scientists and engineers from around the world first create the standards for a new technology. Once those standards are published, vendors begin seriously developing marketable technologies to sell.

Every vendor strives to make technology that meets the standards so that it can be used worldwide. Vendors like Huawei from China and Nokia from Finland want the cellular technology they develop to be able to communicate with cellphones manufactured around the world. While there are differences between vendors, the differences are fairly minor, and over time, any development touted by any one vendor will be picked up by the other vendors. The whole purpose of standards is to make sure that a new technology is compatible around the world.

What’s particularly funny is that the U.S. is a minor player in the development of cellular technologies. The vendors ultimately decide which features of a new technology get stressed and developed first. If there were a 5G or 6G race, it would be between China and Europe – but I’ve never seen competition between the vendors referred to as a race.

I think the term 6G race is just more rhetoric from the marketing folks at the big U.S. cellular carriers. While they already won half of the battle by getting Congress to require that the FCC find more cellular spectrum, the lobbying effort is to make sure that happens in a timely manner before Congress or the FCC has a change of heart.

So, in case you are late to the game, welcome to the 6G race. It’s a drama-free race, and there is no finish line. But if the cellular companies get what they are asking for, the phrase will disappear as quickly as it appeared.

The Challenge of Adding Fiber to Poles

On February 5, the FCC issued a Memorandum and Order related to a pole attachment dispute between Comcast and Appalachian Power Company (APCO). The Order was issued under the authority of section 224 of the Telecommunications Act, which gives the FCC the authority to “regulate the rate, terms, and conditions for pole attachments to provide that such rates, terms , and conditions are just and reasonable”. This order highlights the nuances of regulations that can make it a challenge to build new fiber. This particular case provides a cautionary tale that shows why it can be so hard to get on poles when working with an uncooperative pole owner.

Before discussing the FCC decision, let me review existing FCC pole attachment rules and processes that an ISP must follow to get onto a pole. Just starting the process of getting on a pole requires a well-defined step-by-step paperwork-heavy process that obligates both the pole owner and the attacher to take steps within specified time frames.

  • The ISP must formally request access to a pole. Every pole owner has a unique set of forms needed to make such a request. The request must be detailed and specifically describe the changes that are wanted, and the attacher often includes drawings showing the desired connection.
  • The pole owner then conducts a survey to determine if there are any issues involved in meeting the request. Some pole owners invite the attacher to participate in a physical survey.
  • If the pole owner accepts the request, it must provide an estimate of the ‘make-ready’ costs needed to accommodate the request.
  • If the attacher accepts the estimate, it must pay the make-ready costs upfront, and the make-ready work proceeds.
  • Finally, if the pole owner finds that the actual cost was higher than the estimate, the attacher can request a detailed invoice showing all of the costs.

The dispute in this Order arose over poles that APCO said needed to be replaced in order to accommodate Comcast. Comcast claims that many of the poles had preexisting violations of safety and engineering standards, and because of that, Comcast wanted to pay nothing for APCO to replace the poles. APCO wanted Comcast to pay the full cost of replacing the poles, which would mean that Comcast would be paying to fix problems caused in the past by other attachers.  As an aside, Comcast would be required to pay the full cost to replace a pole that didn’t have any safety violations, as long as the only reason for having to replace a pole is that there isn’t enough room to add the new fiber.

Comcast filed a formal complaint with the West Virginia Public Service Commission in May 2025. The Commission ruled in favor of Comcast and said that APCO unlawfully assigned costs to Comcast and also delayed the pole attachment process. Rather than comply with that decision, APCO appealed the case in July to the FCC’s new Rapid Broadband Assessment Team (RBAT). This was the first FCC case processed under the new RBAT appeal system. The parties entered into mediation, but failed to reach an agreement.

In September, APCO issued new rules across its pole network that require any attacher to pay 100% of the cost for a poles replacement, even when a pole has preexisting violations.  At the end of November, Comcast filed a complaint with the FCC that resulted in this Order. The FCC sided with Comcast and said that its rules had been clear for twenty years that an attacher is only responsible for the incremental cost of moving to a new pole when an existing pole is in violation of safety or engineering standards.

