Fiber Forward Q1 - 2023

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Gary Bolton, FBA President & CEO

Dear FBA Members,

The first quarter of 2023 has taken off like a rocket! While 2022 was a record year for fiber broadband deployment, we were only getting started. It has become clear to everyone that fiber is the only choice for our nation’s critical broadband infrastructure.

As the 118th Congress settles in, the Fiber Broadband Association has already been very active advocating our positions, including an extremely comprehensive response to Senator Thune’s (R-S.D.) letter requesting information to better understand the Fiber Broadband Association’s positions on important and critical broadband topics related to federal grants. The Fiber Broadband Association’s response included our members’ positions on important and critical broadband topics.

President Biden doubled down on the importance of delivering broadband to Americans in his State of the Union address – a priority that the entire membership of the FBA will play an instrumental role in delivering. There is no doubt 2023 will be a pivotal year for fiber broadband as we execute on our mission to accelerate the deployment of fiber broadband networks to ensure digital equity and enable every community to leverage economic and societal benefits that only fiber can deliver.

I am so excited about this issue of Fiber Forward magazine. This issue’s cover is fantastic! We had so much fun debating over which dogs are at the table. I also hope you enjoy finding the little easter eggs that are included in the illustration.

The content quality of our magazine continues to get better and better. This year is big for implementing NTIA BEAD funding, so we interviewed several State Broadband Offices to see how they are preparing for BEAD and what challenges they face ahead. If you watch Fiber for Breakfast, you know that I am extremely excited about the future of Quantum Networks. We talked with some of the top experts in the field in our article on Quantum Networks and the potential is astounding.

Along the same vein, we looked at how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are going to shape the future of the internet in our article “AI’s Rapid Rise is Fiber’s Gain.” Also, do not miss “Alexandria, VA, Microtrenches to Fiber.” Our deployment committee has just completed a best practice

whitepaper on microtrenching and this article illustrates a successful implementation of this best practice.

This issue also includes a nice recap of our record breaking and wildly successful Regional Fiber Connect workshop held in Raleigh, NC, on February 7. After Columbus in November, I could not imagine how our regional events could get any better. I cannot wait for our next Regional Fiber Connect workshop in Oklahoma City on April 6. During this regional event, we will be putting a hard focus on Tribal Broadband. After Oklahoma City, we will be in Austin, TX, on May 16, Lake Tahoe on June 21, Orlando, FL, for our annual Fiber Connect conference from August 20 – 23, and we will finish the year in Minneapolis, MN on October 24.

While 2022 is in our rearview, we do take a moment to reflect on the Association’s tremendous growth and our vision for 2023. I also want to say thank you to my good friends, our outgoing Chairman Kevin Morgan (Clearfield), Joanne Hovis (CTC), and Ben Moncrief (C Spire) for their tremendous contributions to our organization and industry. Kevin will continue to serve on FBA’s senior council, Joanne will serve on FBA’s executive advisory board, and I hope that we will see Ben soon as he settles in at his new company.

I also want to welcome our new board members, Arianne Schafer (Google Fiber) and Kim McKinley (Utopia Fiber). Both Arianne and Kim have been serving FBA in leadership roles as the co-chair of the Public Policy committee and cochair of the Public Officials Roundtable, respectively. Gregg Logan (Telapex/C Spire) has rejoined the Board to fill Ben’s remaining term. Gregg has a long history of service on the FBA board and had been our longest-serving secretary. We are excited to have him back.

For those of us that have been in this industry for a very long time, it appears everything that we have been working towards our entire careers will come to fruition over the next few years. This is a historic time, and we are so privileged to have the responsibility to close our nation’s digital divide. What an amazing time to be at the Fiber Broadband Association!

Sincerely,

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About the Cover

Created by Raleigh-based Illustrator Alice Holleman (www.AliceHolleman.com), this issue’s Fiber Forward cover builds on the “Dogs Playing Poker” oil paintings crafted by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in the later part of the 19th century and into the early 20th century. The iconic series has been burned into the mainstream consciousness through repeated references in pop culture; from music, including the cover of the band Rush’s 1981 Album “Moving Pictures” and Snoop Dog’s 2019 album cover “I Wanna Thank Me,” to TV show placements in “Cheers,” “Rosanne,” “That 70’s Show,” and “The Simpsons,” as well as films such as “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “The Accountant,” and “Toy Story 4.”

We decided to pay homage to it for the Q1 issue of Fiber Forward to highlight that 2023 is the year when everyone’s cards are now on the table as the nation’s stakeholders collectively work to close the Digital Equity Gap. No single entity can do it alone. Only by working together, placing our bets on fiber, and focusing on the goal of better serving the underserved, can we move our communities, people, and nation forward. The stakes are high because if communities select any other infrastructure option other than fiber, they are choosing to fold and lose the game.

The dogs illustrated on the cover represent seven of the ten most popular breeds today. The breeds associated with the different players are not meant to reflect the organization or any person at that organization in any way, shape or form. During our various rounds of drafts and reviews, we found that there were as many opinions about the type or breed of dog to be included as there were reviewers.

Like with all art, there is no “right” interpretation. Our cover is meant to be fun, engaging and a way to start the conversation about our future and the role fiber broadband can play in allowing everyone, everywhere, better access to education, healthcare, training, entertainment, and a more connected world. We have also hidden a few Easter eggs within the artwork for your enjoyment. See if you can find them all.

BRINGING BROADBAND

Editor’s Moment

New Factories, AI Aren’t Built on Gravel Roads

By Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief

Over the past year and change, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with numerous FBA members, service providers, solution providers, public officials, a universe of analysts, and other key industry stakeholders. Every time I pick up the phone, er start a Teams call, I’m usually learning something new about fiber and its role in communities across the country. There’s no one template, no “one size fits all” for how people are building new networks and connecting people both with physical media and through the applications and opportunities that result when highquality, high-speed broadband goes into service.

One key point that shines through from the mountains of Massachusetts, the bayous of Louisiana, the forests of Oregon, and all the other places where people continue to turn up new fiber networks: businesses want it, just like they want access to highways, airports, and other modern infrastructure to deliver the goods and services to their customers around the world.

You don’t build a new factory on a gravel road. It just doesn’t happen. Amazon, Walmart, and other corporations are looking for well-maintained thoroughfares and easy access to highways, not something that barely gets the job done and needs replacement every couple of years.

Businesses of all sizes certainly don’t build new facilities in 2023 in places that don’t have fiber. Time after time, regardless of location, I hear the same refrain, “Once the fiber was lit, businesses considered us seriously as an option,” followed by a list of new neighbors moving into town, creating good paying jobs and adding to the local tax base.

It’s not just the Fortune 500 that need fiber, but your local grocery store is clamoring for it as well, according to the Wall Street Journal. A January 23, 2023, piece, “Bandwidth Challenges Limit Grocery Chains’ Technology,” laments that many stores lack internet and sufficient broadband to power new initiatives. Everything from AI-enabled inventory tracking systems to HR systems need more capacity, especially as chains work to cut costs and reduce manual labor by digitizing

operations. Ahold, operator of brands including Food Lion and Stop & Shop, is getting by with today with 10 to 100 Mbps speeds, but if it decides to leverage more bandwidth-heavy tech, it will need more and easily-upgradable speed.

Speaking of new advances, AI/ML and high-speed broadband are closely related. High-speed broadband enables fast transfer of large amounts of data, which is crucial for training AI models. Additionally, AI applications such as online streaming, virtual reality, and autonomous vehicles also benefit from high-speed broadband by enabling seamless delivery of real-time data. Thus, highspeed broadband infrastructure is essential for the growth and deployment of AI/ML technologies.

Surprise! Everything in the paragraph above after the comma was written by ChatGPT, the technology Microsoft is rolling into its Bing Search engine and practically everything else these days.

AI is interesting because everyone sees it as a way to get better and faster insights with fewer people. The problem with ChatGPT and other current tools is that I have no idea what sources it used to generate the paragraph, so it could be making stuff up between the facts that large amounts of data are crucial for training AI models and high-speed infrastructure is essential for the growth and development of AI/ML technologies. I’d argue with ChatGPT’s assertion that online streaming is an “AI” application unless you are doing deep fakes of video, but that’s a different discussion.

In closing, I’d like to thank the FBA community for supporting our efforts at Fiber Forward and look forward to more good conversations in the year ahead.

Sincerely,

CTA Predicts 2023: Enterprise Tech Innovation, Continued Consumer Services Growth

By Doug Mohney

When the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) leads with Enterprise Tech Innovation at its annual “Tech Trends to Watch” to kick off CES, it’s time to pay close attention. Enterprises are going to be looking to ways to improve efficiencies and do more with fewer people this year with a potential recession on the horizon and labor shortages affecting all sectors of the U.S. economy, according to the association’s presentation on January 3, 2023.

“Twenty years ago, technology was the ‘nice to have’ when it comes to business or commercial problems,” said Steve Koenig, Vice President of Research at CTA. “Today, the truth is we can’t hire workers, certainly if we’re talking about skilled labor and knowledge workers... More and more commercial enterprises across the globe are going to be employing cloud, AI, robotics, and cybersecurity.”

CTA framed four services of cybersecurity, cloud, AI, and

robotics as “digital utilities” and the toolkit that underpins the modern enterprise. In this environment, Enterprise Tech Innovation is upgrading the global economy, with near-term transformation occurring already out of necessity thanks to pandemic impacts in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), supply chain, and retail. Longer-term, an emerging phase of automation and virtualization through applications of 5G in the enterprise space, Industrial IoT, and Web 3.0 would result in the large-scale use of smart factories, autonomous systems, and the Metaverse.

To enable this will require high-speed, low-latency connectivity to effectively deliver services, a point Koenig illustrated by discussing the transformation of the logistics sector through the application of digital utilities. Speed, safety, and savings are occurring through Industrial IoT increasing productivity in fully automated warehouses, safety improved by the application of both robotics and

Steve Koenig, CTA Vice President of Research, presents ‘Tech Trends to Watch in 2023’ at CES. Source: Consumer Technology Association.

The Metaverse is expected to be an important component in enterprise technology. Source: Consumer Technology Association.

wearable robotic-assist devices for humans, and savings delivered by optimized uptime and usage of floor space as well as lower insurance rates.

Cybersecurity earned its own slide in the presentation. “If you thought cybersecurity is basically the firewall, your IT guy, and the password keeper app on your phone, you’re critically mistaken,” Koenig said. “There’s so much going on here… We want to secure our data. But we also want to protect our children online. This is a very serious business. A lot of this is really approachable and we’re experiencing it even more and more in our daily lives. Take, for example, identity and access management. We used to say, ‘trust, but verify.’ Now, we say ‘zero trust.’ I don’t trust you at all. Zero trust is a great strategy in cybersecurity and online endeavors.”

What the Metaverse is and what it will ultimately mean is still a work in progress. “Any dialogue these days around Metaverse is very likely met with skepticism,” Koenig said. “Metaverse as a term is still a speculative one. But make no mistake, this is a real trend, just as the internet was a real trend in the early 1990s even though a lot of us didn’t know what it was. That’s exactly the same dynamic that is manifesting around the Metaverse right now.”

Virtualization and immersion are the experiences that should bring society to a better understanding of what the Metaverse might ultimately be. Virtualization enables virtual 3D spaces for work and play to deliver a much more compelling and interactive experience, along with “digital twins” of products and things in the real world. Immersion, because of its higher computational and bandwidth requirements for AR/VR, is more of an enterprise workspace right now. An aerospace company can use simulation to develop a new aircraft and then each operator can keep a digital twin reference model to track repairs and changes to each individual airframe as they occur.

Gaming, Consumer Services Remain Robust

Koenig also discussed CTA research on gaming and services within the U.S. market over the past year. In 2022, there were 164 million gamers, ranging between 13 and 64 years old. The average gamer today is spending an average of 24 hours per week on gaming, up from 16 hours in 2019.

“Increasingly, it’s about connection and socialization,” said Koenig. “The game is a construct for me for socialization. We’re playing the game but we’re also talking about what’s been going on…When we think about Metaverse and those immersive experiences, that will only grow and increase... our gamer cohort is pretty much built to share immersive experiences.”

Consumer services became very important coming out

of the pandemic. “In fact, a lot of customers adopted new services during the season of the pandemic, like ordering groceries online,” Koenig said. “The key takeaway is that consumers, not just in the U.S. but around the world are sticking with it. We’re seeing a transmutation of consumer behavior really emphasizing service… 31% of total U.S. consumer technology revenues is attributable to services. That’s a big percentage that’s only going to grow.” Drivers of that growth will include audio and video streaming, cloud gaming, fitness and health services, and home security.

CTA’s consumer services findings were independently supported by research from Parks Associates, presented at the firm’s CONNECTIONS™ Summit at CES. Specializing in emerging consumer technology products and services, the market research and consulting company released 15 whitepapers examining the continuing growth and role of applications such as next generation controls, home energy management, streaming, support for the smart home, Wi-Fi and managed services, home security, and growth opportunities within commercial buildings, especially apartments, independent living, and student housing.

Parks Associates’ research shows 87% of internet households have at least one streaming service with 63% of U.S. Internet households owning a smart TV, according to a January 13, 2023, press release by the company. With 38% of U.S. internet households owning at least one smart home device, the firm reports annual home spending of $350 billion across home phone, internet, mobile, security, and connected devices in the home.

Home networking solutions have become more value to consumers, according to Parks, with around 41% of U.S. home internet households owning a mesh networking product. One of the firm’s CES-released white papers, developed with Calix, examined Wi-Fi managed services and the subscriber experience. Its research found that the average number of home connected devices rose from nine per household in 2016 to 16 per household in 2022, with growth occurring in a mix of smart health, smart home, and computing and entertainment products.

However, home network performance remains an issue in many homes, with almost 40% of U.S. internet homes reporting problems with home network performance such as Wi-Fi dead spots or areas with poor performance such as slow download speeds and high latency. Parks Associates notes that Wi-Fi stresses within the home include smart home products, such as IP security cameras, that are deployed at the edge of the network where coverage is more challenging and smart TVs deployed in multiple rooms of the household. Work From Home (WFH) also played a role, with uplink speeds necessary for real-time conferencing becoming a concern for consumer internet home needs.

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FBA Introduces 2023 Board of Directors

By Doug Mohney

At its 2022 Premier Members Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida, the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) elected its new slate of Board members for the upcoming year, electing new officers, and bringing on three new members while re-electing another member to a second three-year term. The new Board is comprised of industry leaders representing the diverse spectrum of companies from across the fiber broadband industry and have served on the Association’s committees.

