Carl Weinschenk

Indiana is positioned to be well connected with the second announcement of a statewide fiber network consortium. The newest entrant, Accord Telecommunications Collaborative, LLC, is owned by 21 electric and telephone cooperative service providers and covers 75% of the state’s land mass. Accord’s owners, which are non-profit organizations, collectively service more than 300,000 homes and businesses in Indiana. They own 20,000 miles of fiber and about 40,000 miles of electric lines. Announcements about partnerships with other providers are expected to be made in the coming weeks.

Brightspeed will pass 130,000 addresses in the Commonwealth of Virginia during the next several years, with the first 60,000 of those passings to be completed by the end of 2023. The first phase of the Virginia rollout will include portions of Charlottesville and parts of Albemarle, Campbell, Henry, Page, Rockbridge and Smyth counties.

Resound Networks, a winning bidder in the Federal Communications Commission's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, has successfully achieved gigabit speeds using fixed wireless access (FWA) in the 6 GHz band via an experimental license. The company reached a distance of more than three miles using 160 MHz-wide channels that will become available in the band. Fixed wireless providers have big hopes for the 6 GHz band, which contains a wide swath of spectrum that will be available on an unlicensed basis. The FCC voted in 2020 to free up spectrum in the band. 

Consolidated Communications is partnering with the Southern Vermont communications union district (CUD) to provide symmetrical gigabit speed broadband services to almost 12,000 Bennington County (VT) homes by the end of summer 2022. A CUD is a non-profit municipal entity that provides or aims to provide broadband in Vermont to two or more towns that are underserved or unserved. A CUD can fund operations through grants, debt and donations — but not taxes.

Market share, not households new to broadband, is the focus of “intense competition” between four types of service providers, according to Kagan, the media research unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Here is how Kagan positions the four types of providers:

Cox Communications will double the speeds of two services – ConnectAssist and Connect2Compete—from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps on March 31. The cable company also said that it is participating in the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). More than 500,000 are enrolled in the two Cox programs and will receive the higher speeds at no additional costs, Cox said. The ACP provides $30 towards broadband service for low-income households. The amount is $75 on Tribal lands. Cox said that applying the $30 subsidy will enable more subscribers to get the 100 Mbps service for free.

Regional operator Ritter Communications has been awarded eight grants totaling about $44 million to provide all-fiber broadband networks in Arkansas. The grants were awarded through the Arkansas Rural Connect (ARC) program, which is funded through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). The eight grants are in addition to other ARC grants previously made to Ritter, bringing the total ARC funding awarded to the provider to $67 million. Ritter will supplement the funding to “ensure ubiquitous network coverage” and make the final connections to homes and businesses.

Windstream has completed the first phase of deployment in Green County (KY) under the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) by bringing access to 109 locations in the city of Greensburg. An additional 409 homes will be given fiber access by the end of the year. The Green County RDOF award of $1.5 million will be supplemented by an investment of $2.3 million by Windstream. Windstream’s Kentucky RDOF commitment is to bring fiber to the home (FTTH) services to more than 15,700 addresses across the state during the next six years.

Metro by T-Mobile has joined the Federal Communications Commission’s new Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). Doing so enables the company to offer free service. Beginning January 27, qualifying new and existing low-income Metro by T-Mobile subscribers are eligible for free wireless service with high-speed smartphone data. Eligible subscribers also can get as much as $30 off all Metro by T-Mobile smartphone plans with data or as much as $75 for those on Tribal lands. All those subscribing to the offerings will have access on the carrier’s 5G network and Scam Shield security.

Cable operators who do not own mobile infrastructure often use infrastructure from mobile network operators (MNOs). They use this infrastructure as mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). These arrangements enable them to bundle fixed and mobile broadband into single packages, generally with an initial focus on Wi-Fi services. MVNO platforms are a partial solution, however, because they offer different and sometimes less than optimal levels of control over subscriptions and service elements.