You might read this and view it as a victory for Comcast, but it’s really not. This process delayed Comcast by nine months, and this is one of the faster regulatory resolutions of a pole dispute I can remember. This case shows the challenge that any attacher faces when a pole owner elects not to follow existing pole attachment regulations. In this case, APCO wanted to charge Comcast incorrectly at the time of the application. APCO then ignored an order from the State PUC and took the issue to FCC arbitration, where it failed to come to a mediated agreement. Finally, Comcast had to appeal to the FCC for a resolution.

Most ISPs don’t have the budget or the legal resources to fight an issue like this through this maze of steps. A smaller attacher with a similar situation would likely either have to agree to meet the conditions of the pole owner, and pay far too much for the attachment, or it might instead elect to bury fiber to bypass the poles, also at an increased cost.

Most attachers also worry about getting into formal disputes with pole owners who can retaliate by making it more difficult or costly for other desired attachments. The FCC and States can pass as many rules and regulations as they want, but the pole owner still has the ultimate power to make life costly and miserable for an attacher. I don’t know if any amount of regulations can fix that.

2026 Urban Rate Study

One of the more curious undertakings done by the FCC every year is the Urban Rate Study. This is an exercise undertaken every year to determine the highest monthly broadband rates that can be charged by ETCs (Eligible Telecommunications Carriers). This basically means regulated telcos and other ISPs that participate in some grant or subsidy programs. At a minimum, these rate caps apply to incumbent rate-of-return telephone companies, and ISPs that participated in the Rural Broadband Experiment, CAF II Phase II Auction, RDOF (Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Auction 904), and Enhanced A-CAM. These rate caps will apply to any BEAD winners that are certified as an ETC. These rate caps also apply to any ISP that voluntarily became an ETC in order to participate in any other subsidy program, such as the Universal Service Fund.

The FCC publishes this rate near the end of each year, and by July 1 of the following year, every ETC must certify to the FCC that it doesn’t charge a rate higher than the benchmarks.

 The FCC determines rate caps for an interesting mix of speeds that match the minimum speed goals set over the years for different subsidy programs. The FCC samples actual rates in the market and sets the target rates by applying two standard deviations. The FCC also sets the minimum size of any rate cap, and for 2026 has raised any monthly rate caps to provide at least 800 megabytes of data as of July 2026.

Below is a table that compares the 2026 rates to the rates from the Urban Rate Study in 2019.

It’s interesting that the maximum rates allowed for slow speeds have increased significantly between 2019 and 2026. The FCC rate caps for speeds of 100 Mbps or greater have decreased since 2019. I think this is because gigabit rates were somewhat rare in 2019, and some ISPs that offered gigabit then charged a premium rate.

It’s commonly believed that the FCC is not in the ratemaking business, and for broadband, I think this is the agency’s only ratemaking role.

I’ve seen ISPs with rates higher than these benchmarks, but those ISPs are not regulated ETCs. I doubt that consumers are comforted by these rates, and luckily, market competition has pushed rates lower than everything in the table for most ISPs.

Cell Tower Regulation Changes?

Cellular carriers seem to be on a winning streak with federal regulators. In the Big Beautiful Bill last year, cellular carriers were able to insert language in the bill that mandates the FCC to auction 800 MHz of mid-range spectrum. That’s going to force the FCC to carve the spectrum from other uses, and it seems likely that most spectrum that goes to auction will be won by the big cell carriers.

Late last fall, the FCC opened a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) Eliminating Barriers to Wireless Deployments. In the NOI, the FCC asked the following questions.

  • Should the FCC establish a new set of shot clocks that cover permitting and construction of wireless towers and other wireless infrastructure?
  • Should the FCC consider a “deemed approved” rule that would mean that any proposed new tower project would be considered as approved if a local government doesn’t approve the project within a specified time frame?
  • Should the FCC preempt local governments from setting fees related to permits, rights-of-way, and construction processes, and should the FCC set national fees for these efforts?

As someone who has read a lot of FCC documents, the tone of this NOI suggests to me that the FCC has already largely determined what it is going to order related to the shot clock and fees. It looks likely that the cell carriers will likely achieve another big win on their regulatory wish list.

The NOI also seeks comments on a wide range of other questions:

  • Can localities reject a tower request for a carrier that will be providing interstate services?
  • The FCC is thinking about relaxing the rules for concealment elements, which is the process of hiding towers or disguising them to look like trees of other objects.
  • The FCC wants to make it harder for localities to disallow modifications to existing towers.
  • The NOI explores the definition of a macro cell site in relation to existing rules related to small cell sites.
  • The FCC asks if it can limit the ability of a locality to reject a tower application based on aesthetics.
  • The NOI asks if local franchise agreements that involve in-kind contributions are a violation of Section 253 rules.