“This year is one of the most exciting for both the Fiber Broadband Association and our industry,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO at the Fiber Broadband Association. “Our membership is working hard to accelerate the deployment of fiber broadband networks and enable every community to leverage the economic and societal benefits that only fiber can deliver. Our 2023 Board of Directors is an impressive, diverse group of leaders that will guide us through this journey and accelerate our vision to advance quality-of-life and digital equity anywhere and everywhere.”

The new Board’s expertise will help steer the FBA to advance its goal to close the Digital Equity Gap for all Americans.

The full 2023 Board of Directors includes the following industry leaders that have demonstrated a continued commitment to the Fiber Broadband Association and its mission to create a better broadband future in North America:

y Chair: Joseph Jones “JJ,” President at On Trac, Inc.

y Vice Chair: Jimmy Todd, CEO and General Manager, Nex-Tech

y Secretary: Kimberly McKinley, Deputy Director and Chief Marketing Officer, UTOPIA Fiber

y Treasurer: Joe Jensen, Director, Americas Market Development, Corning

y Mark Boxer, Technical Manager – Solutions and Applications Engineering, OFS

y Katie Espeseth, Vice President of New Products, EPB

y Scott Jackson, National Market Manager –Broadband, Graybar

y Gregg Logan, Vice President of Engineering, Telapex, Inc.

y Ariane Schaffer, Government Affairs & Public Policy, Google Fiber

Joseph Jones “JJ,” President at On Trac, Inc., was elected as the new Chair of the Board for a one-year term beginning January 1, 2023. He has provided dedicated leadership to the Fiber Broadband Association for many years, serving as Chair of the Conference Committee for a decade and was Vice Chair of the Board in 2022.

Kimberly McKinley and Ariane Schaffer are newly elected Board members and will each serve three-year

terms starting in 2023. Each of these individuals have demonstrated long-term commitments to the Fiber Broadband Association. McKinley was a co-creator and cochair of the Fiber Broadband Association’s Public Officials Roundtable. Schaffer served as co-chair of the Fiber Broadband Association’s Public Policy Committee.

Mark Boxer was re-elected to a second, three-year term and will continue to provide exceptional leadership for the Association’s Optical Telecom Installer Certification (OpTIC Path™) workforce development initiatives. Gregg Logan, from C Spire’s parent company Telapex, will fulfill the remainder of C Spire’s vacant board seat term. He has served as secretary on the Fiber Broadband Association’s Board of Directors in previous years and most recently on the Association’s Senior Council Committee.

Kevin Morgan, Chief Marketing Officer at Clearfield, and Joanne Hovis, President of CTC Technology & Energy, termed out of their tenure on the Board of Directors. Morgan contributed over twelve years of service on the Board, serving as Chair in 2015, 2019, and 2022. He will now serve on the Fiber Broadband Association’s Senior Council Committee alongside Mike Hill and John George. Hovis provided her leadership and expertise to the Board for six years and will continue to serve the Association on the Executive Advisory Committee.

FBA Chair Joseph Jones “JJ”

Vice Chair Jimmy Todd Secretary Kimberly McKinley

Treasurer Joe Jensen Board Member Mark Boxer Board Member Katie Espeseth

Board Member Scott Jackson

Board Member Gregg Logan Board Member Ariane Schaffer

FBA Public Policy UpdateWelcome to the 118th Congress

By Marissa Mitrovich, Vice President of Public Policy, Fiber Broadband Association

Welcome to the 118th Congress, which commenced on January 3rd. There are over 80 new members of Congress and the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) is excited to meet them all and share with them why our over 450 members know that “when you lead with fiber, the future follows.”

While many observers assume that few landmark pieces of legislation will pass due to the split leadership among chambers, FBA remains optimistic that telecommunications policy will continue to be bipartisan and productive. In fact, the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA-05) opened the committee’s organizing meeting acknowledging the committee’s history of trust among members and bipartisanship. We have historically seen a similar working relationship in the Senate Commerce Committee and are hopeful we will see the same over the next two years.

It is important to note that the Republicans have a slim majority in the House and the Democrats have an even smaller majority in the Senate. This means that to pass any legislation, there will need to be compromises made by both parties, they will need to find enough consensus on the substance of bills for legislation to be passable in both chambers and to be signed into law. This does not have FBA concerned when it comes to advocating for top FBA priorities which include permitting, guarding our country through supply chain security, and ensuring Americans have affordable, reliable, and accessible high-speed internet. These priorities are shared by most Americans and the leaders who serve in this current Congress. FBA will be providing an opportunity for our members to engage with Congress to discuss these issues with the Fiber Day on The Hill on March 29, 2023.

FBA has already been engaged in many conversations this year with Congressional and Administration staff and we are seeing a lot of energy around the topic of permitting. We have shared that FBA’s membership is very interested in finding ways to streamline permitting policies that facilitate access to government rights-of-ways and infrastructure. There is also a focus on supply chain, and both Congress

and the Administration want to ensure that scheduled infrastructure grant funds are poised for success. We will see a lot of focus on grant programs and broadband from key committees, especially once states begin receiving BEAD funding allocations.

The ReConnect program at the Rural Utility Services (RUS) within the Department of Agriculture has played an instrumental role offering funding that has allowed fiber broadband deployed to reach some of the hardest to most rural locations in the country which have often been overlooked. The Farm Bill will need to be reauthorized and a part of this bill will include the continuance of funding for the ReConnect program.

In addition to this bill historically being supported across parties, there is another development that could also contribute to advancing spending bills. Congress recently reinstated earmarks after a decade long absence. Members of Congress will be allowed to include priority projects for nonprofits and government entities in appropriations bills which may incentivize spending bills being passed on time and not extended in the form of limited continuing resolutions as we have seen in recent Congresses. A focus on this legislation will be an opportunity to share with Congress how FBA members have been at the table with ReConnect and our plans to continue to be.

These are some of the issues where FBA will engage, and as new topics arise, we will ensure our membership has a seat at the table. FBA looks forward to working with legislators in the 118th Congress who want to move towards bipartisan compromise on issues and prioritize bringing high-speed fiber broadband to all.

Committee Activity Highlights

Recent Public Policy Committee activities include changes in the committee’s composition. FBA is off to a strong 2023 with new public policy leadership and committee membership. Marissa Mitrovich started as the Vice President of Public Policy for Fiber Broadband Association. Chris Champion, Vice President of Government Affairs at C Spire, and Jordan Gross, Manager of Federal Government Affairs at Corning, will

co-chair FBA’s Public Policy Committee. Ariane Schaffer, Government & Public Policy at Google Fiber, is our FBA Board Liaison. If your company is interested in joining the public policy committee, please email mmitrovich@ fiberbroadband.org to join.

Senator Thune Letter on Federal Broadband Grant Programs

In December, FBA and peer associations received letters from Senator John Thune (R-SD) inviting comments on issues related to federal broadband programs. FBA submitted a response on behalf of the membership in early January highlighting the importance of fiber in ensuring federal programs use taxpayer dollars efficiently and all Americans are connected.

Fiber Day on the Hill

FBA will be hosting a Fiber Day on the Hill on March 29th. This is an educational event that will allow members of Congress and their staff to learn more about why fiber is required for our nation’s critical broadband infrastructure. FBA will be inviting key Congressional offices to the event that will feature demos and talks from FBA member companies covering fiber’s impact on the economy, workforce development, supply chain, sustainability, resiliency, fiber’s role in 5G, and quantum computing. Please let us know if you would like to invite any policymakers where your organization has a presence.

Broadband Equity, Access, and Development Grants and Mapping

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has now distributed planning grants to all states and all territories to develop five-year grant “Action Plans.” These action plans will need to be submitted to NTIA within 270 days of each state receiving funds. NTIA also released that it will announce funding allocations to states beginning on June 30, 2023, which triggers the submission of the initial proposals by the states within 180 days.

Mapping challenges were submitted by Friday, January 13, to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These maps will be used to determine the unserved locations upon which a substantial amount of the funds will be allocated to the states. Additionally, the FCC is encouraging state and local governments and broadband providers to file bulk challenges to the FCC’s Broadband Serviceable Location (Fabric) data by March 15. Bulk challenges received by that date are most likely to be addressed in time to be reflected in the update to the Fabric, scheduled for around June 30.

Build America, Buy America

AI’s Rapid Rise is Fiber’s Gain

By Doug Mohney

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone a surge in popularity over the last year, with significant consequences for society at large and businesses in general. We are comfortable with specialized applications such as conversational AI that drives voice assistants like Alexa and Siri and have fallen love with art generators that will take a simple text phrase and turn it into a beautiful image in a few moments. Other specialized tools work behind the scenes to improve health care outcomes, provide better interactions with customer support chatbots, and smooth out bumps in corporate supply chains.

Fiber provides the highways for AI to grow and thrive by providing low-latency, high-speed capacity supporting thousands of simultaneous users and the ability to move large amounts of business data in an opportune manner. We asked ChatGPT, an AI, to elaborate.

“AI applications, such as machine learning and deep learning algorithms, require vast amounts of data to be processed in real-time, which can be challenging for traditional broadband networks,” ChatGPT stated. “Fiber broadband, on the other hand, provides the speed and low latency required to transfer this data in a timely manner. This enables AI algorithms to quickly process and analyze the data, making it possible to deliver accurate results in real-time.”

ChatAI went on to point out that AI systems often are deployed in cloud computing environments, requiring fiber broadband to work within the data center, as well as to be easily accessible by users around the world. Service providers are among those users tapping into AI today to gain benefit.

“Folks in telco, ISPs, and other service providers have seen some leverage from machine learning in their businesses already,” said Jonathon Reilly, Co-Founder and COO at Akkio. “Increasingly, data is the new gold and data is the basis of being able to leverage AI and machine learning to extract value for your business. If you look at anything from GPT to any sort of predictive maintenance, customer churn prediction, targeted marketing spend, customer support triage, you just go down the list, making things more efficient and reducing costs and driving more revenue can only be achieved by really understanding your data and leveraging it.”

Akkio’s AI service is designed to make it easy for business operations people to use machine learning in their daily lives by preparing and analyzing the large amounts of data accumulated through daily processes and being able to take advantage of models created through Akkio’s machine learning (ML) processes to produce timely insight.

“Companies are increasingly generating exponentially larger streams of data every year,” Reilly said. “You need to be able to move that data around efficiently, manipulate it, and then deliver insights in a fast manner. One thing that’s really important to us in our product is getting customers results quickly, we call it time to insight. That’s entirely dependent on the pipes and the storage that are available in order to make that possible, as well as the compute technology and the way that we approach the ML engine process. We spend a lot of time working on making our compute efficient and trying to minimize delay.”

Shipping large amounts of data using fiber is the crux of effectively being able to use machine learning. Akkio is tailored to table-style data that you’d typically find collected and massaged in Excel or a larger database. Reilly said he’s seen customers training small modes with as little as 10,000 rows of data while there are larger ones moving 260 million rows of relevant information out of its data warehouse with terabyte-sized sets.

“We’re actually gated in some ways by the times it takes to transfer data [today],” Reilly said. “We’ve had to do a bunch of engineering around issues with larger data sets, like intelligently subsampling the data in the right ways to make the problem tenable today. Our main limiter today is someone doesn’t want to wait around for a day to see if there’s a pattern in their data that’s going to be valuable to their business. They’d like to get an answer in 10 minutes. If you have to tweak, tweak, and input or eliminate something and do it again, pretty soon the work flow gets untenable.”

However, the emergence of generative AI tools using large language models (LLMs) with fewer guardrails, such as ChatGPT, have raised practical and ethical questions. Such tools are being used today to write software code and help with essay creation, which is great for saving time but less useful when students use it as an unauthorized shortcut on homework.

unauthorized shortcut on homework.

LLMs can also follow the old IT adage of “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” generating inaccurate, misleading or false information, according to “The Next Generation of Large Language Models,” a February 7, 2023, Forbes piece. Put more simply, the current generation of LLMs make stuff up.

Despite these issues, Microsoft is going all in on AI to enhance its products and services. Microsoft has incorporated OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine and Edge browser to improve search results, provide complete answers to questions, improve chat, and enable a new creative experience, with other applications expected to incorporate AI in the future; its LLM implementation will provide source citations, so you can understand the rationale behind its recommendations.

The rapid growth of AI is undeniable. When ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, it reached one million users within less than a week, despite being an unfinished product launched as a “research preview.” In early January 2023, CNBC and others reported Microsoft would invest $10 billion into OpenAI, with resources being put towards more computing power and connectivity.

AI is critically dependent upon large scale, purposebuilt cloud computing resources and high-speed fiber connectivity to link everything together. Microsoft and Open AI built one of top 5 supercomputers in the world to support their development efforts. The machine is a single system with more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs, and 400 Gbps of network connectivity for each GPU server – not exactly something you can fit into a pocket or put on a desktop.

With hundreds of millions of people around the world clamoring to work with ChatGPT, OpenAI launched a subscription for access service, ChatGPT Plus, in February. Users who pay $20 will get priority access to new features and improvements as well as faster response times and general access to ChatGPT during peak times, while free usage will be limited. Providing priority access requires lots of bandwidth and low-latency.

Regardless of the type and style of AI and its hiccups, AI will continue to rise in importance. “We’re at the front-end of the AI explosion with ChatGPT unlocking a lot of people’s first interaction with an AI/ML platform. Every data-driven process in business is going to be underpinned by machine-learning models in the next five years,” Reilly stated. “It’s the next competitive battlefront. If you want to be competitive, you need to be working as an organization to adopt the ability to extract value from your data across the organization. It’s going to be everywhere in every business, permeating everything.”

Source: Midjourney AI.

Source: Midjourney AI.

With one text command – ‘/image prompt: fiber installer’ –Midjourney generated this image. Source: Midjourney AI.

Adams Cable Equipment

Adams Cable Equipment

Taking Stock –State Broadband Offices Prep for BEAD

By Doug Mohney

All 50 states and six territories are gearing up to spend an initial $100 million in BEAD money and jockeying to secure more funding out of the overall $42.45 billion pot. Many have built their own broadband coverage maps and plan to do battle with the latest versions of Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) latest plots. Winning this battle means more money to reach more people. Losing may put in-need households out of reach and on the back burner for high-speed connectivity, potentially for years.

We wanted to get an idea as to the biggest challenges states have in delivering broadband to their citizens, how much and what sort of pre-BEAD monies they were spending on broadband, if they were developing their own broadband maps, how they were going about challenging the FCC mapping process, how they were preparing for BEAD, and what long-term challenges states might face in getting broadband to everyone.

After reaching out to a distributed sample of state broadband offices around the county, we received responses from Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, Nevada, and Washington before the Fiber Forward publication deadline. We are especially appreciative to the public officials who found the time to respond, given the amount of work they are involved in at this time in staffing up their offices, evaluating and challenging the latest round of FCC broadband maps, and building the foundation for long-lasting, sustainable high-speed networks to serve their citizens.

