Fiber Forward Q4 - 2023

2023 EDITION 4

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Gary Bolton, FBA President & CEO

Dear FBA Members, I am currently at the airport in Mexico City as our second successful LATAM Fiber Connect event this year wraps up. It is exciting to see the tremendous momentum in connecting everyone with fiber extend well beyond U.S. borders. Latin America’s growth is one of many industry highlights this year.

The excitement and enthusiasm in the fiber broadband industry could not be higher in the U.S. Our annual conference, Fiber Connect 2023 at the end of August, broke all records with nearly 4,000 attendees, over 225 speakers, five pre-conference workshops, seven educational session breakout tracks, and Tech Deep Dives with the Broadband Forum. I have not seen this much energy in our industry since the 1990s, when the internet moved out of academia and into the public sphere. With a historic level of broadband infrastructure spending, our industry has a real opportunity to close the digital divide and elevate the quality of life for generations to come.

Some of my favorite general sessions at Fiber Connect were the executive “Light Talks,” including hearing the CEO of Google Fiber, the president of AT&T, and other industry leaders discuss how fiber is changing lives. A recap of AT&T’s and Consolidated Communications’ Light Talk remarks can be found in “Demonstrating Fiber’s Disruption at Fiber Connect 2023.”

Given the tremendous amount of outstanding content that was presented at Fiber Connect 2023, this issue of Fiber Forward celebrates this historic moment and recaps some of the many informative sessions from our event. While BEAD funding is getting the headlines, there are over 25 different federal programs available for broadband projects, administered by seven different federal agencies, as detailed in the article, “Fiber Connect 2023 – Understanding the Cornucopia of Federal Funds.” This piece will help you understand how to dissect and piece together the different federal broadband funding options and leverage them for the best results.

Fiber Connect 2023 closed with the State Broadband Summit. The new event provided timely and important information relevant to the NTIA BEAD broadband infrastructure program. Will Arbuckle from NTIA kicked off the Summit, unveiling the latest rules on the Build America, Buy America (BABA) provisions for BEAD. The Administration is very focused on creating Americanbased jobs and “BABA Arrives at Fiber Connect” provides some keen insights on the BABA policy and the industry’s response. While BEAD is still in front of us, operators provide insights on their lessons learned during the NTIA middle mile grant application process in the article, “Middle Mile Funding Frustrations.” This article will be instructive to those operators looking at tying a middle mile component into part of a larger BEAD project as well as providing some food for thought on (cont. on page 07) Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

05

Fiber Forward

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(cont. from page 05)

As 2023 comes to a close, I am grateful and excited about how far FBA has come in the past three years. We are at the moment that many of us have been working toward for our entire careers. how utilities can approach broadband funding as part of a larger infrastructure refresh or upgrade.

Other highlights and key takeaways from Fiber Connect 2023 are documented in this issue as well, including articles such as “Fiber Connect 2023 - Midwest Legislators Talk Broadband” and “Honoring Outstanding Contributions to the Industry at Fiber Connect 2023.” In addition to the Fiber Connect 2023 recaps, we also have some great articles on how Wallops Island and Kennedy Space Center spaceports depend on fiber in “NASA’s Diverse Fiber Paths” and community provider case studies from Orange County to Missouri and Minneapolis.

Fiber’s economic value continues to grow in its adoption.

In partnership with FBA, our good friends at RVA LLC have released their latest consumer research. “Fiber Preferred by Nearly Two-Thirds of U.S. Consumers” provides a summary of RVA’s findings and how fiber is winning the broadband churn wars.

NTIA BEAD guidance and the way states can implement it continues to evolve. In partnership with the NTCA-The Rural Broadband Assocation, we created the Broadband Infrastructure Playbook to provide information that states would need in working with and implementing BEAD. We realized that as states, FBA, and other parties provided feedback to NTIA’s initial Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) and NTIA responded to that commentary, the Playbook would have to be updated to reflect new developments. “The Broadband Infrastructure Playbook 3.0 Update” provides a discussion and recap of the latest advice and best practices released by FBA and NTCA over this summer.

I hope some of you had the opportunity to attend our final Regional Fiber Connect workshop in Minneapolis on October 24th. We executed five very successful Regional Fiber Connect workshops around the country this year, attracting communities and service providers that were not familiar with the Fiber Broadband Association. These

regional events have provided FBA and our sponsors with an opportunity to engage with community leaders seeking to elevate economic development and quality of life for their residents with the deployment of fiber broadband infrastructure in their towns and cities.