The NOI saw over 4,000 public comments. AT&T, T-Mobile, and CTIA, the lobbying group for the cellular carriers, were in favor of what the FCC is proposing, while almost all of the other comments were against some or all of the FCC proposals.

A lot of the comments involved those that want local communities to have some say in the placement of towers for health reasons. Traditionally, these folks have an uphill battle since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and other FCC rulings have made it hard for the FCC to consider “environmental issues’ related to cell site placement. But I read last week that HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. supports the idea that there are health risks from cell towers, so perhaps this now has some chance.

There were also comments from local governments and groups like the National Conference of Counties NACo), the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM), the National League of Cities (NLC), and the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) have all filed comments that disagree with allowing the FCC to override local authority. The comments from these groups asked the FCC to:

  • Preserve local aesthetic and placement authority.
  • Recognize that local governments are entitled to compensation which reflects the full costs of wireless deployment, not an arbitrary national assessment of what costs “should” be.
  • Reject the creation of a “rocket docket”.
  • Reject premature preemption of state and local AI regulations.
  • Facilitate industry and local cooperation rather than heavy-handed federal mandates.

I do fine it curious that an agency that is working feverishly to eliminate regulatory requirements won’t hesitate to create new rules it likes.

 

Is the FCC an Independent Agency?

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr recently told Congress that he doesn’t believe that the FCC is an independent agency. The FCC went so far as to remove the term independent from its website. The bottom line of Chairman Carr’s opinion is that he believes the FCC should take direction from the White House.

It’s an interesting position that contradicts the long-standing intentions that the FCC, and many other federal agencies are independent, meaning that they don’t take directions directly from the Administration, but are required to follow whatever enabling laws and rules established by Congress. There are a number of independent agencies other than the FCC, including the EPA, SEC, Federal Reserve, NASA, CIA, FTC, SSA, and NTSB.

There are several key characteristics of independent agencies. First, they are not part of, and don’t report to any of the fifteen cabinet departments like State or Treasury. Independent agencies were generally established by Congress to be somewhat shielded from political pressure. For example, it’s not easy for the President to fire the head of an independent agency. The agencies are often structured with a multi-member Board or Commission, which typically includes rules that require representation from both parties. Some agencies like the SEC and the FCC are accorded rule-making power within a specified range of issues.

The FCC was created by Congress with the passage of the Communications Act of 1934. The agency has been directed by Congress to regulate radio, television, wire, satellite, cable, and the Internet. The Act did not include language that specified the FCC was independent. The independent status is inferred from the structural provisions in the Act that define how the agency operates. The relevant language appears in Section 4(a) of the Act (codified as 47 U.S.C. § 154(a)), which establishes the structure of the Commission. The Act created a commission of five (originally seven) members who are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate. The Commission must be bilateral, and no more than three members can be from the same political party. Commissioners serve for fixed, five-year terms. The FCC is required to follow laws passed by Congress aimed specifically at the agency.

The Supreme Court has explored issues related to independent agencies over the years. Supreme Court rulings, like Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), defined a key element of an independent agency to be a lack of explicit legislative language giving a President the power to remove commissioners at will (i.e., for any reason). Instead, the ability to remove commissioners is widely understood to be limited to specific reasons like “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” This structure of independent agencies is done deliberately to insulate agencies from direct presidential control and ensure decisions are based on the public interest rather than political pressure.

Chairman Carr’s statements are a direct challenge to Congress. Historically, independent agencies like the FCC are given general marching orders from Congress through legislation, but even then, the agency is free to interpret specifically how to enact laws. Chairman Carr says that he feels empowered to take direction directly from the White House, and it seems likely this will eventually trigger a showdown. At some point, Congress will have to assert its authority or cede its power to the Administration.

The FCC has never been free from politics, because almost nothing in Washington D.C. can be. The FCC Chairman has traditionally been from the same party as the White House and is typically sympathetic to policies of the administration. But there has always been an uproar if an FCC Chairman has been accused of directly taking direction from the administration. An example of this happened when Republicans accused Chairman Tom Wheeler of too closely following the White House direction on the issue of net neutrality.