Colorado

y Agency: Colorado Broadband Office, created in: 2016

y Full-time staff working on broadband: 15

y Open positions at time of interview: 1

y State goals for broadband: 100/100 Mbps

y Estimated unserved/underserved households: 47,000/195,000

y Spokesperson: Brandy Reitter, Executive Director, Colorado Broadband Office

Hawaii

y Agency: University of Hawaii

y Full-time staff working on broadband: 3, plus some part-time

y Open positions at time of interview: 5

y State goals for broadband: 100/20 Mbps, following FCC & NTIA guidance

y Estimated unserved/underserved households: FCC 25,000 estimate, no clear number on unserved

y Spokesperson: Garret T. Yoshimi, VPIT & CIO, University of Hawaii

Minnesota

y Agency: Office of Broadband Development, created 2013

y Full-time staff working on broadband: 7

y Open positions at time of interview: 3

y State goals for broadband: 100/20 Mbps, following FCC & NTIA guidance, 2026 for full state coverage

y Estimated unserved/underserved households: Approximately 291,000 underserved and unserved homes

y Spokesperson: Bree Maki, Executive Director of Minnesota’s Office of Broadband Development

Nevada

y Agency: Office of Science, Innovation, and Technology, created 2015

y Full-time staff working on broadband: 1 plus contractors

y Open positions at time of interview: None

y State goals for broadband: Per FCC guidelines

y Estimated unserved/underserved households: close to 250,000 households

y Spokesperson: Brian Mitchell, Director, Office of Science Innovation and Technology

Washington

y Agency: Washington State Broadband Office, created 2019

y Full-time staff working on broadband: 9

y Open positions at time of interview: 3 in digital equity programs

y State goals for broadband: 150/150 Mbps notational

y Estimated unserved/underserved households: 167,000 households unserved,2.14% of households underserved.

y Spokesperson: Mark Vasconi, Director, Washington State Broadband Office

y Common and Local Challenges for Closing the Digital Divide

Across the board, state broadband officials cited infrastructure, construction costs, affordability, and adoption as the biggest challenges to delivering broadband to all the unserved households in their state, with supply and labor constraints also causing concern.

Common issues include making sure the state knows which households are unserved and where they are at, understanding the costs to reach those households, plus providing what Director Mark Vasconi calls “wraparound services” like digital navigators. “We’re trying to reach not just a universal broadband service, we are also trying to address digital equity requirements,” said Vasconi. “That’s why affordability comes into play, as well as making sure that people have devices, and a big part of adoption is digital literacy. All of that has to play clearly.”

Few are happy with FCC broadband map accuracy, believing coverage is overstated. Some have built their own maps while others are in the process of doing so.

Exacerbating the problem for several is geography. “Terrain and the high cost of building infrastructure is a major obstacle we face in connecting Coloradans,” said Brandy Reitter, Executive Director, Colorado Broadband Office. “The majority of Colorado households in need of broadband access or help with affordability and adoption are in rural parts of the state, so our office is prioritizing those residents as well as those areas of the state where people lack access to the internet.”

85% of Nevada’s land is managed by the federal government, such as Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Department of Defense, and the like,” said Brian Mitchell, Director, Office of Science Innovation and Technology in Nevada. “The federal permitting process is complex. It also takes a lot of time. We are working with our federal partners to better understand their process. We’re also working to educate providers and construction partners about the process to ensure permitting applications are complete and accurate so that the process can be streamlined. We’re also informing our federal partners of the volume and location of future projects so they can be prepared.”

While Colorado faces rocky mountainous geography, Hawaii has a middle mile challenge requiring investment into a new inter-island subsea fiber optic cable ring system to deliver robust and reliability broadband across the islands. “We need to ensure the historically-hidden middle mile does not fail us and leave entire islands or our entire state cut off from the global internet,” said Garret T. Yoshimi, VPIT & CIO, University of Hawaii. In addition, like Colorado, Hawaii faces the issue of high-cost rural areas lacking sufficient last mile infrastructure.

One of Nevada’s big challenges is bureaucratic. “Over

Mitchell noted that the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act provided for additional staffing at the Department of Interior and Department of Agriculture and the state would be advocating for additional staff in local permitting offices in Nevada where it is needed to process permitting applications.

Organizing to Build Broadband

Some states had significant broadband development efforts long before BEAD rolled out last year, coordinating resources and allocating state taxpayer dollars to provide broadband to their unserved and underserved households. Minnesota opened the doors for its broadband office in 2013 while Nevada (2015) and Colorado (2016) followed, making them old timers compared to Hawaii (2021) and Washington (2019).

Nearly all state broadband offices we talked to were staffing up in anticipation for allocating and managing the forthcoming surge in BEAD monies, regardless of their date of inception. How to find and keep talent over the long term was a concern for at least one director, given the competition between public and private sector jobs and the fluid nature of today’s younger workforce.

“There are a lot of folks engaged in broadband offices who are telecom veterans that are in, let me say, the mature stage of their career, like me,” stated Mark Vasconi,

Director, Washington Broadband Office. “Telecom has always been my blood. I think there are folks in my age cohort that are similarly situated, or you find people who have been in state government for a while or you find people who are younger who see this as a great stepping stone along the path to a more lucrative position. I don’t know what the half-life of state broadband directors is, but from the very small sample set I have, it might be about 12 to 14 months.”

Digital equity programs continue to gain in importance, with some states choosing to have separate offices for them on the org chart outside of the traditional broadband network construction flow while the primary focus of the state office remains on building out infrastructure.

monies into prepping for its inter-island middle-mile ring. Minnesota is putting $130 million in CPF funding into broadband construction while Washington was awarded $145 million in ARPA funds in 2022 with another $122 million expected to be allocated in 2023. Nevada is working through a process to deploy $338 million in ARPA money this year.

Some states have funded broadband projects for a number of years prior to ARPA and BEAD, giving them a leg up in the planning and grant distribution processes. Colorado’s Broadband Development Board (BDB) has allocated funds through a competitive grant process since 2014, with $4 million in state funds awarded in 2022. Minnesota put out $126 million in state monies between 2014 and 2022 with the latest proposal from Governor Walz coming in at $276 million for FY24 and FY25. Washington has provided state match funding for ARPA programs to progress.

All Over the (Broadband) Maps

Questioning the accuracy of the FCC broadband maps is par for the course, with some states allocating considerable resources to develop and maintain their own maps so they can reach the households most in need and not miss anyone in the process.

One state is taking a unique approach on how it is organized to spend BEAD dollars. “Hawaii did not take an explicit step to setup a standalone ‘state broadband office,’ but rather, after lengthy discussions in Former Governor Ige’s cabinet and executive team, including with our Congressional delegation, it opted to designate the University of Hawaii to staff the role,” said Yoshimi. The University of Hawaii was officially designated the lead organization to handle federal broadband grant programs in the summer of 2021 and has been fully engaged with the state administration to ensure the state is tracking and fully participating in the full range of available federal funds that are available, including COVID relief funds and BEAD.

The Pre-BEAD Funding World

Every state broadband office we spoke with had some processes and staff in place to work with pandemic relief funds flowing through various aspects of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), with disbursements to local projects taking place last year into this year. Colorado has deployed around $18 million from Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF) awards and is expecting to deploy $171 million this year from ARPA Capital Projects Funds (CPF). Hawaii is putting ARPA

Colorado has a staff of five people dedicated to developing accurate broadband maps. It has purchased Ookla data and hired Esri as its mapping vendor to assist in developing location level maps. The state office submitted 13,000 challenges to the FCC Fall 2022 map release, challenging on physical location, and says it will continue to challenge the FCC maps both on location and availability.

Hawaii is not funding its own broadband maps, with multiple community and crowd-sourced mapping efforts emerging over the past two years. Yoshimi says the state is reviewing its options for fabric challenges at this time. “Given the uncertainty in the FCC maps to identify candidate locations, we will have to rely on carriers and our community to clean up the data that will guide BEAD and other investments.”

Nevada is working with a GIS firm to create its own broadband maps, using a combination of state and federal funding. BEAD funds are going into research and data collection to identify unserved and underserved locations. The state has submitted over 45,000 challenges, both location and availability, to the latest FCC map and is the process on working on more.

Minnesota has had its own broadband maps since 2009, mostly using state funds to pay for the efforts with a

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Solving the MDU Gigabit Coverage Challenge

By Pierre Trudeau, President and CTO, Positron Access

Recent years have seen operators deploying more and more fiber miles to achieve the highest possible Homes Passed metric, with the focus on serving Single-Family Units (SFU) along these routes. Legacy MDUs were “bypassed” due to the difficulties and expense of bringing fiber to each door in these MDUs. This has created a digital divide for tenants in these buildings despite the nearby access to fiber.

Over 25% of U.S. residents live in MDUs. Unlike their neighbors, their internet access is limited to the lesser capabilities of VDSL2 or DOCSIS 3.1. For operators, this means a higher churn, missed revenues and an overall negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) from these frustrated target subscribers.

Addressing the MDU challenge

Recent work by the Broadband Forum (BBF) has focused on revisiting the best fiber extension technologies to leverage existing in-building wiring for these MDUs (telephone pairs or coaxial cabling), extending Gigabit services from nearby fiber without any construction complexity or disruption.

The BBF Technical Report TR-419 defines the notion of Fiber to the extension point (FTTep), describing different ways of providing fiber-based access to customers by employing existing copper infrastructure to facilitate deployments in a more economically attractive way. This can be achieved by extending the fiber network with the inbuilding wiring infrastructure to provide Gigabit access into the home. FTTep addresses how user traffic flows from fiber to coax or copper and then to a Gigabit Ethernet interface to connect to a residential gateway or Wi-Fi router.

Increasingly, the preferred technology for FTTep is G.hn, an access technology for operators looking to simplify their access network with an “Ethernet-like” technology over the existing wiring. A G.hn Access Multiplexer (GAM) is an Ethernet switch where each G.hn subscriber port supports up to 1.7 Gbps of dynamically allocated bandwidth for nearsymmetrical gigabit services to each residential gateway (RG).

Adding xPON with OMCI support results in a transparent fiber extension

The last element to achieving a transparent fiber extension was for a GAM device to appear to an Optical Line Terminal (OLT) as an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) with multiple Gigabit Ethernet subscriber ports to the OLT (see diagram).

Native support for the ONT Management Control Interface (OMCI) by a GAM device allows the OLT and the operator OSS/BSS systems to define and activate services and subscribers as if they were delivered entirely over a fiber feed to a typical ONT. The GAM uses the management information received via OMCI to enforce the services and subscriber definitions as it uses G.hn to extend fiber over the copper or coaxial infrastructure and ultimately to the RG. OMCI is also used to retrieve operational data from each subscriber to monitor the services with the same level of visibility and control as with fiber.

Why does this matter for operators?

Fully leveraging an xPON infrastructure with G.hn FTTep is key to solving the MDU challenge and to unlocking the large MDU market. This is particularly attractive to telco operators and cable MSOs that are pushing a fiber-first strategy. The additional MDU-based subscribers come with a minimal investment and maximize the return on the already deployed fiber in a market.

The fiber-divide is solved and MDU tenants become strong supporters and your NPS goes way up along with revenues while the churn percentage is much lower. These operators can then build upon their newly found dominant position in the MDU market with better services and coverage. This expanded subscriber base generates extra revenues to support managed Wi-Fi across the MDU and a host of complementary services (home security, parental control, etc.) to secure their market position and achieve higher ARPU from these subscribers.

The last element to achieving a transparent fiber extension was for a GAM device to appear to an OLT as an ONT with multiple Gigabit Ethernet subscriber ports to the OLT. Source: Positron Access.

Wi-Fi 7 – The Key to Unlocking the In-Home Experience

By Doug Mohney

One of the quiet truths underlined by the pandemic was the speed and performance gap between fiber broadband services and existing generations of Wi-Fi technology. Routers and mesh network devices today are challenged to deliver hundreds of megabits per second to the many devices in the home simultaneously, an issue that perplexed fiber service providers touting the delivery of gigabit and multi-gigabit speeds to the home but unable to do little to affect service delivery in the home.

The latest generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 7, is a critical advancement to unlock the in-home experience for fiber providers, enabling multigigabit speeds, lower latencies, and improved mesh network performance. Being deployed in large scale venues today and arriving in consumer devices later this year, the technology will be a must upgrade for anyone wanting to get the maximum benefit out of their broadband connection.

“Wi-Fi 7 provides increased capacity and reduced latency for both Wi-Fi 7 and legacy devices when employed in a home mesh network topology, “said Nick Kucharewski, Senior VP and General Manager, Wireless Infrastructure and Networking, Qualcomm. “The key is higher capacity, and more deterministic low latency, not only at the device level but at the network level when you talk about home mesh.”

Kucharewski said Wi-Fi 7 was built for today’s broadband environment, including multi-gigabit speed broadband coming into the home and how people are using it with

support for real-time response requirements including gaming, two-way video, and more devices on the home network ranging from smartphones to the proliferation of home automation devices. “The average U.S. household has 22 connected devices, 23% of households have security cameras, 26% smart doorbells,” Kucharewski said. “It’s about supporting all those devices.”

Supporting all those devices means providing highspeed, low-latency connectivity, and the ability to support a variety of network device types sharing the same airwaves, including lower-speed and legacy devices alongside newer higher-speed devices. Wi-Fi 7 adds faster wireless connections, supporting channels of 320 MHz -- double the size of Wi-Fi 6’s 160 MHz channels -- as well as adding improvements in modulation. Wi-Fi 7 also enables the ability to dynamically allocate multiple radios for communication between two devices, a concept called multilink. Radios can be aggregated for an overall faster link or data can be alternated between radios to ensure low latency resilience if there’s interference or delay on one link.

Wi-Fi 7’s new smarts also include interference puncturing, providing the ability to carve around interference on a channel and use more of the overall RF spectrum rather than cutting the channel in half or further. The improvements should improve aggregate throughput about 10 times higher than Wi-Fi 5 and anywhere from 2 to 2.5 times higher than Wi-Fi 6, as well as being more power consumption efficient.

Qualcomm goes beyond the standard Wi-Fi 7 improvements within its platform to improve home mesh networking equipment by incorporating more intelligent radio usage between the base station and nodes through the home by leveraging all three standard Wi-Fi bands – 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz – and using interference puncturing to work around interference from neighboring devices. Using Wi-Fi 7 and Qualcomm’s mesh enhancements offers significant wireless network performance throughout the home even without having to upgrade the other Wi-Fi devices already in operation. Upgrading to Wi-Fi 7 further improves bandwidth and lowers latency for individual devices for noticeable benefits, so households can upgrade devices on their own schedule rather than having to upgrade everything at once.