Our Regional Fiber Connect workshops were so successful, we will continue our community outreach in 2024 with events in five new cities, including Richmond, Va., in February; Little Rock, Ark., in April; Park City, Utah, in June; Des Moines, Iowa, in September; and Albuquerque, N.M., in November.

I would like to close in saying “thank you” to the 2023 FBA Chairman, Joseph Jones “JJ,” president of OnTrac Inc. Not only is JJ a good friend, but he is also an amazing leader. He is the definition of a servant leader.

JJ has been a hands-on volunteer at FBA for over two decades, chairing our conference committee for much of that time. JJ shares his thoughts and insights on our industry and organization in the article, “JJ’s Good View of 2023.” I can’t thank JJ enough for his tremendous leadership as our Board Chair this year, leading FBA to the best year in Association history, and for all his hard work and efforts to elevate our industry.

As 2023 comes to an end, I am grateful and excited about how far FBA has come in the past three years. We are at the moment that many of us have been working toward for our entire careers. I look forward to seeing many of you at the Fiber Broadband Association’s Premier Member meeting in Palm Springs on December 4 and 5. It is going to be a fun and productive meeting as we celebrate our industry’s success and prepare for 2024, which will be the biggest and best year in the fiber industry’s history!

Sincerely,

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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2023 EDITION 4

FBA PRESIDENT & CEO Gary Bolton PUBLISHER Connect2 Communications, Inc. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Doug Mohney CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Gary Bolton FBA President and CEO

Marissa Mitrovich

FBA Vice President of Public Policy

ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Lucy Green DESIGNER Rick Skippon

Table of Contents 05 Letter from the President & CEO 10

About the Cover

11

Editor’s Moment

13

The Broadband Infrastructure Playbook 3.0 Update

16

NASA’s Diverse Fiber Paths

18

BABA Arrives at Fiber Connect

21

Build America, Buy America Scorecard

23 Demonstrating Fiber’s Disruption at Fiber Connect 2023 24 Fiber Connect 2023: : Midwest Legislators Talk Broadband 26 Honoring Outstanding Contributions to the Industry at Fiber Connect 2023

29 Fiber Connect 2023 Photo Gallery 34 Fiber Connect 2023: Executive Light Talks from AT&T and Consolidated Communications

36 Fiber Connect 2023: Understanding the Cornucopia Join Fiber Broadband Association Today! www.fiberbroadband.org

Mark Your Calendars for Fiber Connect 2024!

July 18–31, 2024 Nashville, TN

of Federal Funds

39 Fiber Connect 2023: Middle Mile Funding Frustrations 43 JJ’s (AKA “Captain Photon”) Super View of 2023 46 Public Policy Update 50 Fiber Preferred by Nearly Two-Thirds of U.S. Consumers 52 The O.C. Gets Lit

2024

Subscribe to the Fiber For Breakfast podcast on your favorite podcast platform.

53 Fiber Forward Editorial Calendar 54 Gateway Fiber Expands from Missouri to Minnesota 55 FBA 2023-2024 Events 56 Industry Event Calendar

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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About the Cover Mild-mannered Joseph Jones “JJ” is a familiar face to anyone associated with the Fiber Broadband Association. He has helped lead the Fiber Broadband Association for more than a decade, championing the Fiber Connect conferences, and helping forge the organization’s mission from his hidden fortress of solitude in Knoxville, Tennessee.

2023 EDITION 4

What you probably didn’t know -- how could you, given his clever disguise of spectacles -- is that he also battles the forces of broadband misinformation, space-based orbiting threats, and the “good enoughers” as his alter ego of Captain Photon!

He can lift communities with fiber, shoulder the responsibility of leading the world’s largest broadband association, and see through the shenanigans of his arch-nemesis Professor Tech Agnostic. Sadly, for us, with a final cry of “When fiber leads, the future follows,” Captain Photon is hanging up his cape. He does believe, as he shared during his Chairman remarks during Fiber Connect 2023, with the opportunity ahead, we all can be heroes as we look to close the digital divide and connect rural communities with fiber.

The cover was once again created by the talented Raleigh-based Illustrator Alice Holleman (www.AliceHolleman.com).

She helped us capture the superhero efforts of outgoing FBA chairman Joseph Jones “JJ.” Enjoy!