The long-term repercussions of a political FCC are not good for the industry. While ISPs, carriers, and programmers all have a wish list of regulations they don’t like, there has always been a huge benefit for regulated companies to have regulatory certainty, which means that rules don’t change drastically with every change of administration. Regulated companies might complain loudly about being overregulated, but they benefit financially from knowing the rules, since this allows them to develop long-term strategies. Every large ISP will quietly admit that regulatory certainty is far better for them than rules that change with each Administration.

Mission Accomplished?

In my recent annual predictions for 2026, I predicted that the FCC or the NTIA would declare that the rural digital divide has been solved since everybody in the country now has access to adequate broadband.

We got an inkling of this from NTIA Assistant Secretary Arielle Roth in a speech she made to the Hudson Institute. She alluded to the end of the rural digital divide twice in that speech. First, she said, “This administration does not want BEAD to become just another well-intentioned broadband program that falls short. Its mission is nothing less than to close the “digital divide” once and for all.” Later in the speech, she said, “Being good stewards of taxpayer money means holding awardees accountable and making sure those who take taxpayer dollars will deliver on their promises. That is what will set BEAD apart and ensure that this really is the last broadband funding program.”

I can’t find any similar statements from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, but he has been a strong supporter of satellite broadband. He’s been a big proponent recently for easing the regulation of satellite broadband companies and also freeing up a lot of spectrum for them.

It’s obvious that any pronouncements about the end of the rural digital divide would be tied to the ubiquitous availability of satellite broadband. It would not be a stretch for regulators to say that the rural digital divide has been solved since everybody can buy satellite broadband.

Of course, pronouncing the end of the rural digital divide is not the same thing as it being true. Starlink told State Broadband Offices that it needs BEAD grant funding to grow the capacity to serve larger numbers of rural households. Starlink no longer has any waiting lists, but it does warn that new subscribers might have to pay a ‘demand surcharge” in areas that are oversubscribed.

Starlink is no different than any ISP in that there is a maximum number of customers that it can serve in a geographic area. Recent estimates are that the company has around 2.6 million U.S. customers. Only Starlink knows what its real capacity is, but it’s not an unlimited number of subscribers, particularly in the parts of the country where it will see a greater concentration of customers. It’s anybody’s guess what Amazon One will mean for the industry.

There are definite repercussions if federal regulators say that the rural broadband gap has been solved. Certainly, this would mean the end of federal broadband grants. Even if grants are created, like is happening with ReConnect at USDA, there will be no grants awarded if the federal government declares that satellite broadband means all households are considered to be served.

Such a declaration probably also puts pressure on maintaining federal subsidies in rural areas through the Universal Service Fund. It becomes easy to justify ending ongoing subsidies for rural ISPs if satellite broadband can pick up any customers left stranded by the end of subsidies.

Such a declaration would be a big disappointment to the millions of homes being missed by BEAD. The last two years of the BEAD process focused on eliminating BEAD-eligible locations, many of which still don’t have good broadband. For example, the map challenge process eliminated huge numbers of homes from BEAD that are claimed by WISPs using CBRS spectrum, with no real concern if the WISPs were actually delivering adequate broadband. Making this declaration would end up leaving these homes to satellite without any public declaration.

People who still don’t have good broadband are not going to stop complaining about it to local, state, and federal elected officials. A declaration that rural broadband might make it easy to ignore these folks for a while, but that will only last for so long.

Predictions for 2026

The following are my predictions for 2026. I noticed that after I wrote this, the overall tenor of the list is negative. I’m generally pretty upbeat, but I can’t find fault with any of the predictions.

Federal Regulators Will Continue to Ignore Congress. Federal broadband regulators will continue to ignore Congressional legislation. This past year, the FCC ignored a Congressional edict to lower inmate calling rates. NTIA is ignoring Congress by withholding grant funding for the Digital Equity Act, and is likely to provide little or no funding for BEAD non-deployment funds. Expect similar actions in 2026.

Further Erosion of BEAD. NTIA is not done trying to whittle down the size of BEAD grant funding. The agency already whacked funding with the Benefit of the Bargain rule changes, along with numerous other actions. I expect NTIA to pull more rabbits out of the hat and find more excuses to deny funding to some states for issues like net neutrality, state permitting rules, or state regulation of AI.