“We feel the latency benefits will be most felt by gamers and if you’re doing real-time two-way video communication, where you might experience latency due to congestion in a traditional network,” said Kucharewski. “You can see a reduction where you’ve cut out all those very-long delay transmissions.”

The combination of intelligent radio usage and more RF bandwidth through wider channels and interference puncturing is also expected to provide higher performance at range throughout the home. Qualcomm believes total home wireless throughput using its Immersive Home Platform will deliver “over 20 Gbps and near instantaneous real-time response” and peak speeds up to 5.8 Gbps to a single connected device, according to a company press release.

For large venues, the new standard’s capabilities kick in to deal with hundreds and thousands of active users in the same area. “Wi-Fi 7 provides a number of features for interference avoidance when you talk about multiple devices operating on the network,” said Kucharewski. “What slows you down is one device having to wait for another device to finish transmission on the network. There are a number of innovations in Wi-Fi 7 that allow you to react to those kinds of situations where you can basically steer around those congestion events. It has the net effect of reducing latency and eliminating some of those delays that would impact your experience. Those improvements are visible in the home

Demand for real-time applications

network environment, but they’re even more clear when you start talking about more congested environments like a hotel or even going up to a stadium or an airport.”

High-end devices serving large venues and business environments based on Qualcomm’s Wi-Fi 7 Networking Pro Series Platforms should be available in the first half of 2023 with home Wi-Fi 7 devices becoming available in the second half of 2023, according to Kucharewski.

Some are taking a more tempered view of Wi-Fi 7’s improvements, based upon their ongoing experiences with previous versions of the technology, viewing it as an evolutionary advancement building upon previous work.

“We view Wi-Fi 7 exactly in the same way that we view the changes from Wi-Fi 5 to Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E,” said Adam Hotchkiss, Co-Founder and Vice President of Customer Solutions at Plume. “The user will see incremental benefits, not something that’s going to change their usage habits or the way they consume capacity. They’ll see increases in speed and slightly lower latency, but it won’t change their basic habits. A customer should expect and demand to be satisfied with WiFi 5, 6, 6E or 7- this is our mission.”

Hotchkiss said Plume is supporting Wi-Fi 7 as it comes to market, but the company continues to work on improving the applications side of the Wi-Fi experience.

“Applications become more important than throughput to a single device,” Hotchkiss said. “If you have a house that has 50 devices and all 50 devices are accessing the Internet at the same time, most of those devices are doing mundane things like checking in with a command sever, or sending some background information. You may have five devices that are performing critical real-time functions like a FaceTime session, Zoom call, or some other interactive applications like gaming or coming Metaverse applications. You want to be able to pick those particular real-time applications and process those packets before any of the others and make sure they have the lowest latency so they user will never see glitch or delay with them.”

Source: Qualcomm

4 1. Comcast: https://tinyurl.com/5n6cn4mn

2. Microsoft: https://tinyurl.com/28wsn222

High bandwidth, real-time applications dominate total traffic1: 71% Video traffic Gaming traffic 11%

in weekly meeting time vs 20202

Average Microsoft Teams user in 2022 reports: 252%

No Fiber Gambles in Las Vegas

By Doug Mohney

Through its CenturyLink legacy, Lumen has invested in Las Vegas fiber for a number of years. The company will be migrating its existing CenturyLink fiber customers into the Quantum Fiber experience in 2023, providing a fully digital buying experience and a fully digital platform to the market. At present via residential CenturyLink and enterprisefocused Lumen divisions, the company has over 150,000 locations passed with fiber in Las Vegas and plans to add at least 15,000 addresses in 2023 through its Quantum Fiber arm with steady expansion over the years to come.

“Las Vegas is a great market for us” said Scott Davis, Vice President and General Manager – Mass Markets Fiber, Lumen Technologies. “Not only is it home to over 2 million people, but it’s routinely one of the nation’s highest cities in growth and investment. It’s also great for us corporately from an exposure perspective with the strong tourism industry. All those things make it an attractive market for us from an investment perspective to serve all of those needs of the growing population.”

Adding more fiber in Las Vegas is part of the company’s larger strategy to expand from over 3 million locations passed today to over 12 million fiber-passed locations in the next several years within its 16-state footprint. Current plans will have Lumen’s Quantum Fiber build filling in gaps in the current network across the area, adding to places where it has existing capacity. However, things could change depending on the business and regulatory environments.

“Our build strategy moves to where demand is being generated, which is fluid because market conditions are always changing”,” said Davis. “It’s also based on where we have flexibility and agility to move based on conditions like supply chain and working with the various public stakeholders on issues like permitting and ensuring we’re partnering with them on timelines on road construction and those types of things.”

Lumen’s fiber footprint extends throughout the area, including North Las Vegas, Downtown, along the worldfamous “Strip,” out to the suburbs such as Henderson and Summerlin, and supporting enterprise and public sector customers. The vast majority of the company’s deployed fiber is underground, with the rock-hard desert soil being more expensive to bore through than in other parts of Lumen’s national footprint. To avoid supply chain issues, Quantum Fiber is ordering in bulk as much as possible, whereas in the past it placed smaller orders on a job-byjob basis.

Vegas’s scorching summer weather doesn’t impose a significant challenge. “The heat isn’t as much of a barrier as you see in other markets where you have factors like snow,” Davis stated. “People that live and work in Las Vegas acclimatize, have water strategies, and breaks and such. In the summer, you’ll see a lot of work happen when it’s cooler, in the evenings and early mornings.”

However, more significant hurdles within the Las Vegas territory are different permitting requirements between local governments and coordinating field crew schedules with them to minimize road disruptions. “We want to be good partners with municipalities,” said Davis. “For instance, if they have a road restoration project happening, we don’t want to come in later and bore through their nice new roads. So, there’s some coordination that needs to be done.”

Scott cited higher permitting costs in some Vegas neighborhoods as one inhibitor for a more aggressive buildout. “We’re in business,” said Davis. “Our investments need to be generating returns. The permitting costs are substantially different in one municipality versus another. It can flip the scale for us by making a build financially unprofitable.”

While most people think of bright lights and big casinos, Las Vegas and its suburbs continue to be one of the largest growing areas in America. Source: Doug Mohney.

FBA 2022 - A Year in Review

Source for all photos: FBA.

Mark Boxer, FBA Board Member and Lead for FBA’s Training and Certification Program, models a headset camera during the OpTIC Path™ pilot training course at Wilson Community College.

Brandy Reitter, Executive Director for the Colorado Broadband Office, explore local broadband initiatives during her keynote at a Regional Fiber Connect event in Copper Mountain in August 2022.

Keynote panelists gathered to discuss municipal fiber at Fiber Connect 2022. Speakers included Plume’s Jeffrey Gavlinski, Holland Board of Public Works’ Pete Hoffswell, Tennessee Economic & Community Development’s Taylre Beaty, City of Fort Collins’s Chad Crager, Ting Internet’s Amol Naik, and it was moderated by US Ignite’s Mari Silbey.

Ann Zimmerman, Broadband Program SpecialistOhio and Federal Program Officer for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, provides a keynote address at the Columbus Regional Fiber Connect in November 2022.

Kimberly McKinley, 2023 FBA Board Secretary and UTOPIA Fiber Deputy Director and Chief Marketing Officer, and Joseph Jones “JJ,” 2023 FBA Board Chair and On Trac, Inc. President, catch up at the 2022 Premier Members Meeting.

FBA Premier Members gather in St. Pete Beach, Fla., for the 2022 Premier Members Meeting.

FBA President & CEO Gary Bolton takes a moment during Fiber Connect 2022 keynotes to recognize the contributions of all the FBA Committee Chairs.

Bill Stiles from The Johnson Group explores the value and impact of research and brand positioning at the Columbus Regional Fiber Connect event.

FBA 2022 Board Chair/2023 Senior Council Member and Clearfield Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Morgan engages with attendees at the 2022 Premier Members Meeting.

FBA’s Lucy Green and Deborah Kish celebrate a successful year with Viavi’s Stephen Knight at the 2022 Premier Members Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Fla.

DZS welcomes visitors to its Fiber Connect 2022 Proof of Concept, “Enabling 5G, Smart Cities/Spaces, and IoT Services with Network Edge Transport and 100/200/400G Coherent Optics.

Mike Hill, FBA Senior Council Member and On Trac, Inc. Senior Consultant, presents at FBA’s 2022 Premier Members Meeting.

The 2023 FBA Board Nominees gather on stage at the 2022 Premier Members Meeting. State of Rhode Island Representative Deborah Ruggiero delivers the closing keynote at the Providence Regional Fiber Connect event, exploring the impact of broadband.

The Columbus Regional Fiber Connect event filled the room in November 2022, exploring the latest opportunities and strategies for fiber broadband.

FBA President & CEO Gary Bolton interviews CTC President Joanne Hovis and City of Boston Broadband Director Michael Lynch about broadband funding at the Providence Regional Fiber Connect event.

Students learn MDU omstallation at the OpTIC Path™ pilot training course at Wilson Community College.

Katie Espeseth, FBA Board Member and EPB VIce President of New Products, introduces a keynote speaker at the 2022 FBA Premier Members Meeting.

Source for all photos: FBA.

FBA Takes It to The Streets

By Rich Williams, Conference Program Director, Fiber Connect

A big focus in 2022 and into 2023 is creating opportunities for FBA to communicate more broadly and more intimately with everyone involved in the fiber broadband ecosystem. This includes key decision makers committed to leveraging fiber broadband for a generational level impact on their communities.

One key part of FBA’s strategy is to communicate directly, face-to-face, with communities through Regional Fiber Broadband Workshops. Four highly successful workshops took place last year. For 2023, FBA is taking it further, diving deeper into new topics and customizing each workshop agenda to address issues specific to the region, the operators that are building networks and launching services, and the communities involved.

FBA kicked off the first 2023 Regional Fiber Connect Workshop on February 7, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Consistently listed as a member’s top choice for a regional event, the workshop shattered attendance records for this series.

During the Raleigh event, local operators, regional legislative representatives, FBA members, and regulatory leaders discussed key issues including workforce development and training, building successful customer experience metrics that keep customers engaged and connected, best practices to address supply chain challenges, and the role of diversity and equity as our industry grows and evolves.

Nate Denny, Deputy Secretary for Broadband and Digital Equity for the NC Department of Information Technology Division, sat down with FBA’s Vice President of Public Policy Marissa Mitrovich to discuss the state’s plans for fiber broadband, creating opportunity for community broadband operators to understand how the state is utilizing the variety of federal funding mechanisms to address local challenges and opportunities.

FBA also used the Raleigh event to introduce its Fiber Broadband Triple Play initiative. The goal of this effort is to shift the focus from simplified metrics focused on homes passed to homes connected, and eventually homes served. Closing the digital divide is more than putting fiber outside of a home, but making sure all households can be connected and have the tools and skills necessary to participate in today’s digital society.

Future workshops will take place in Oklahoma City where tribal broadband will be the focus, and then in Austin, Lake Tahoe, and Minneapolis. Each event features the opinions and experiences of local operators, influencers, and

experts to dig deeper into what it will take to deliver fiber broadband down every street, into every home, in every community, across the country.

Fiber Connect 2023, FBA’s national conference, will be held August 20 – 23, at the Gaylord Palms Resort near Orlando. The conference committee, led by Lit Communities’ Ron Frye and EPB’s Evann Freeman, have spent the last six months expanding programming, building alliances, and looking for new and exciting conversations that will help shape this year’s program.

New content in 2023 includes:

y Six Operator Light Talks, Ted Talk style keynote addresses that showcase how operator networks are enabling disruption and innovation in their communities.

y Technology Deep Dives in partnership with The Broadband Forum.

y The C-Suite Forum, an invite-only assembly curated to bring FBA’s Premier Member leadership face to face with leading policy makers, regulators, and administrators to discuss the leading issues facing our industry today and into the next decade

y The State Broadband Summit will focus on the progress, potential, and initial impact of the NTIA’s BEAD program.

Fiber Connect 2023 will also include several Pre-Conference Workshops, three specialty luncheons, networking events, engaging breakout sessions, and opportunities for the industry to learn, grow, and leverage the historic opportunity ahead as we look to turn every street in the U.S. into a fiberfed information superhighway.

Nate Denny, Deputy Secretary for Broadband and Digital Equity for the NC Department of Information Technology Division, sat down with FBA’s Vice President of Public Policy Marissa Mitrovich to discuss the state’s plans for fiber broadband at the Raleigh Regional Fiber Connect event in February. Source: FBA.

Horizon Wins Kao Award

By Doug Mohney

On November 3, 2022, the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) presented the annual Dr. Charles Kao Award to Horizon, an Ohio-based fiber broadband service provider. The annual award recognizes individuals, organizations, and companies that leverage innovation to connect communities with fiber broadband. Horizon was selected as this year’s winner for its work in bridging the Midwest’s digital divide, delivering high-speed fiber broadband to communities across the region.

“Broadband providers everywhere are deploying high-quality, reliable networks that will finally close the digital equity gap in every community,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO at the Fiber Broadband Association. “Horizon is an excellent example of that effort. For over 125 years, Horizon has evolved with customer needs, delivering everything from telephone, radio, cable television, and now fiber broadband. The service provider had a banner year in terms of growth, and it is encouraging to witness its continued success in connecting communities across the Midwest.”

Horizon began in 1895 as a local telephone company. Today, the service provider operates 6,000+ miles of fiber to deliver high-quality connectivity to residents and businesses in Ohio, West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Throughout 2022, Horizon significantly expanded its fiber footprint to bring connectivity to more communities including new fiber builds in three key Ohio markets to support an increased demand for highly scalable, low latency bandwidth.

Horizon also completed an acquisition that added approximately 450 route miles of fiber to Horizon’s existing all-fiber network. As part of the Ohio Residential Broadband Expansion Grant Program, Horizon was commissioned to build new fiber networks that deliver symmetrical Gigabit speeds and reach nearly 2,500 underserved households in Ohio.

“Horizon takes pride in our dedication to premium customer service and our reputation for community commitment.

We understand that fiber broadband is crucial to enabling Midwest communities to compete in the digital economy, and we’ll continue our efforts to reach every corner with high-speed connectivity,” said Jim Capuano, CEO at Horizon. “The Fiber Broadband Association has provided unwavering support, resources, and guidance over the years. We are honored to accept its Dr. Charles Kao Award in acknowledgement of our determination to bring highspeed internet to all.”