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Editor’s Moment

Looking Over the Horizon

By Doug Mohney, Editor-in-Chief

As we get older, we gain wisdom. Once upon a time, I wanted to own and control everything past the demarcation point in my home, just deliver the pipe and let me deal with the rest. Today, my fascination with technology has turned into pragmatic tolerance. I do not want to be bothered with router placement optimization, mesh networks, deciding quality of service for applications, or other variables. I just want to plug it in and know it’ll work.

Most normal folks are at that point on day one, desiring an effortless turnkey experience without having to worry about things like assigning priority for TV streaming over everything else in the home to avoid jumpy playback, having the neighborhood piggyback in on your Wi-Fi, or having to wonder if it’s better to add pods for better inhome wireless coverage.

Service providers are at the same point, but for a different reason. Frustrated customers trying to integrate their off-the-shelf wireless gear and all the other devices in the home means busy call centers and lots of time on the phone, which costs money and impacts customer satisfaction. Network management at gigabit speeds essentially means network management from fiber through Wi-Fi in the home and office.

It’s nice to see Qualcomm come to the party— rescue — with its 10G Fiber Gateway Platform that integrates Wi-Fi with fiber connectivity and unlocks multigigabit wireless speeds throughout the home in a single, manageable package. Expected to show up in 2024 hardware, will this next generation of seamless CPE be paid for by the customer proper as a value-added package/upgrade or as a cost-savings measure to reduce call center minutes?

There’s not a clean answer at this point other than “a bit of all of the above.”

Reading through the fine print on the spec sheet, the 10G Fiber Gateway has an open software architecture that enables the delivery of value-added applications and deployment of differentiated services. Calix has been all about value-added apps for differentiation for years, with

Nokia announcing its own Corteca home connectivity platform at Fiber Connect 2023. Hopefully, we’ll see some fresh applications emerge beyond the now-standard bandwidth monitoring/management, security, and parental controls.

BEAD is already creating jobs and driving investment through its Build America, Buy America (BABA) provisions.

A quick run-through of summer BABA announcements by companies such as Adtran, Calix, CommScope, Corning, DZS, Nokia, and Prysmian Group adds up to at 850 or more new U.S. manufacturing jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in facilities to support fiber infrastructure from cable through ONTs. Additional production will, at some point, translate to lower materials and equipment costs and more capable CPE. We’ve already seen this shift as GPON has become retro and XGS-PON is now the standard for many, with 25G PON starting to make headway. It’s easy to imagine that we’ll see a movement towards 50G PON and 100G PON speeds on the business side by 2030, if not earlier, if for no other reason than to support 5G and future wireless deployments.

In January, I should be at CES, making my annual pilgrimage to see the latest in consumer tech that will leverage all the fiber being turned up around the country over the next five years. We’re about due for something cool to break through. It might be AR/VR, health tech, smart home, or some totally new category that’s been percolating for several years and is finally ready to be served. If you are one of the 120,000 other people planning to be in Vegas from January 6 through January 10, drop me an email at doug@connect2comm.com and let’s see if we can meet up.

Sincerely,

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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RESELL • REUSE • RECOVER • RECYCLE

Fiber Forward

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The Broadband Infrastructure Playbook 3.0 Update

By Doug Mohney

At the time of the webinar, over 20 states had submitted to NTIA their initial BEAD Volume One proposals and a handful also supplied their more detailed Volume 2 implementation proposals. “Almost across the board, they’re really well done,” said Tom Cohen, FBA’s head legal counsel. “They pose a lot of interesting questions they have to sort through and NTIA now is reviewing.” Many of the points discussed were “balancing issues,” tradeoffs between cost of construction and delivering coverage to as many unserved as possible while upgrading underserved locations.

Over the summer and through the fall this year, NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association and the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) have released a series of updates to their joint “Broadband Infrastructure Playbook.” The Playbook was first released in 2022 to provide information states would need in working with and implementing the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

Policy experts from both associations realized that there would be an ongoing need to provide updated information as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published its original BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) and provided revised and more detailed recommendations and guidance to states over time, based upon public comment and feedback. The Playbook would be updated in modular fashion over time as NTIA released this information.

Definitions and Challenges

One of the balancing issues Cohen spoke about was defining unserved and underserved households in Volume 1 of the BEAD proposals, and how to fashion service areas for Volume 2. The definitions provide part of the framework for BEAD applicants to challenge the process of how states allocate funds.