Major Spectrum Battles. Congress instructed the FCC to find 800 megahertz of mid-range spectrum for auction. That means potentially reclaiming CBRS spectrum used for rural broadband and 6 GHz spectrum that is just starting to be implemented for WiFi 7. Cellular lobbyists preempted the normal deliberations on spectrum management and got the biggest item on their wish list included in the Big Beautiful Bill. I don’t expect opponents of the spectrum grab to go down without a big fight.

FWA Will Have Another Strong Year. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon just had the biggest quarterly gain of new customers yet, adding over 1 million net new FWA customers in the third quarter of 2025. I predict the three companies will continue to add over 900,000 customers per quarter in 2026, and even more if we see a softening of the economy.

Universal Service Fund Reform Will Stall. Congress is considering badly needed changes to the Universal Service Fund. In the current political chaos in Congress, I predict that a USF bill will never make it through the legislative process.   

Big ISPs Will Have Record Cash Windfalls. There hasn’t been a lot of industry press about the bonus depreciation change included in the Big Beautiful Bill. This allows ISPs to quickly write off current fiber construction, which will cut tax liabilities and generate big cash bonuses for the biggest ISPs in 2026. I predict much of the windfall will be used to buy back stock rather than invest in new networks.

Big ISPs Will All Raise Rates. You might think that in a weakened economy, where the cost of living is the number one issue with the public, ISPs might hold off on rate increases. But the recent $5 across-the-board rate increase by AT&T for fiber will be the first of many significant rate increases during the coming year.

A Federal Regulator Will Declare that the Rural Broadband Gap has Been Solved. I don’t know if it will be the FCC or NTIA, but I expect one of the federal broadband regulators to declare that the rural broadband gap has been solved because of the many grant programs and because everybody can now buy satellite broadband. Arielle Roth already hinted at this when she said in a speech that the mission of BEAD “is nothing less than to close the digital divide once and for all”.

Do We Have a Spectrum Policy?

Telecompetitor recently published an article that cited concerns from analysts at MoffettNathanson Research that wonder about the way spectrum is being allocated for FWA home cellular broadband. It turns out that the big cellular carriers are devoting a huge amount of network resources to FWA while reaping only small financial benefits. FWA use may already account for more than half of the traffic on the Verizon cellular network while only accounting for 3% of Verizon’s revenues. FWA makes up only 6% of T-Mobile’s revenues.

I’ve written about this before, and the difference in monthly data usage between cell customers and home broadband customers is immense. CTIA, the association for cellular carriers, recently reported that the average cell customer uses 17.2 gigabytes of data per month on cellular networks. OpenVault recently reported that the average home broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes per month at the end of the third quarter. That means that the average FWA customer is using as much bandwidth as 37 average cellular customers.

You might ask why it matters how Verizon and T-Mobile use the spectrum they purchased in FCC auctions. From a regulatory perspective, it probably doesn’t matter. Once these companies buy the spectrum, they are free to use it in ways allowed by the spectrum licenses. Cellular spectrum has been used for home broadband for many years through the sale of hotspots. The big difference between hotspots and FWA is that hotspots most normally have stingy data caps similar to what is sold to cellphones, while FWA offers unlimited home broadband.

But from a market perspective, it matters a lot because the government has suddenly decided to shuttle a lot more spectrum to the cellular carriers. In the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress instructed the FCC to find at least 800 megahertz of spectrum for commercial wireless services. The expectation is that the sale of this spectrum could raise around $88 billion for the U.S. Treasury. It’s highly likely that the three big cellular companies would buy most of this spectrum along with perhaps a few large cable companies.

Cellular carriers need this extra spectrum to support FWA. Even if they add no new FWA customers, home broadband usage has been growing at around 9% per year, so FWA will take up an increasing share of existing cellular spectrum every year. But the major reason the carriers need more spectrum is because they have big plans to continue to grow FWA cellular. Verizon says it plans to double the number of FWA customers by 2028. T-Mobile says it plans to grow from today’s 7.8 million FWA customers to over 12 million by 2028. AT&T has expressed no specific plan for FWA growth but has recently stepped up sales significantly.

The three carriers will need the new spectrum being made available by Congress to support their sudden appetite for using spectrum to compete for home broadband. That’s one of the more surprising sentences I have ever written. A decade ago, I would have been laughed out of the room if I had suggested that our scarce national spectrum resource should be used to compete with landline broadband networks.

This is policy gone amok. Clearly, the carrier lobbyists were successful in getting this change inserted into the Big Beautiful Bill. That alone is extraordinary, because in the past, the FCC and the NTIA together collaborated to determine spectrum policy. Apparently, Congress can now set spectrum policy in a footnote of a budget reconciliation bill.