The Dr. Charles Kao Award for Community Broadband honors Dr. Kao and celebrates the lasting impact he continues to make on the fiber industry. Dr. Kao, regarded by many as the “Father of Fiber Optics,” revolutionized the transmission of data and laid the foundation for fiber connectivity around the world. The award recognizes individuals, organizations, or companies that honor Dr. Kao’s innovation and connect communities with fiber optic technology. This year’s award was presented to Horizon at the FBA’s Regional Fiber Connect event in Ohio.

The FBA presents the annual Kao award in conjunction with Gimme Fiber Day on November 4, an international event to celebrate Dr. Kao’s birthday and the advancement of Fiberto-the-Home. The previous year’s recipient of the Kao Award was Steven Foshee, CEO at Tombigbee Communications. Foshee was recognized for his leadership of a powerful initiative to deliver broadband to rural Alabama, enabling communities there to grow and prosper. As the state’s first broadband partnership between an investor-owned utility and an electric cooperative, Tombigbee Communications teamed up with Alabama Power to use existing infrastructure to offer high-speed broadband services. Tombigbee Communications will lease available capacity on fiber infrastructure, used by Alabama Power on its electric grid for reliable and resilient service, as additional support for its backbone network to reach and connect its customers.

Horizon accepts the 2022 Dr. Charles Kao Award for community broadband efforts at the Regional Fiber Connect event in Columbus, Ohio. Source: FBA.

2022’s Boom Times, 2023’s Bright Future

By Gary Bolton, President and CEO, Fiber Broadband Association

Last year was one for the record books, with the industry deploying fiber to 7.9 million homes, surpassing the previous record set in 2019. Fiber now is deployed to 68.3 million U.S. homes, reaching nearly 50% penetration, with almost half those homes connected, according to the latest RVA research. The past year was the beginning of the largest investment cycle in the history of our industry, with the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) and its members ready to take fiber further in the months and years ahead.

The FBA sent new records on nearly every front, with the 2022 Fiber Connect conference having its greatest attendance. Beating the previous year’s record attendance by 50%, revenue for the conference was up 65% year-overyear. More importantly, the Association continues to focus on diversifying our non-conference revenue which was up 140% year-over-year. As a result, FBA’s total revenue last year was up 95% over the previous year’s record and we have rebuilt our financial reserves after pandemic drawdowns to place us in a very strong financial position for future investment.

While our Fiber Connect 2022 annual conference held in Nashville in June brought record attendance and world-

class content, we needed to spread our fiber message across the country, especially to community leaders that do not yet know us. As a result, FBA launched a series of Regional Fiber Connect workshops that were held in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in March; Providence, Rhode Island, in April; Copper Mountain, Colorado, in August; and we ended with record attendance in Columbus, Ohio, in November.

FBA regional workshops provided a more informal and engaging setting to discuss local broadband challenges and to help educate these communities on how to leverage fiber broadband for jobs, economic development, and improving the quality of life for residents. We will continue these workshops in 2023 in Raleigh in February, Oklahoma City in April, Austin in May, Lake Tahoe in June, and Minneapolis in October. A big thank you to our 2023 Board Chairman Joseph Jones (OnTrac), Conference Chair Ron Frye (Lit Communities), Program Director Rich Williams (Connect2 Communications), and to everyone that made FBA’s events a huge success this past year.

Membership growth has placed a significant role in FBA’s ability to speak as a single voice for the fiber industry to regulators, lawmakers, community leaders, and other

industry leaders. Net membership grew 46% year-overyear and 85% over the past two years. The value of the programs we’ve created is reflected in the fact that 51% of our member companies are broadband internet service providers, representing the demand side of the industry. On the supply and construction side, the FBA member company breakdown is 35% manufacturers and vendors, and 14% associate members such as consulting engineering firms and business consultants.

FBA’s biggest public policy victory for 2022 was clearly winning the battle of the last mile technologies. As soon as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act became law, FBA teamed with NTCA and Cartesian to develop our wildly popular Broadband Infrastructure Playbook to help ensure that every State and Territory was prepared when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was issued. We provided advance drafts of the Playbook to NTIA during its development and also submitted lengthy comments to NTIA, arguing for a fiber-first approach for awarding support for deployment projects.

As a result of our advocacy and that of our allies, on May 13, 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce and NTIA issued the BEAD program NOFO and declared that projects using “end-to-end fiber-optic architecture” will be prioritized for the $42.45B in broadband infrastructure funding. We also succeeded in having the Treasury Department maintain in its final rules for the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) broadband funding the requirement that eligible projects meet or exceed 100 Mbps symmetrical service with Treasury encouraging recipients to “prioritize investments in fiber-optic infrastructure wherever feasible.”

The FBA is extremely pleased how well the BEAD NOFO and the Treasury Department ARPA rules aligned with our efforts. In 2023, FBA will focus on ensuring these gains are not reversed in the face of promoters of other technologies. Of course, the decisions of NTIA and Treasury fully accounted for the vast advantage fiber has in terms of performance, reliability, security, and being future-proof.

Another major public policy milestone during the year was the FCC’s decision on August 10, 2022, to reject Starlink’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) long form application, denying the company of $885.5M in support to deploy broadband service. In 2021, FBA partnered with NTCA and Cartesian to develop a detailed model that we provided to the FCC, which demonstrated that Starlink would not be able to deliver the broadband performance it promised. The model provided a firm and defendable basis for the FCC to reject Starlink’s application, one that seems to be being verified by real world third-party data. The FCC’s action was a huge victory for the 640,000 households that would have been relegated to lowerspeed satellite service. Further, if Starlink had received RDOF support, these households would have been

effectively redlined and not be eligible for broadband infrastructure funding from BEAD and other federal, state, and local broadband programs.

In anticipation of the largest fiber investment cycle in history, FBA identified that workforce development would be critical to the success of building our nation’s critical broadband infrastructure. FBA spent over a year developing the premier fiber optic technician training program, OpTIC Path™, and we successfully completed the pilot in May 2022. The program consists of 144 hours of classroom and labs, with a Department of Labor registered 2,000-hour national apprenticeship.

FBA is currently engaged with over 39 states and over 28 community colleges and veterans training organizations across the country as we work to stand up this critical training in all 56 states and territories. Additionally, NTIA cited FBA’s training efforts as a best practice in their recently released NTIA Workforce Development Playbook developed for the state broadband offices. FBA has also entered into collaboration agreements with WIA’s Telecommunications Industry Registered Apprentices Program (TIRAP) and with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) for its unionized apprenticeship program. The Association continues to hold “Train-theTrainer” workshops around the country at our Regional Fiber Connect workshops. None of our workforce development efforts would be possible without the hard work and dedication from FBA Education Chair and Board Member Mark Boxer (OFS), FBA Research and Workforce Development VP Deborah Kish, and the efforts of the Education and Deployment Specialist Committees.

We are also pleased to report that our LATAM Chapter reported record revenue in 2022, as a result of very successful regional conferences in San Jose, Costa Rica, in July and in Bogota, Colombia, in November. In addition, LATAM has successfully launched its new training programs for the region providing education to more than 150 professionals from major operators in Latin America. Further, the Chapter achieved 45% growth in company membership year-over-year. Congratulations to Nelson Saito, LATAM President, Edna Preuss, FBA LATAM Director, and the LATAM Board for their excellent progress and success this past year.

Looking Forward to 2023

While 2022 will be hard to beat, I am so excited about our potential this coming year.

As key NTIA BEAD deadlines occur, a lot will have to be accomplished in a short period of time. To begin, we are encouraging every state broadband office and state workforce development office to carve out funds upfront for critical workforce development training in tandem with awarding infrastructure grants since our nation’s critical infrastructure will not get built without the boots on the

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Fiber’s Necessity in a Quantum World

By Doug Mohney

While “Quantumania” hit movie screens across the country last month, enthusiasm for a real-world quantum revolution steadily grows around the globe. Last year the U.S. government put nearly $900 million into Quantum Information Science (QIS), looking for advances in areas such as quantum sensing, computing, and networking, double the amount spent in 2019.

The international research community believes a prototype global quantum network – the Quantum Internet -- is feasible over the next decade, according to a 2020, Department of Energy’s (DoE) Quantum Internet Blueprint Workshop report. The DoE report cited the need for building and scaling quantum-protected and enhanced communications networks among the most important technological frontiers of the 21st century, with QIS efforts taking place in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.

Developing a nationwide quantum internet would have a major impact in many fields, leading to advances in such areas as astronomy, cybersecurity, chemistry, materials, and life sciences. But there’s a lot of work ahead to convert the quantum dream into usable hardware. A quantum network would move around single particles of light (photons or quantum bits) with extreme accuracy. Being able to move quantum bits large distances without affecting them requires a different way of thinking than today’s on-off light ocean of high-speed broadband communications. Fiber optics plays a key role in building a quantum network, but

there are a number of tools that need to be developed, built, and tested to make it a reality.

“A quantum [network] system is an analog system,” said Nicholas A. Peters, PhD, Section Head & Distinguished Research and Development Staff, Quantum Information Science Section, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Most of the photons you send don’t make it to the endpoint, so you either have to have lower loss, meaning you have shorter lengths [to travel], or you have to figure out a way to make up for the loss of photons.”

The largest current terrestrial quantum networks today are metro-sized and use customized, purpose-built equipment. Building a larger network that will scale to national size will require the creation of quantum repeaters, routers, and other foundational building blocks and the ability to move from one-off and low-volume devices to commercial production. Traditional routing puts a packet header onto a piece of information, but that doesn’t work for an individual photon of light. Routing will have to be handled externally, with the existing internet providing the communications channel between quantum routers.

Creating the quantum internet will initially require dedicated fiber to move around photons as well as traditional broadband capacity to provide routing and other control information to quantum network devices. Further, a quantum network works with the state of single photons while conventional

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Quantum networking efforts are still in the experimental stage as scientists and engineers built new processes. Source: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

Digital Equity: Academic and Private Sector Views

By Doug Mohney

Digital equity presents a problem that is not simply solved through building fiber to every home and turning it on. The root causes and potential solutions for the problem are deeper than simple connectivity and will require follow-on efforts to ensure affordable access to broadband, devices, and education when needed.

Finding Sustainability for Connectivity

“The digital divide, in my mind, maps onto every single element of inequality that already exists in the United States,” said Dr. Christopher Ali, holder of the Pioneers Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University. “We’ve got these divides existing in rural, remote, tribal, urban, lower income, minority communities, newcomer communities. I get a little frustrated when I hear elected or appointed officials say we’re going to end the digital divide in five years. The digital divide will only end when inequality in this country ends, because new technologies are going to be rolled out to wealthy urban areas first and then they’ll trickle down.”

Ali is concerned that one-off programs like the Federal Communications Commission’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) don’t have planned longevity and must be engaged as longer-term legislation to provide continued support. “Those folks dependent upon ACP are not going to suddenly find themselves incredibly wealthy to be able to afford a broadband subscription without this assistance. We need to make sure that a program as robust as ACP is sustainable. We need to be pushing elected officials to think about funding ACP in perpetuity, to make sure that the people who are going to be dependent on it can continue to rely on this type of connectivity. Otherwise, we might see a massive drop off in broadband subscriptions once the money dries up.”

Making ACP into a more sustainable program will require changes to existing ones, such as modifications to the Universal Service Fund (USF) with financial augmentation or Congress could bundle ACP as a part of larger assistance programs it already supports. Sustainability will also have to go into operational expenses for networks that operate at extremely high cost and also to areas where telecom providers have failed to maintain and upgrade infrastructure.

Networks need to be viewed not as simple capital expense projects but as sustainable long-term investments. “You think about a 20-year investment and suddenly it’s not that expensive compared to fixed wireless or any other network technology where you have to maintain it so much more aggressively,” said Ali. “Fiber is going to be the best investment for the buck, for sure.”

Ali is also concerned about the reliance of mobile phones for internet access, noting people need more than a device they can carry around in their pockets. “There is a reason why the FCC keeps saying mobile is not a replacement for fixed connectivity,” said Ali. “A phone is absolutely not good enough. I think about my college students. They can’t live off mobile access and devices alone. They can’t write essays or keep hotspotting for connectivity--that’s tremendously expensive. You need to have device access, a tablet or computer, with an affordable internet connection to do substantial work.”

Community efforts for providing access to devices and training are happening through many channels, Ali noted, with public libraries and universities providing the ability to check out devices for cardholders and students while non-traditional technology stakeholders such as churches, Meals on Wheels, and the YMCA are becoming local advocates and providing digital navigators to the people they serve.

Not being able to function in today’s digital society can have significant consequences. “A great example of this is booking your COVID vaccine appointment,” said Ali. “I booked my appointment, went in, and got my shot. No problem. That’s what we expected everyone to be able to do, but so many folks couldn’t. The call center phone lines were jam-packed because people didn’t know how to use a computer and get to the necessary website. Or they didn’t have a computer. I call it assumptive connectivity. We need to make sure we’re getting rid of these assumptions and meeting people where they are, not assuming they are at the same place we are at.”

Avoiding The (Build) Sins of the Past

The Digital Equity team at Google Fiber looks at access to broadband in three parts by analyzing data to figure

out who has access to fiber and if they have choices, who has affordability for devices and digital literacy skills, and carefully looking at who doesn’t have access and why during network construction.

“When Google Fiber builds out our footprints, we’re traditionally engineering led,” said Jess George, Head of Government & Community Affairs – East Region, Google Fiber. “We look at how we design the network in a way that’s the most efficient to build it. Sometimes what happens is you are accidentally reinforcing old red lines. Part of addressing equity is being very intentional about what existing infrastructure there is and not allowing ourselves to be passively part of the sins of the past, but proactively engaging in engineering networks that provide service across entire footprints of communities. It is an important part of an intentional way to advance digital equity.”

Google’s Digital Equity team of eight people is fully involved in the network planning process from the beginning to make sure communities are fully served. It reviews the company’s 24-month build plans every year, with its members sitting down with the technical operations team to see where the network is going and spot problems to address where builds aren’t happening.

“If I have concerns, I’ll always flag them,” said George. “Occasionally we’ve had communities reach out to us and

ask why their area never gets services. It’s a lot of science, and there’s a lot of art that goes into making sure that we’re really reaching all these communities.”

George cited a recent review in Carrboro, North Carolina, where an entire street of people got left out of highspeed broadband three times as the infrastructure in the surrounding area was upgraded by different providers over the years. Pure engineering issues had kept the street on the wrong side of the digital divide, leading Google Fiber to investigate alternative ways to get the street connected.

“This particular street had railroad tracks cutting them off from the rest of the neighborhood,” said George. “Ultimately, we had to file a request to cross the tracks and wait months until we finally got it approved. This problem took over a year to solve.”