Topics covered in the latest “3.0” update and discussed through joint blog posts and webinar conducted by NTCA and FBA on October 11, 2023, include commentary, broadband coverage challenge process, the Extremely High-Cost Threshold, letter of credit requirements, NTIA Cybersecurity and Supply Chain requirements for the BEAD program, and permitting.

“For example, you can treat all DSL as underserved,” said Cohen. “We all know that DSL is a technology that is distance sensitive. The farther you get away from the central office, the more speeds go down. You can call for rigorous speed tests dealing with other locations. If you are dealing with technologies that are somewhat flawed in

Extremely High Cost Per Location Threshold | Getting It Right The Threshold should be set to encourage deployment of fiber over less capable alternatives while not deterring providers from participating to build to all eligible locations

Illustrative Fiber Deployment Cost per Location by Percentile

Average Cost per Location

EXAMPLE THRESHOLD RANGES

TOO HIGH

THRESHOLD IS SET TOO HIGH

LACK OF BIDS OR FUNDS

Eligible locations may completely miss out on getting access through BEAD funding

Many Locations suffer: • Left with no broadband access, especially costly locations • Stuck with poor connectivity options

THRESHOLD IS SET TOO LOW

OPTIMAL TOO LOW

0%

Risks that States/Territories may face:

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

Cost Percentile

70%

80%

90%

100%

Affordable locations: • Receive less capable technology Eligible locations that • Require more frequent upgrades would have otherwise received fiber miss out • Incur higher long-term costs

MISSED FIBER COVERAGE

The Threshold signals to providers where they should bid to provide fiber rather than less capable technologies Source: Cartesian

1

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Project Boundaries | Average Project Costs Arbitrary project boundaries will tend to skew average costs higher due to the hockey-stick curve; this may lead to the threshold being set too low and/or fiber projects being blocked in otherwise viable areas

Census Block Group as single Project Area 101

201 301

$8k $4k $4k

102

202 302

$8k $4k $4k

103

$8k

401

104

$8k

402

$40k

$40k

$12,800

With EHCT Set at $12,000:

Entire Project Area above the threshold

terms of their ability to constantly deliver performance, such as fixed wireless, why aren’t we putting fixed wireless in with DSL, and start placing them as underserved?”

Volume 2 of the BEAD proposals goes into how states define service areas for projects, requiring officials to trade off between using arbitrary political boundaries such as census blocks, counties, or other definitions for ease of use and the way operators will plan the most efficient way to build and operate a network.

“This becomes an issue, because if you lose the [building] efficiency, you have less money for BEAD awards,” said Cohen. “If you lump in a few very or extremely high-cost locations into that political boundary, that changes the business case a lot. We urge states and NTIA to think about this, because if you deter bidding by the way you set up service areas, naturally the price goes up and service providers don’t match as much. If you are going to use arbitrary political boundaries, you make them as small as possible, say census blocks, but pull out the very highest cost [locations] and deal with them separately.”

Extremely High-Cost Threshold Math & Planning

Getting the Extremely High-Cost Threshold right will be a challenge that affects coverage. In the October FBA/ NTCA webinar, Michael Dargue of Cartesian noted that the cost of deploying fiber steadily creeps up until the last percentages of locations rapidly become more expensive to provision.

“We’ll see the classic hockey stick, where the cost rapidly increases as you edge towards 100% coverage,” said 14

Fiber Forward • Q 4

101

A

201 301

$8k $4k $4k

102

$8k

202

$4k

302

$4k A

Average Cost per Location:

Source: Cartesian

Census Block Group split into two Project Areas

B

103

$8k

401

104

$8k

402

B

$40k

$40k

$6,000 $40,000

Project A (8 Blocks) below threshold

2

Dargue. “We’ve got this inflection point whereas you get further to the right, you get closer to hitting that steep gradient on costs. It’s really important that we get the optimum zone where we maximize the reach of fiber and we don’t miss locations which are viable, but we don’t stray into this too-high zone. The Threshold is serving two key points.

It’s giving the state the decision about whether to prioritize fiber or not. This also signals to providers about what technology they should be building for certain locations.”

Set the Extremely High-Cost Threshold point too low and there’s a risk that locations which would have been affordable for fiber will miss out and will get an inferior technology that doesn’t have the ability and capacity to grow over time, requiring larger future investment to be upgraded. If the threshold is set too high, increasing the cost per location and the average cost to service an area, states may find providers are unwilling to provide the 25% minimum match amount and unwilling to provide a proposal for BEAD funds.

