Viewpoints
Broadband Communities Summit 2024, more than any other in the past 20 years, is devoted to the details.
With so much to discuss, from massive federal funding to new technology and how to buy it, smaller-scale community networks and multiple dwelling-unit (MDU) deployments offer huge and meaningful opportunities.
By: Steven S. Ross, Broadband Communities
This year’s Broadband Communities Summit is special. Fast, reliable broadband to almost every home and business? Reaching that goal seems assured. Then, we’ll need even faster and more reliable broadband, and we assuredly will get that as well. The opportunities will not end.
But the devil is in the details. This year’s Broadband Communities Summit, more than any other in the past 20 years, is devoted to those details – finance, technology, regulation, and human resources. A mature fiber technology and almost $50 billion in new federal funding meets a pandemic-scarred country that is now almost united in its vision.
The Broadband Communities Summit 2024 Conference Agenda exposes differences of opinion and even conflicts in corporate and community goals and priorities. There’s a piece for everyone. But conferees take note: There are so many roads – “information highways” – that the Broadband Communities Summit structure has been opened up to allow far more time to talk to vendors while not at all cutting actual speaker, workshop and panel session time.
A two-decade ride
We move ahead with confidence. In 2004 the broadband industry had been massively upended. Verizon was aiming to deploy high-capital-cost fiber to the home in many spots throughout its footprint, but was worried that it would be forced to rent its newly created fiber bandwidth to competitors. Until then competitors, especially small deployers (“private cable operators” or PCOs), had been successfully using that right of broadband access to serve multiple-dwelling unit (MDU) properties. Those folks were our readers. Their whole existence was threatened, as companies like Verizon were suddenly allowed to keep control of the networks they built.
This was hardly front-page or even business-page news for the general public. But the private cable operators’ main information source, Broadband Properties Magazine, was threatened as well. The late Scott Degarmo saw an opportunity. He bought the magazine, hired me as editor, and changed the focus to embrace the new fiber technology. We soon became Broadband Communities, as national carriers began to expand their fiber footprint, joined by numerous local carriers and even municipalities.
The first big “fiber to the premises” deployment had been by a countywide public utility district in Washington State. It and about three dozen small communities and deployers elsewhere had confirmed the advantages of last-mile fiber before Verizon had committed. A few years later, AT&T upped the game by being the first national carrier to embrace the Apple “smart” phone – and saw its cellular broadband demand increase 50-fold in less than two years. The cable industry advanced data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) as web and entertainment network video demand pushed the TV dial from five main channels to hundreds.
In just two decades, thousands of deployers have committed to fiber supplemented by new, fast, and reliable wireless technologies – cellular and point-to-point. The private cable operators are doing fine, thank you. By comparison, it took more than a half-century, many regional monopolies, and one national phone monopoly to spread the electric and telephone grids nationwide.
At the Broadband Communities Summit, speakers will detail the progress and emerging issues with USDA ReConnect, Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) funding, legal and regulatory challenges, partnership models, investment, and commercial strategies – and the technologies that make them possible.
Closing the digital divide and ensuring that no community, neighborhood, or building is left behind is NOT a problem. It is an opportunity. The Broadband Communities Summit will highlight issues faced by communities ranging from old urban MDUs, to posh suburbs, to rural counties, to tribal nations.
Who should build these networks? My position has always been simple: Whoever has the lowest cost of capital and, of course, the talent. There is more capital and talent than ever before. But, there are also more uncertainties, especially budget uncertainties. Labor shortages, delays in delivery of fiber, software and electronics, and even regulatory hangups still loom large. Interest rates are coming down, but money is less available than it was for most of the last few decades.
The Broadband Communities Summit will cover it all.
MDUs: Once and future kings
That brings me back to MDUs. Pre-COVID, only about half of new apartment buildings had broadband wiring (fiber or Cat5 and Cat6 copper) built in. But pandemic resiliency needs, an economy shift to working from home, global climate change, and relative lack of mortgage availability for the new generation of families have changed all of that.
While only a quarter of existing dwelling units are in MDUs, more than a third of all dwelling units built in the last five years, and more than 40 percent last year, are in large (five units or more) MDUs. And 95 percent of those new MDUs, and half of new single-family construction, are rentals. Two decades ago, fiber seemed to be the end of private cable operators. Now, MDUs are the cheapest dwelling units for fiber deployers, and the PCOs are still here.
Wall Street has not exactly caught on. Politicians see only a federal outlay in forgiveness of student loans while our industry would be somewhat more balanced by individual home ownership even if condo associations are harder to deal with than are landlords. But network deployers and the states have embraced the changes.
The next 20 years begins at this year’s Broadband Communities Summit.