Google Fiber is also leveraging its connectivity to deliver broadband to those who can’t afford it. “Since 2015, we’ve had our Gigabit Communities Program. Our partnership with public housing and nonprofit housing,” George said. “We bring a no-cost gigabit connection to every household and apartment building we partner with in these properties. We serve thousands of residents that get gigabit service in their homes for free. Additionally, the Affordable Connectivity Program has given us another tool to make sure that more households have a low-cost, high speed internet product available to them.”

Source: Dall-E/OpenAI

Advancing Digital Equity: with Angela Thi Bennett, Director of Digital Equity Programs, NTIA

By Doug Mohney

As the fiber industry embarks on building network connectivity to every household in the nation, closing the digital equity gap will require more than simply digging trenches and splicing connections. For some, getting a connection to the home will be only the beginning of a journey with other steps involved. Working to make sure everyone can successfully make that trek is Angela Thi Bennett, the first Director of Digital Equity Programs at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

“The President and Congress’ goal is to ensure that every American is connected to affordable, reliable high-speed internet and the skills and the resources they need to thrive,” said Bennett. “Within the role of Digital Equity Director, I’m working with states, territories, tribal organizations, and other stakeholders to apply a Whole-ofNation approach, to really think about what digital equity means to each of the communities that we’re serving.”

When the BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) was drafted, it was interpreted by some as extremely broad, but the intent was to recognize that every state and the communities within each state are different and have their own unique characters. “The solutions for digital equity may look different for each of those communities,” she said, with her role being to “challenge the possibilities” for defining what advancing digital equity solutions and their desired outcomes look like to maximize the impact of an available $2.75 billion distributed over five years.

Reaching digital equity is built around three pillars. Deploying affordable high-speed broadband infrastructure access to homes through BEAD last mile connectivity and middle-miles programs is one part, eliminating stop-gap measures that people have had to rely on. “If you have to go to the library or a fast food parking lot to get access, it’s not equitable,” Bennett said.

“The second pillar is making sure you have internetenabled devices that will meet the needs of that particular user,” she continued. “It’s determining the needs of the users and making sure the device meets that. Every user may not need a MacBook to be able to access telehealth appointments. I’ve heard people promoting the use of cell phones, but you can’t utilize a cell phone to do

homework online. Your cell phone is not conducive to apply for benefits online, but it is for checking your email and receiving text messages.”

The third pillar is making sure users have the necessary skills to be able to meaningfully use the internet, requiring the ability to assess what skills are needed and arranging the appropriate instruction. “For the individual who needs it, and I dealt with this in my previous organization, it’s a whole community effort,” Bennett stated.

As Director of Advocacy and Impact for a Cleveland, Ohio, non-profit, Bennett implemented a Whole-of-Community approach for a senior housing complex in the city, working with public and private organizations to get an internet connection into a community room, finding a stakeholder to provide refurbished devices for providing access, and arranging training so the people in the complex could use the connectivity and tools that were made available. The pandemic complicated the process of bringing seniors online because people had to stay home rather than come to an onsite training course in the complex, resulting in the need to have a call center to establish appointments and dispatch trainers to conduct in-home visits.

Bennett is sensitive to the fact that one size or one approach will not work for everyone. “We have to be

NTIA Director Angela Thi Bennett (L) at a listening session Oakland, CA. Source: NTIA.

sensitive to not only the needs of the community, but the needs of the people, making sure that we’re not going in and imposing what our solutions are onto the individual, but meeting them where they’re at and then identifying what are their needs and what’s relevant,” she said.

She also recognizes that while $2.75 billion is a historic amount of money, it’s not enough to close the digital divide on its own. “This is where a Whole-of-Nation approach is necessary,” Bennett said. “It takes all our different partners from all the different sectors to leverage and blend and braid different funding and resources available to close the digital divide. That said, device purchases and skills training are eligible uses under digital equity funding.”

NTIA is working with partners within the federal government, including the Departments of Agriculture and Education, HUD, and the Federal Communications Commission. “Sometimes the programs that providers are delivering may not be communicated effectively at a customer service level,” Bennett said. “When we hear that feedback from communities, we’re looping it back to our [federal] providers to provide them with an opportunity to improve the process.”

Collaboration with HUD is one collaboration success story Bennett cited. “We met with HUD’s tribal department,” Bennett said. “They pushed out information to all of their tribal stakeholders to encourage them to submit their Letters of Intent for the tribal set asides. We had an unprecedented number of Letters of Intent submitted, with over 450 sent in for the digital equity program and tribal entities.”

Bennett and NTIA have been equally forward-leaning, working with non-federal entities. “We are working with state library associations, Hispanic Federation, NAACP, National League of Cities, Boys and Girls Clubs, Pew,” Bennett said.

“We’re looking to work with community-based organizations to make sure states are aware of the different organizations that are serving with the community’s workforce development agencies, organizations that develop and assess people to make sure they’re in the right position for the job. There’s literally not an organization we won’t meet with. If you get into a room and know everyone in the room, then you know you need to push a little bit farther out because you should go into rooms where you don’t know people because we need to be expanding our networks to make sure everyone is involved in the planning process.”

Broadband service providers in particular need to know three things in working with the federal government on closing the digital divide. “First, it’s important they know who their NTIA state federal program officer is,” Bennett said. “They are our boots on the ground within the state to work with the state broadband offices and to work with the stakeholders within that state to make sure connections are being made. The second piece is to know your community and collaborate. If you are a provider, you should be reaching out to those stakeholders to form meaningful relationships with them so that you can really understand the needs of the communities and then involve them in cocreating the solutions for that particular community.”

The third piece is to include workforce development strategies. “It’s not enough to bring internet to those communities,” Bennett said. “How can we incorporate training and certification opportunities to those communities so that they can also economically participate in the infrastructure expansion efforts that are happening in their communities. Honestly, the most impactful thing providers can do is to really involve residents who have been left out of the digital economy into these opportunities. They want access to the good jobs that will be created and honestly that’s how we will begin to transform communities.”

Engagement sessions such as this are part of NTIA’s ‘Whole-of-Nation’ effort to work with communities, bringing together public and private resources to close the digital divide. Source: NTIA.

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Speaking Broadband to Power –FBA Public Utilities Roundtable

By Doug Mohney

Utilities have been a part of America’s landscape for over a century, providing the electricity to keep houses warm, streetlights on, and businesses running. Owning and operating the infrastructure to create and deliver power provides public and privately-owned utilities with unique assets and challenges to deliver broadband to communities. With around 20 member companies participating on roundtable calls, the Fiber Broadband Association’s Public Utilities Roundtable provides a forum for participants to advance the development and implementation of fiber within the sector, including the different mindset involved from power to broadband.

“As a public utility, we look at fiber in two ways,” said Pete Hoffswell, Chair of the Public Utilities Roundtable and Broadband Services Superintendent at Holland Board of Public Works. “First, fiber serves the utility itself, connecting our infrastructure, such as substations, water pumps,

Over the past 12 months, the roundtable has discussed a wide range of issues. “One of our recent meetings was on fiber optic sensing,” Hoffswell said. “The technology uses fiber optics to sense vibrations and temperature. It’s a very interesting technology for power utilities that have things in the ground, from electric services to natural gas mains, that are feeding our power plants. Any very sensitive hazardous component we want to keep a close eye on.”

Smart Cities has been a popular topic. “A component of Smart Cities is infrastructure, whether that’s a smart metering system or supporting common public utilities, like traffic control systems or other sensing operations that fiber can really empower,” Hoffswell stated. “We’ve talked about how some of us are using the fiber infrastructure to do things that we may not have thought we would have done in the past.”

wireless meter reading nodes, and other field-based public utility assets. Fiber lets us monitor and control those systems. Secondly, we use fiber to provide broadband service. Many of us are very interested in or are already providing broadband services to our communities.”

For municipalities and electric co-ops, providing services that benefit the community has been an ongoing part of their mission with broadband delivery the latest part of a legacy dating back to the electrification of the country. But provisioning and operating broadband services requires a different mindset from keeping the lights on.

“Power utilities are typically a monopoly,” said Hoffswell. “We own the infrastructure and provide service to everybody in our area. That’s not the same for broadband services where there’s competition. The Roundtable talks about the business of broadband. How do you work in a competitive environment and succeed? It’s a little different than the core mission of a utility.”

Part of the Smart Cities discussion includes Smart Grid attributes, said Hoffswell, where utilities can leverage connected power meters to follow electric usage directly rather than having to send out a physical “meter reader” to households. The ability to remotely turn meters off and on without having to send a technician provides benefits, as well as interpreting meter data to monitor service interruptions with relative certainty. Over the long term, fiber to the home provides the infrastructure to utilize solar panel power generation and home storage systems most effectively.

The Public Utilities Roundtable actively collaborates with other FBA committees and welcomes the opportunity to work with them and other FBA members as appropriate, recently working with the Public Policy Committee and the Public Officials Roundtable. “Many of those folks are from municipalities, small communities that have public power infrastructure, and they’re looking for ways to develop their communities by partnering with their local power providers,” said Hoffswell.

Power utilities are typically a monopoly. We own the infrastructure and provide service to everybody in our area. That’s not the same for broadband services where there’s competition.

– Pete Hoffswell, Chair of the Public Utilities Roundtable and Broadband Services Superintendent at Holland Board of Public Works

Cable’s Long-Term Fiber Path

By Doug Mohney

The cable industry has a long and productive relationship with fiber, one that often gets lost in higher level competitive battles between the MSO and traditional telecommunication industries. But the sector’s ultimate destination will be to all-fiber networks, according to Wall Street and CableLabs, the industry’s innovation center for research and development.

How fast will the cable industry move to all fiber plant? “We expect different choices to be made in different [population dense] areas,” said Grant Joslin, Vice President, U.S. Telecom Equity Research, Credit Suisse. “If you’re in an area where you’ve got millimeter wave wireless and you’ve got one fiber competitor or two or three fiber competitors, that’s the kind of area where you would prioritize first and

as soon as you’ve got components coming in, you would love to do those upgrades.”

Joslin made his comments during a November 2022 Fiber for Breakfast podcast, saying there would be less urgency for upgrading to DOCSIS 4.0 in less competitive markets, with suburban areas without fiber competition getting upgraded as a defensive basis as needed. Rural areas would likely to be the last to be upgraded. Industry-wide upgrades from the DOCSIS 3.1 to 4.0 standard would be more gradual and not resulting in a significant capital expense for larger service providers, given their existing expenditures.

Joslin noted that most cable operators won’t get the reliability of fiber through DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades, but

Cable plant will ultimately transform into full-fiber networks. Source: DALL-E/OpenAI.

the industry is quietly building in an on-ramp to all fiber networks through their latest hardware rollouts. “As part of the Step One piece of the upgrade, there’s a technology called GAP, the Generic Access Platform. If an operator decides that there’s no more use throwing good money after bad or they don’t see any more lifespan in the DOCSIS technology, it’s just a module swap [to move to fiber].”

Operators could migrate to all-fiber networks on a gradual basis, first migrating high-bandwidth users onto fiber to relieve pressure on the coax network and then ultimately upgrading everyone to fiber. “It’s a more elegant way [to migrate] than burn the entire network down and put in a new one,” Joslin said.

Cable’s Historic Fiber Entanglement

Through CableLabs, the sector has participated in the development of global standards through the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and IEEE, including Passive Optical Network (PON) definitions starting at GPON through 25G PON. The organization has also participated in work to establish higher-speed, longer-distance and higher split ratio coherent PON standards to deliver 100 Gbps on a single wavelength and 100G and 200G point-to-point connections on a single wavelength via coherent optics.

“First, the cable industry has been doing fiber to the home for years, just not quite at the rate of telco,” Knittle said. “There is an increase in fiber deployment that is occurring, and it boils down to the strategy of individual cable operators. As an industry and CableLabs as a neutral consortium, we don’t all have the same strategy. I like to say when you understand the strategy of one cable operator, you understand the strategy of one cable operator. Competition is different, the plant is different, whether its aerial or underground and things like that.”

Different fiber strategies cable operators are using include all-fiber builds in greenfield networks, upgrading older coax plant to all-fiber, and pushing fiber deeper into existing networks while deploying more intelligent edge devices in what the industry calls a Distributed Access Architecture (DAA), moving the physical access layer close to the home.

“Even though it may not be fiber all the way to the home, the growth of fiber in the cable industry is still fairly tremendous,” Knittle stated. “The good thing about that is that it’s an investment in outside plant that’s not wasted. Every time we invest in fiber, which we have been for years, it gets us closer to the ultimate endgame of fiber to the home. And again, when a cable operator actually makes that leap, whether they do it end-to-end or in an incremental success-based manner using DAA, there are fiber solutions available in the industry.”

“In discussions of hybrid-fiber coax (HFC) cable networks, people automatically go to coax,” said Curtis Knittle, Vice President of Wired Technologies, CableLabs. “The reality is that in most HFC networks, fully 90% or more from the hub to the home is fiber. Literally, you’re talking about a pigtail of coax. Does that pigtail have the same theoretical capacity as fiber? Not likely, but nobody deploys the highest theoretical capacity of fiber. That’s why our next-generation DOCSIS 4.0 is able to keep pace with 10G PON deployment and provide services that compete at the same level.”

However, cable operators are deploying all fiber networks today in certain instances. For example, Altice USA last year announced it was accelerating its multi-year plan to provide 100% fiber broadband to more than 6.5 million homes passed by the end of 2025.

Going deeper with fiber and adopting all-fiber solutions presents significant advantages to cable operators in terms of ongoing operational costs, with the only area of relative disagreement is how long the cable industry will take to migrate to an all-fiber plant.

“Fiber to the premise, especially if it’s all [PON], consumes less power than an HFC plant,” Knittle said.

“As operators take fiber deeper and deploy DAA, that’s fewer [RF] amps. As we take amps out of the network, we consume less power. As technology advances and electronics power dissipation decreases, we are still decreasing power. DAA and other technologies enable better reliability with proactive network management (PNM), the ability to detect problems in the network before consumers run into them.”

Even though it may not be fiber all the way to the home, the growth of fiber in the cable industry is still fairly tremendous.

– Curtis Knittle, Vice President of Wired Technologies, CableLabs

The Latin America Fiber Deployment Panorama

By Edna Preuss, Director, Industry Affairs & Member Services, Latin America

The Fiber Broadband Association LATAM Chapter has just released its annual market study analyzing the FTTH panorama in the region. Developed by SmC+Consulting, the study takes into consideration information gathered by interviews and direct contacts with operators throughout 18 countries in the region, regulatory agencies, and public reports.

The numbers show fast FTTH growth in the last decade, and a significant increase in the number of FTTH homes passed and subscribers along with forecasted growth through 2026.