A few Extremely High-Cost locations within a census block group or other type of project service area can significantly drive up the average cost of providing service to all locations, leading to state officials concluding that all the locations in that area are too expensive to serve with fiber.

Intelligently identifying those more expensive locations and handling them separately enables the deployment of fiber in an appropriate and economical fashion.

Low-Cost Option and Affordability

Creating physical access to high-speed broadband networks is only one part of puzzle in closing the digital divide. Households need to be able to pay for service

plans. “Affordability is an important piece of the puzzle,” said Michael Romano, Executive Vice President, NTCA. “You’re not just building networks for the sake of building them. They’re for use by consumers of all kinds throughout these areas.”

As a part of BEAD grant funding, service providers need to provide a low-cost option for consumers. “It’s geared towards low-income households, because NTIA keeps on talking about its connection to the [FCC] Affordable Connectivity Plan,” said Cohen. “Anybody who gets funding needs to provide a plan for consumers who are low income so that they can afford the service.”

Building an operational business model dependent upon the ACP is problematic, since funding for the program runs out next year. “Unless Congress appropriates [more] funds for it, it gets a little tricky to deal with the low-cost requirements,” said Cohen. “Providers and eligible entities are going to have to wrestle to come up with something that is reasonable, because this is the revenue side of the calculation. If the revenue side is depressed, it changes the business model. You can’t afford as much match or you need to have more money coming in.”

Cohen encouraged service providers and state officials to define low-income households and what kind of affordable plan they should be getting. Middle-class households and affordable plans for that income group can help contribute to service provider’s business case, but states need to “show their work” in calculating how they arrive at their figures, rather than simply throwing out a figure.

Rural areas face additional challenges on service plans that will affect business plans, said Romano, because of the higher cost to provide service to less densely populated areas. “Service providers are still going to have operating expenses,” he stated. “It’s a two-hour truck roll both ways in some rural areas when you have an operational issue, whereas the apartment building behind me here in Arlington, Virginia, has a five-minute roll from the central office. It’s a very different operating structure.”

Cybersecurity and Supply Chain Provisions

With cyberattacks an unfortunate part of today’s broadband arena, the BEAD NOFO requires fund applications to attest to either having an operational cybersecurity and supply change risk management plan or one that can be implemented before receiving any grant. The plan must reflect the most recent version of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and NIST guidance for supply chain risk management.

“Do we have to comply with every single thing in the NIST cybersecurity framework?” said Tamber Ray Regulatory Counsel, NTCA, during the webinar. “For small companies especially, that’s an overwhelming concept for them to take on. The answer quite simply is ‘No.’”

However, the Draft 2.0 NIST Cybersecurity Framework has six functions that do need to be addressed in any BEAD cybersecurity risk management plan, including the newly added function of Govern. “That was a recognition that you must have the executive team on board. You must have the top of the company understanding and being an active part in cybersecurity at a company in order for it to be effective,” stated Ray. In writing up a supply chain management plan, BEAD applications should be aware of two specific points. “No company should be entering into any sort of contract with any companies on the FCC’s Covered List,” said Ray, referring to a list of foreign telecommunication services and equipment manufacturers that are banned from doing business in the United States. “Beyond that, simply having companies look outside of themselves, look at their vendors to make sure that they’re getting updates when software releases are available and that they’re in a position to make sure that their equipment is up to date as much as possible, so they’re doing proactive steps to protect against any sort of supply chain attacks that might be coming their way.”

Permitting Best Practices

The first Playbook 3.0 module released this summer, the “Permitting: Access to State and Local Rights-of-Way and Infrastructure” document discusses how to think about and implement best practices for working with the permitting process at the state and local levels. “Permitting is a really important piece of the puzzle,” said Romano. “You need to be ready to go and permitting can certainly be a long pole, especially in certain regions where you can’t build for a good portion of the year.”

States are supposed to provide information and details in the BEAD Volume One proposal on how they plan to reduce costs and barriers associated with permitting. “They need a roadmap, a strategy, a plan of attack to help address those issues within the state,” Romano stated. “One good practice, for example, is identifying those state permitting agencies that are likeliest to have a significant role and articulate the plan for coordination with those agencies.”