There are many other important uses for the same spectrum bands now being considered for expanding FWA. The spectrum is also needed for the military, for rural fixed wireless broadband, for communicating with airplanes, for weather services, for public safety, and for WiFi.

That last use is the most troublesome of all. WiFi spectrum is by far the most valuable spectrum in the U.S. economy. Almost everybody reading this blog spends most of their online time, whether by computer or cellphone, using WiFi spectrum. The FCC is likely going to have to dip into the 6 GHz WiFi spectrum to satisfy the Congressional mandate. That is absurdly short-sighted and undoes decades of careful spectrum deliberations that have tried to make sure that every use of spectrum is protected.

It’s a fair question to ask if we even have a national spectrum policy now. Raiding 800 megahertz of the most valuable spectrum we have to support FWA sounds less like a policy and more like a land grab by the cellular industry.

Grants Should Look Forward

State Broadband Offices had to go through a process this year of deciding if various technologies qualify for grant purposes as priority projects. A priority technology must meet the following requirement: Provide broadband service that meets speed, latency, reliability, consistency in quality of service, and related criteria as the Assistant Secretary shall determine; and ensure that the network built by the project can easily scale speeds over time to meet the evolving connectivity needs of households and businesses and support the deployment of 5G, successor wireless technologies, and other advanced services.

NTIA chose a speed of 100/20 Mbps as the metric for meeting the current test of a priority technology. This is convenient, since this was the declared speed that the legislation said a BEAD-funded technology must be able to deliver. Today’s blog asks if that definition is adequate.

One way to consider what the current speed of broadband should be is to look at historical trends. For many years, Cisco issued reports that regularly reported that the demand for speed was growing at roughly 21% per year for residential broadband, and a little faster for business broadband. Cisco and others noted that the demand for broadband speeds was on a relatively straight line back to the early 1980s.

It’s not hard to test the Cisco long-term growth rate. The following table applies a 21% growth rate to the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband established by the FCC in 2015.This table is somewhat arbitrary since it assumes that broadband demand in 2015 was exactly 25 Mbps – but there was widespread praise of the new definition at that time, other than from ISPs who wanted to stick with the 4/1 Mbps definition. This simple table accurately predicted that we would be talking about the need to increase the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps download around 2022, which is exactly what happened. The FCC did not have a fifth Commissioner at the time and wasn’t able to make the change until March 2024 – but in 2022, the FCC wanted to change the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps download, which was at a 21% compounded annual growth rate from the definition of broadband the FCC had established in 2015.

I can’t think of any fundamental industry changes that would change the historical growth rate in the near future. We’ve certainly seen a big demand to buy faster broadband products. Consider the following chart that starts with the assumption that 100 Mbps was the right definition of broadband in 2022. Growing that number over time by the same 21% results in the following table. What does this table suggest for BEAD and other grant?. Consider the evaluation of Starlink, which is the technology that is closest to meeting or not meeting the needed speed. Ookla released a report in the first quarter of 2025 showing that the median speed on Starlink was 104.71 Mbps download and 14.84 Mbps upload, and that only 17% of Starlink customers in the first quarter fully met the 100/20 Mbps speed threshold.

The table above suggests that the current definition of broadband in 2025 should be something like 177/35 Mbps. It’s debatable if Starlink meets the 100/20 Mbps test today, but it clearly doesn’t meet a test based on the speed demand in 2025.

The BEAD future-looking test is challenging because nobody defined what future-looking means. I can think of two definitions of forward-looking that might make sense. One is to judge what speeds should be delivered when the grant project has been constructed, which for most BEAD projects will be at the end of 2029. The growth chart suggests that the speed for defining broadband in 2029 will be around 380/76 Mbps.

I think a better forward-looking test for a government-sponsored grant should be that a grant-funded network should still be relevant a decade after a grant is awarded. The chart suggests the desired speed should be 1191/238 Mbps in 2035.

Naysayers will argue that the 21% growth in speed demand can’t be sustained. Consider taking a more conservative approach that cuts the historical growth rate in half. That conservative approach would say that a target speed for a grant-funded project would be 195/30 Mbps in 2029 and 345/69 Mbps in 2035. I have nothing to go on except my gut, which tells me that 345/69 Mbps will feel inadequate in 2035.