Like the rest of the world, LATAM is demanding higher bandwidth rates with lower latencies. Legacy networks based on cable and copper are not able to fulfill these conditions so existing players have started to migrate towards full fiber networks in order to address this data demand. Additionally, governments in the region have understood their role in fiber deployments to reduce digital exclusion and create digital agendas. Many strategies from private players have also increased FTTH/B homes passed along the region along with more public initiatives involved in fiber deployments in countries such as in Brazil and Chile.

FTTH adoption in the region has been led by Brazil and Mexico. During 2021, the two countries together accomplished more than 17.8 million additional homes with FTTH/B. Strong efforts have been also observed in Puerto Rico, Peru, Bahamas, and Colombia with growth rates in terms of homes passed of 229%, 49%, 40%, and 38% respectively.

By the end of 2021, the LATAM region reported 103 million homes passed with FTTH/B compared to the 80 million homes passed by end of 2020 at 29% YoY growth. In terms of subscribers, 46 million FTTH/B signed up for fiber by the end of 2021 compared to 31 million by the end of 2020, resulting in 47% YoY growth. The FTTH/B take-up rate reached 44.6%, up 5.4% compared to the previous year, by end of 2021.

Five countries are leading the market in terms of FTTH/B subscribers. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador represented 90% of total LATAM subscribers by December 2021.During 2021, Brazil and Mexico added more than

12.1 million FTTH/B subscribers in the region, followed by Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. However, less populated countries such as Bahamas, Costa Rica, and Bolivia have started to add more FTTH/B subscribers.

Compared to international fiber broadband progress, LATAM-18 had an average take up rate of 45% by the end of 2021, which is lower compared to a 52% take up rate in EU27+UK. Commercial efforts are still required to migrate end users from older technologies towards FTTH/B. Also, it implies potential subscriber growth with no or limited additional investments.

By December 2021, six countries were above the average regional FTTH/B take-up rate. Barbados and Uruguay led with 92% and 79% of take up rates. These countries have taken advantage of size and demographics to deploy fiber fast to reach more houses and migrate subscribers towards this technology.

Brazil shows a 50% FTTH/B take-up rate, which given the country’s size, is a very remarkable achievement that is almost in line with European rates. Brazil’s take-up rate has been pushed by efforts from local ISPs which have deployed fiber in isolated areas throughout the country.

However, 12 countries from LATAM-18 are still below the FTTH/B take up rate average for the region. Even Mexico and Chile, who are FTTH/B leaders in the region, still have below average take-up rates. This implies an opportunity to strengthen commercial efforts to adopt fiber. Commercial initiatives will also help countries like Colombia and Argentina persuade users to migrate towards fiber in markets where cable operators have a strong dominance in terms of service and price.

Future FTTH LATAM Growth

The FTTH market is expected to reach 158 million homes passed by 2026, up from 103 million in 2021, with a 9% compound annual growth rate. Many players, including copper and cable-based operators, have defined major and aggressive FTTH homes passed targets. Certainly, this will make FTTH the prevalent technology in the region for the coming years.

Overall, FTTH/B subscribers reached 45 million by the end of 2021 and it is estimated that this will double by the end of 2026. The two main reasons for this expected growth are (1) Players will implement aggressive commercial strategies and (2) there will be a technology migration performed mainly by cable operators towards full FTTH solutions for their existing customers.

It is estimated that the coverage rate will reach 91% of total household in the LATAM-18 region, mainly driven by countries as Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad that will push fiber deployments to nationwide FTTH coverage. Additionally, FTTH penetration is expected to double between 2021 and 2026 (27% to 54%). This will be the result of FTTH coverage expansion to more homes and technology migration from other technologies.

Lastly, FTTH/B take-up rate is expected to increase to 59% by end of 2026, as more cable operators and legacy copper networks will migrate towards full FTTH networks. It is anticipated that the region will consolidate around FTTH as the main fixed broadband technology, but there will be still some use of other fixed and mobile technologies.

Although the digital equity gap is still present in the region with only one out four homes connected with FTTH/B architecture, the region is expected to keep growing in the number of homes passed and subscribers. It is expected that fiber deployments will allow homes passed to go from 103 million in 2021 to 158 million in 2026, which results in coverage going from 60% to 91%. Subscribers

are expected to grow at a higher pace, going from 45 million in 2021 to 94 million in 2026.

Subscribers are expected to grow faster than homes passed, which will result in an increase of the take-up rate, going from 45% in 2021 to 59% in 2026.This ratio is in line with 2021’s Europe’s adoption rate -- by 2021 the take-up rate was 52%, indicating that Latin America is five years behind in terms of adoption of FTTH/B.

On the business side, new business models are rising and new neutral players are present in the region. Traditional telecom players have evolved into infrastructure companies as a way to deploy, but also to take advantage in a shared capacity framework. Infrastructure business models are expected to keep evolving in the coming years, where specialization and network sharing are expected to gain terrain and become a new standard.

Regarding new regulations, digital agendas will require coordination between national and other authorities as local governments have substantial influence in the permits and rules for new deployments. For these deployments to occur local companies and investors will need more clarity on the conditions and regulations for the fiber to be laid. This is an important aspect, not only to provide full fixed fast broadband infrastructure, but also to allow the deployment of high-speed mobile networks as 5G.

The full report is available to FBA LATAM Chapter members at https://www.fiberbroadband.org/p/do/si/topic=126.

Nelson Saito, Samuel Hoyos, Furukawa Electric LATAM, President FBA LATAM Chapter; President, Asomovil; Galé Mallol Agudelo, Executive President, ASOTIC; Sebastián M. Cabello, CEO, SMC+; Natalia Guerra, Director of Public and Regulatory Affairs, Telefónica; and Lina Maria Duque Del Vecchio, Commissioner CRC participate in Fiber Connect LATAM 2022 in Bogota, Columbia. Source: FBA.

Alexandria, VA, Microtrenches to Fiber

By Doug Mohney

The city of Alexandria, Virginia, is building the infrastructure for a digital future while preserving its historic character dating back to one of the largest ports in America in the 1700s. Amazon’s construction of its HQ2 second headquarters next door in Arlington is part of a larger regional technology boom driving mixed-use construction within the city and the need for high-speed, future-proof broadband capable of supporting homes and businesses.

“Federal, state, and local government--everyone’s concerned about how we ensure there’s digital connectivity if and when needed,” said Vanetta Pledger, Chief Information Officer and Director of Information Technology Services for the City of Alexandria, Virginia. “It is so vital to making sure that city services are available to our residents, businesses, and our staff.”

Alexandria has sought a second broadband franchise for nearly a decade, but the pandemic spurred the process into high gear. Four service providers made serious proposals to the city in February 2022 with Ting Internet securing an agreement in May 2022 to build a network capable of serving the nearly 90,000 street level addresses within city limits.

“The main emphasis for another broadband provider was consumer choice,” said Pledger. “Competition is good. With the pandemic, everyone needed to raise speeds, from the family at home for work, for economic development, businesses, tourism. We wanted to make sure everyone interacting with the city can have sufficient connectivity regardless of what they’re trying to do, from telehealth, streaming movies, and making sure there’s sufficient connectivity for the latest at-home gadgets.”

The city had one essential requirement for a new fiber franchise. “The city has undergrounding requirements,” said Pledger. “Some providers prefer to use telephone poles to provide connectivity. That’s a cheaper method, but there’s more likelihood of damage from a storm, vehicles, etc. that would disrupt services. Undergrounding is a little more expensive in Alexandria because we have historical districts with unique characteristics that have specific preservation requirements.”

Ting’s economic and technical solution for Alexandria was microtrenching, enabling the service provider to put in its own fiber with minimal disruption and more rapidly than traditional “big dig” methods that result in the logistical movement of large amounts of equipment, interruptions of traffic, tearing up and having to repave streets and sidewalks, and numerous other headaches.

“Alexandria represents a step up in terms of the community size we’ve served in the past,” said Jill Szuchmacher, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President Networks, Ting Internet. “The mayor along with the city council and staff have been a great partner in enabling everything from permit processes to allowing microtrenching as an approved construction methodology. A lot of cities can learn from some of the things Alexandria has put in place.”

With Ting’s preference for underground installation over having to work with above-ground poles, microtrenching proved to be the perfect solution for Alexandria. “We like microtrenching because it’s much faster and much less disruptive for residents and enables us to get in and do the build as quickly as possible so we can start providing great services to businesses and residents,” said Szuchmacher.

Ting expects to connect its first customers in the first quarter of 2023 and complete its fiber network within two years, with the project providing a nearby example to lawmakers on Capitol Hill on how new fiber deployment technology can accelerate broadband. “We can show people what we mean by microtrenching, how much faster it is, how much less disruptive it is and why it’s compelling as an emerging industry standard,” said Szuchmacher.

Ting is applying microtrenching in its Alexandria, VA deployment, using this big blade monster to cut into concrete and pavement. Source: Doug Mohney.

Prioritizing Small Successes Will Win the Big Broadband Race

By Clark Stevenson, Senior Director, IQGeo

The increased reliance on the internet has created a soaring demand for superfast broadband and the U.S. government has responded to this by stressing the importance of internet access and its strong ties to economic prosperity and social equality, most recently through billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.

As a result, many telecom operators have sprung into action to ensure that consumer demands are met. This race is well underway and those that can deliver the best service first will increase their market share and revenue. The end result should be happier customers and a strong digital economy.

Building a long-term innovation strategy on short-term successes

The route that telecom operators follow in the fiber broadband race will define the winners and losers. Many are investing in new technology to improve their performance, a path that McKinsey supports.

However, new technology is only one component of a successful approach. Operators need to pick the right technologies together with plans that maximize the delivery of value. Building and maintaining a fiber network is a huge challenge. The key to reducing time to revenue is by creating a more agile innovation strategy that consists of smaller, manageable goals that consistently deliver impact and value over the course of the network’s evolution.

Establishing a blueprint for ongoing innovation

Operators can visualize this innovation strategy as a rolling deployment of technology. A strong starting point is to focus on a business area with the greatest pain point and invest in technology that addresses the issue. If the chosen technology is successful, it can then be incrementally rolled out to other business areas.

Organizations that start with one pain point, demonstrate the performance of a solution, and then expand it across other business areas will reap the benefits of each step as well as the larger benefit created by a culmination of

those smaller “wins.” This is like the effect of compound interest, building on previous successes to create even greater future performance. Using this approach also gives businesses the flexibility to evaluate and refine their solution with each deployment, allowing them to create a personalized “blueprint” for success.

To maximize the impact of incremental innovations, operators should also remember the interconnected nature of network lifecycle processes and avoid siloed technologies. Creating a flexible strategy based on constant innovation enables the optimization of vertical departmental processes that contribute to collective performance across the network lifecycle.

Demonstrating continual progress and value for money

Given that the market is evolving extremely quickly, operators don’t have time to sit still. They must demonstrate consistent value to gain and maintain customers.

Those championing a culture of constant innovation can use ongoing ROI as evidence to justify past and future investments and mitigate the risk of wasted time and effort. Operators should be able to look back in six months’ time to see the progress the organization has made and the return on their investment.

One such organization that serves as a great example of incremental innovation in action is The City of Westerville, the first municipality in Ohio to own its own data center and fiber network. This foundation gives it the flexibility to serve residents and attract large businesses to the area. The city is constantly upgrading its technology to meet growth plans, such as rolling out fiber planning and development tools to optimize usage of expensive fiber resources.

Following an approach of incremental innovation has allowed the City of Westerville to deliver excellent service to customers, while improving operations that cut operating costs. Service providers who do the same by rapidly rolling out new technology to customers through constant innovation will emerge as the winners.

U.S. Fiber Installations Hit All-Time High in 2022

By Doug Mohney

The Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) reported more fiber was deployed in 2022 than ever before. Research performed by RVA LLC Market Research & Consulting (RVA) for the Association shows that fiber providers passed 7.9 million additional homes in the U.S. in 2022, the highest annual deployment ever, even with challenges in materials, supply chain, and labor availability.

“High-quality broadband has become more important to consumers and businesses every year. Fiber broadband exceeds all other types of delivery in every single measurement of broadband quality, including speeds, uptime, latency, jitter, and low power consumption,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association. “For the consumer this has real-world impacts, like more productivity, better access to health care and education, more entrepreneurism, and the option of more rural living. Businesses can effectively support Work From Home, real-time conferencing with partners, and tap into the benefits of the cloud for AI and services on demand. For society, this means more sustainability and, ultimately, digital equity.”

According to the latest survey, there are now 68 million fiber broadband passings in the U.S., up 13% over the last 12 months

68% of homes passed in the Great White North. However, getting fiber to the remaining locations will become more difficult where they are located in rural and more remote areas.

“It’s about 13% year over year growth,” said Mike Render, founder and CEO of RVA, making his comments during a December Fiber for Breakfast podcast discussing the annual research. “We’re now at 20 million homes connected of that [U.S.] group. It’s all very good news for the industry.”

2022 Sets A New Record For The Highest Annual FTTH Growth

Last year’s booming growth precedes expected higher levels of annual fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments anticipated over the next five years based upon a combination of federal funding programs coming into play, including ARPA, BEAD, RDOF, ReConnect, and other programs focused on specific markets and demographics. In addition, private sector funding continues to flow into fiber as larger carriers upgrade and expand their networks in urban and suburban areas.

and up 27% over the past 24 months. A total of 63 million unique homes are now passed once homes with two or more fiber passings are excluded. For the U.S. in total, fiber now passes nearly half of primary homes and over 10% of second homes.

Fiber broadband buildouts continue to expand in Canada as well, according to the research, with about

RVA has conducted research for the Fiber Broadband Association over the past 20 years, defining the addressable market for fiber and tracking deployments throughout North America. The firm estimates there are 130 million households in the United States and another 10 million second homes and rental properties that are candidates for fiber, making a total of 140 million homes that could be served with fiber.

With nearly half the potential market having access to fiber at this point, there’s plenty of construction and installation

ahead to increase the overall number of homes passed and the total number of homes connected to a fiber network.

“[Fiber] take rates have leveled off at about 45 percent,” Render said. “This is not bad. When you have a large build, it takes a while for consumers to sign up. AT&T has recently spoken about how they’re getting to their first 20% much faster. It’s a good sign for the industry that penetration is happening very quickly.”

Fiber Broadband Now Passes Over 68 Million U.S. Homes

3 organizations, which added over 18% of homes passed in 2022. About 1,200 organizations, made up of smaller state and reginal telecoms, competitive providers, cable companies, municipalities, and rural electrical coops (RECs) added an average of 10,000 fiber passings per organization, indicating there’s a lot of work going on outside of traditional urban and suburban markets.

