It’s so easy to get caught up in “threats” facing the rural broadband industry when you focus on the panoply of public policy issues swirling around Washington DC these days. Couple that with the unfortunate “cool” cache the new players in the communications industry seem to have when they enter the arena as opposed to anyone excitedly applaud the decades of service that these carriers have already provided and you have a really interesting intersection point when new opportunities do actually arrive. We saw that today when both the results of the CBRS auction were released as well as the short lists for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. That’s a double whammy day! And fabulous timing given that FCC Chairman Pai just announced that he will be speaking at our virtual Fall Conference in a few weeks and their couldn’t be more timely topics tee’d up for him to share his thoughts with NTCA members. We had a chat with the Chairman earlier today on other matters so there is simply no shortage of things to be talking about!
On the CBRS front, it was not surprising that Verizon – who needed midband spectrum to compete with AT&T and T-Mo in the never-ending 5G race went big in the auction and will pay $1.9 billion for 557 licenses in 157 counties. Dish and cable companies such as were also among the biggest winners with Dish winning a total of 5,492 licenses in 3,128 counties. Interestingly, Windstream and Consolidated were also very active and Frontier also participated but did not win any licenses. And a lot of small rural providers seem to have won too.
Looking at the list, I was delighted to see a number of small rural providers listed on the winner’s sheet and am so glad that they proactively thought about how they could use these licenses for service in their communities. But for those who may have hoped that the fixed wireless CAF 2 auction winners wouldn’t get spectrum here, that was not to be – Midco and Nextlink won a lot and showed their hand at how aggressive they intend to be in this space.
As we have seen from many providers lately that talk about their rural broadband deployment strategy, they have gone all in on a fixed wireless strategy and have little interest in building fiber outside of their lucrative urban markets. Meanwhile, NTCA members have remain committed to their fiber strategy (as long as that supply chain doesn’t get too bogged down!) but are wise to keep their options open with access to these wireless licenses.
Then we have the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The FCC is moving forward with the $16 billion dollar phase 1 auction agenda which is set to take place at the end of October. They released today a Public Notice listing all of the complete and incomplete applications. The FCC received 505 short form applications of which 121 are complete and 384 are incomplete, including folks like SpaceX in the mix. Again, it was satisfying to peruse the list and see a number of NTCA member companies on both lists and I remain “glass half full” that this will not only be a good opportunity for NTCA companies but more importantly for the areas that they could deploy to with this additional support and be part of the solution to the rural/rural divide on broadband deployment.