Most fiber consumers today are offered speeds of over 1 Gigabit or more, with nearly 88% subscribing to 1 Gig while another 10% are getting access to multi-gig speeds between 2 Gig to over 10 Gig or more, depending on the market. RVA expects fiber broadband to continue to grow in its share of the market as the medium replaces DSL offerings and continues to become the favored medium of choice in the cable industry for greenfield builds and in more competitive markets.

“We expect even bigger things in the next five years,” said Render. “Almost every company out there has announced big plans for fiber in the next five years. All the big telcos are doing so. They’re trying to move to fiber quickly, they realize the existing copper they have is bleeding customers rapidly… Add to that all the great investment from the BEAD program and other federal programs that are already out there. We don’t have an official forecast yet, but it definitely looks like a big step up for the next five years.”

Contributing to the boom in growth last year are the diverse sizes of fiber providers adding to the total. Tier 1 providers--including major telecom firms, the top five cable companies, and Google Fiber--contributed around 74% of the growth in 2022, with the average added around 3.8 million fiber passings per organization. Tier 2 providers, made up of mid-sized multi-state telcos and MSOs, added eight percent to the total with 0.6 million average fiber passings each.

The most interesting surprise was the contribution of Tier

As an overall share of the broadband market, fiber now serves around 20% of U.S. households, while cable holds roughly 50% of households in 2022 but continues to lose market share, a trend that started a decade ago.

FBA/RVA’s broadband consumer study measuring fiber’s performance compared to other technologies on the market showed that fiber continues to increase its clear advantages. In real world tested speeds, fiber showed significant download and dramatic upload speed delivery over all other media on the marketplace. Fiber also showed clearcut advantages over all other broadband media when it came to latency and jitter measurements, delivering average latency of 60ms and jitter of 10ms.

Given the overall performance advantages of fiber over other media, it should be no surprise that RVA found fiber continues to lead in the Net Promotor Score (NPS) category over all other media, including new entrants such as fixed wireless. RVA started reporting NPS data in 2016 and has watched fiber’s NPS continue to climb over the past two years.

In closing, Render noted fiber had a statistically significant better impact upon individual and community access to health care, education, and sustainability. “Fiber has lower power consumption than any other broadband service,” said Render. ”In terms of truck rolls, fiber has better reliability so there’s less gasoline used. It also enables Work From Home. You add this all up and it makes a big difference. If you could put everyone on fiber today and take out all the old technology, that’s as much [carbon footprint reduction] as taking 11 million cars off the roadway.”

(cont. from page 21)

third-party vendor collecting data from broadband providers under non-disclosure agreements. At this point in time, the state is encouraging individuals to submit challenges to the FCC Fall 2022 maps if speeds are not accurate as the broadband office focuses on developing a serviceable location fabric which it will compare to the FCC’s map, requesting corrections going forward as it develops the data.

preparation phase throughout the period of BEAD fund investments, with funds supporting “baseline functions” required of a state broadband office. Minnesota will use BEAD funding to hire a Projects Coordinator/ Outreach position to coordinate BEAD and digital equity plans. Washington is working with Guidehouse, a consultancy firm, to assist with BEAD planning and digital equity efforts.

Private Sector’s Role

It’s safe to say while the door is open for the private sector to help close the digital divide, state officers are waiting to see what will transpire, with Hawaii having high expectations.

Washington is currently relying on the FCC maps, issuing some challenges that have been “not particularly successful.” Vasconi said legislation has been filed for the state to create its own maps, utilizing the FCC’s maps as a basis and incorporating the data of other providers in the state that weren’t required to file with the FCC.

BEAD Prep Spending

Initial BEAD funding is being used for a number of different initiatives across the country, with each state focusing on the aspects it needs to address within its territory.

Staffing up is where a significant amount of money will be spent by state offices. “Much of our BEAD funding will go toward community engagement and putting the right staff in place to meet with stakeholders around the state,” said Reitter. “We believe it’s vital to meet with and learn from as many residents in all corners of the state as possible.”

Hawaii is staffing up to add more people to state broadband network construction and to support outreach, data analysis, and training from the

“We will rely heavily on our private sector partners in order to help us maximize benefits to our residents,” said Yoshimi. “All of our private and non-profit sector partners have a vested interest in helping our community thrive and have committed to work together to build meaningful solutions. Virtually all of our local employers have already invested heavily in digital equity via two years of CARES funding and over the past several years in collaborating to support highvalue workforce development initiatives for the IT and cybersecurity sectors.”

In Washington, Microsoft has contributed to the state broadband mapping efforts but there are other avenues of assistance available beyond mapping. “Private sector entities can help move the ball forward in a couple of ways,” said Vasconi. “You have private sector ISPs that are willing to come to the table to help provide in order to expand their footprint and provide match to the price. You’ve also had private sector entities that have partnered with public entities in our rounds of funding and that’s very helpful.”

Digital Equity’s Role

All of the state broadband offices we talked to note the key role digital equity programs will play in providing access for all and have similar overall strategies to close the digital divide but are in the process of developing working plans and details.

Gaps in digital equity make up 44% of the lack of internet access in Colorado.

– Brandy Reitter, Executive Director, Colorado Broadband Office

“Gaps in digital equity make up 44% of the lack of internet access in Colorado,” said Reitter. “We have three goals to close Colorado’s digital divide: lower cost through state programs and support partnerships that provide low-cost devices; conduct digital navigator pilots within targeted populations, evaluate strategies that work, and leverage public-private partnerships to build skills and confidence in using technology; and conduct a landscape analysis of existing digital equity and affordability programs and develop strategies to address gaps.”

focus that is different. You have to be able to reach the community in a very deep way, plus on the digital equity side there are a number of state programs that have been stood up and are specifically focused to meet those needs.”

Concerns for the Future

Program sustainability and being able to cover all unserved and underserved households once BEAD funding has been allocated is the biggest issue facing state broadband offices. Minnesota has a mandate to deliver 100/20 Mbps services to all households and businesses by 2026, while Washington is looking at the math to close the price tag to service all.

Minnesota’s broadband office is housed in the state’s Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) and will partner with other state agencies to help with digital equity efforts. “We are leading the digital equity panning as a part of the IIJA and have hired a digital equity lead,” said Maki. “Until that plan is complete, we will not be implementing any new programs.”

Hawaii is also developing its state digital equity plan while Washington has moved its digital equity efforts out of its broadband office but is not severing the relationship between the two. “In order to manage federal monies [for infrastructure development], there has to be a devoted focus to that, but there still has to be a great deal of tieback to digital equity efforts. Infrastructure isn’t sufficient, but digital equity requires a

“To ensure that projects are funded and are sustainable and that we don’t end up with projects that don’t meet the requirements of end users and/ or don’t meet those requirements in a sustainable manner are my two biggest concerns,” Vasconi said. “Along the way there are subsidiary challenges of making certain the broadband office can attract and retain staff necessary to manage programs. There is a gap between what I think the ultimate price tag will be and the available money we’re able to find to fill that gap effectively with required match dollars and whether those match dollars come from state money or other sources such as private funding.”

Nevada knows it will have significant work after BEAD funding has been accounted for. “We’re working to identify, leverage, and bring other funding together as efficiently as possible in order to bring better connectivity to communities,” said Mitchell. “We’re also developing cost modeling and business case tools in order to determine the right amount of state subsidy to serve a given unserved or underserved location. Not every location will receive a 100% or even a 50% subsidy. Depending on the business case, a provider may only need a 10% subsidy to bring service to an area.”

We’re working to identify, leverage, and bring other funding together as efficiently as possible in order to bring better connectivity to communities.

– Brian Mitchell, Director, Office of Science Innovation and Technology in Nevada

(cont. from page 39)

networks flood the zone with billions of photons per second. It’s not clear if you can put both quantum and conventional information on the same fiber down the road due to the different requirements of each, with more research required.

“Making quantum and classical work in the same fiber is pretty challenging,” said Peters. “When you have a conventional signal in a typical small form factor pluggable transceiver, you’re going to be shooting out zero dBm or maybe minus six dBm. That’s many orders of magnitude greater than a single photon stream. You’re going to be very challenged to make your quantum signal stand out from that Raman noise. The standard thing people have done is cranked the power down on conventional transmitters, which most network operators are not going to do because they engineer in their link budget to allow for the potential of the laser power dropping as it gets older.”

Unlocking larger scale quantum networks will open up advances in a range of fields, from esoteric scientific discoveries on the very nature of the universe to substantial improvements in communications, health care, energy storage, and other fields where better precision and complex calculations are essential.

“One thing you can get is better clock synchronization,” said Peters. “If you get that, in principle you can have higher speed data networks. Another area people talk about is chemistry, which applies to just about everything. If you have better predictive quantum calculations of how to store energy, you could potentially build a battery that basically lasted the lifetime of the phone.”

Highly accurate atomic clocks leverage quantum principles to generate their precision, with devices so sensitive that they can sense changes in height and density due to minuscule fluctuations in gravity. Next-generation atomic clocks could be linked via a quantum network to further refine accuracy and the potentially detect gravity waves or dark matter.

Full-body imaging could be transformed through quantum sensing. Instead of going into the cramped confines of a MRI for brain imagery, Peters imagines a quantum-based sensor network that could go over your head like a hairnet, providing the same information without having to worry about the technical and safety limitations of a high magnetic field environment.

Quantum networking would enable the clustering of multiple quantum computers, allowing groups of them to be put to work on large scale quantum calculations applicable to cryptography, drug development, supply chain logistics, and other fields.

In a taste of things to come, EPB is launching the first commercial quantum network in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The network, expected to be available later this year, is the first one outside of university and government laboratories. Anyone that has a quantum device or application will be able to test and refine their application for real-world use on the open metro-scale network, with the network able to support between 10 to 15 users at a time.

To move quantum out of the lab and into commercial applications will require more commercial fiber around and across the country being used for quantum networking.

“We have a lot of national labs and universities that are trying to set up test beds, but we really need broadband network providers to be integrated in this process,” said Duncan Earl, President, CoFounder, and Chief Technology Officer for Qubitekk, Inc., a quantum networking company that is helping EPB setup and operate its quantum network. “We need to lay this infrastructure for quantum networks for all these applications to become possible, but in order to do that, we need broadband provider support and involvement.”

Earl discussed EPB’s efforts and the expected revolution quantum technologies will deliver in the years to come on a recent Fiber For Breakfast podcast. Over the next 20 years, Earl expects commercial quantum applications to deliver breakthroughs in the treatment of certain kinds of cancers, seamless and rapid language translation, improved user interfaces able to read your body and facial expressions to enable true conversational discussions and delivering improved health care, and improved sensing to predict tornados and the first warning signs of earthquakes.

“Quantum is now starting to have real applications,” Earl stated. “There are a lot of companies viewing to own these spaces and be clear winners like IBM, Microsoft, and Cisco. It’s history repeating itself. We can use that knowledge to accelerate what we’re doing today.”

EPB is bringing up the first commercial quantum network this spring. Source: EPB.

Our Key Focus Anchor Points

Desired Outcome

ground to make it happen. In addition, we will continue to actively engage with the FCC to ensure that the FCC Broadband Data Maps are accurate from both a fabric and service provider data perspective.

In January 2023, the 118th Congress gaveled in. FBA will continue to share our members’ priorities on Capitol Hill with returning legislators along with developing relationships with new lawmakers. FBA will be out in front of this to help educate members of Congress and their staff on the value and return on investment that fiber delivers.

A key focus for the Association will be finding ways to make advances on permitting issues members face to accelerate fiber deployment. We also expect to see strong Congressional oversight of the broadband infrastructure investment programs. As part of our first action for 2023, FBA submitted a detailed response to Senator Thune’s recent inquiry that covers a wide range of issues and concerns related to federal broadband programs.

In March, FBA will hold a “Fiber Day” on the Hill focused on educating members of Congress and their staff on the latest capabilities of fiber and the positive community impact fiber delivers in terms of jobs, economic development, education, healthcare, smart grid modernization, and paving the way for future services such as 5G and Quantum Networks.

Throughout 2023, FBA will continue to take our message on the road, leveraging the success of our Regional Fiber Connect workshops and continue to execute on building out the fiber workforce. Our outreach will include

our successful weekly Fiber for Breakfast webinars and podcast program and a new series in partnership with Broadband.money, arming our audience with the inside scoop on funding and financing fiber broadband networks.

In August, we expect another record-breaking crowd at FBA’s Fiber Connect 2023 annual conference being held this year in Orlando with the theme of “What Fiber Disrupts Next” as we explore the amazing applications that will be enabled with all fiber networks. Our expo hall is sold out and will have over 200 industry expert speakers. We anticipate that this will be the largest fiber broadband event in the world this coming year. We will close out 2023 with FBA’s annual Premier Members meeting, providing unique industry insights on the future as we roll up our sleeves to debate and set our strategy for 2024.

These are just a few brief highlights of what to expect in 2023 as we work together as an industry to leverage this historic opportunity to deploy fiber to every home and business, elevating our quality of life, and benefiting generations to come.

FBA’s tremendous success over the past year could not have been possible without our hard-working Board, our exceptional staff, our strategic partners, and our amazing committee and working group leaders and volunteers. The passion, enthusiasm, and talent of our organization is infectious, heartwarming, and inspires me every day as we all work together on this remarkable journey to accelerate the deployment of fiber broadband networks to ensure digital equity and enable every community to leverage economic and societal benefits that only fiber can deliver.

2023 Editorial Calendar

June 2023

Materials due May 5, 2023

• Network-Based Disruptions

• Tower Power | Latency | Cybersecurity | K-12 Broadband

• Executive Insights | Federal/State Update | Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

August 2023

Materials due July 10, 2023

• Fiber Connect 2023 Issue

• Smartest of Smart Homes and the In-Home Experience

• Digital Literacy | 10G for Business | Network Traffic Exchange Points

• Executive Insights | Federal/State Update | Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

November 2023

Materials due October 17, 2023

• Middle Mile Innovations

• Fiber Connect 2023 Highlights

• State of the Association

• Executive Insights | Federal/State Update | Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

FBA 2023 Event Calendar

2023 Regional Fiber Connect Workshop Series

Fiber Connect 2023 Conference & Expo

August 20-23, 2023

Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center Kissimmee, FL

Enabling the Lifestyle that Better Broadband Provides

SeeChange: A small, carrier-grade, access terminal ideal for any fiber network deployment

The game-changing SeeChange™ Access Terminal and precisely designed hardened connectors speed the final connection through:

• Off-the-shelf availability

• Minimizing inventory management

• Cutting your design time

• Simplifying your installations

Clearfield® innovations make designing and installing plug-and-play fiber networks faster and easier than ever before. We can help you achieve your fiber connection goals. Ask Clearfield to show you how.

Learn how to simplify your deployments at www.SeeClearfield.com or call 800-422-2537