Other best practices recommended in the Permitting module include creating a single point of contact within the state for permitting to act as an owner and advocate for permitting issues across state agencies, encouraging state agencies to be transparent in their fees, for permitting fees to be cost-based and close to the actual expense necessary for issuing them, and common permit application forms to the largest extent possible.

“The higher those permitting fees, the more of a dent they make in the business case for potentially deploying service to more locations,” stated Romano.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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D I V E R S E

F I B E R

By Doug Mohney

P A T H S

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) operates 20 centers and facilities around the country along with the International Space Station (ISS), driving America’s civil space program and leading global space exploration. Two of those facilities, Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, are multi-user spaceports providing the agency with diverse ways to launch satellites into space and regular supply missions to ISS. Fiber plays a key role in supporting NASA’s enterprise and launch operations at both spaceports, as well as the hundreds of contractors and a steadily growing number of commercial spaceflight companies working with the agency to put people and things into orbit at competitive prices.

Kennedy and Wallops are economic engines creating jobs and massive amounts of data that require resilient high-speed broadband for safety and science.

NASA’s Wallops Island, Virginia is the primary launch facility for Northop Grumman’s Antares rocket for its supply missions to the International Space Station.

Source: Doug Mohney.

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Fiber Forward • Q 4

From Balloons to the Moon

NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) was established in 1945 – over two decades before Kennedy was officially commissioned-- and does a lot of things, including conducting research using aircraft, balloons, and suborbital sounding rockets; developing small spacecraft; operating NASA’s only research airport; providing launch and orbital support for NASA spacecraft; conducting Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) testing and operations; and partnering with Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) for the launch of orbital vehicles. Since its founding, there have been over 16,000 launches from the pads on Virgina’s Eastern Shore, ranging from shorthop suborbital sounding rockets, early testing of Mercury capsules before the first astronauts were launched from Florida, and a probe to the Moon.

WFF is made up of three distinct parcels of land. The airfield and the surrounding base are north of Wallops Island proper and the mainland plot east of the island anchoring the causeway between it and the island. “We’ve got a lot of tenants here,” said Ted Schultz, Service Area Lead, Facility Unique and Specialized Engineering Group (FUSE), WFF. “The rockets are only a small part it. The Navy has its facilities on the island. We’re part of the ground tracking station for the Deep Space Network, the TDRS satellite constellation-- we’ve got 24x7 operations here.”

WFF has two diverse 10 Gbps fiber connections to NASA and the rest of the world. Its northbound connection goes through Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and connects to the NASA network in the Washington, D.C., area. The southbound connection goes through Eastern Shore of Virginia Broadband Authority (ESVBA) fiber and its route along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, landing in Norfolk where it goes through commercial services to connect with NASA’s network at the Marshall Space Flight Center to Huntsville, Alabama.

“We’ve done a whole lot of work over the last 10 years to ensure that that we have geographic diversity for NASA and our tenants,” said Schultz. “We have four different cables to the island itself. About 25 years ago, they laid a fiber optic cable into the marsh. That cable was damaged a couple of times by dredging operations in the area. A year and a half ago, we put in a new 864 strand cable going across the marsh that was directionally drilled underneath for better protection.”

On the island itself, there are multiple launch pads leased

by MARS and operated by different organizations for orbital missions, including a large facility for Northop Grumman’s Antares, a smaller pad for Rocket Lab’s Electron next to it, and further south, a barebones concrete pad and gantry for Northop Grumman’s Minotaur.

To the north, Northop Grumman has a building where

Kennedy Space Center is a multi-user spaceport supporting tens of thousands of jobs. Source: NASA.

it assembles its Antares rocket with the Cygnus cargo freighter for ISS resupply and the Navy’s Surface Combat Systems Center operates an AEGIS training facility. Under construction south of the Minotaur pad, is a new launch pad, landing pad, and barge dock for Rocket Lab’s larger Neutron rocket, a reusable vehicle that will be built just outside of the mainland entrance to Wallops and is expected to have its first flight in 2025.

There are four distributed communication hubs with redundant fiber routes to each one along the length of the island, enabling NASA to operate its own network and provide dark fiber to everyone that needs it. “Without dark fiber for our tenants and our partners to interconnect and share data, we’d be completely lost,” said Schultz. “You’ve got a lot of different organizations that have different roles and responsibilities.” For example, MARS uses NASA dark fiber to connect its network of IP video cameras monitoring the launch sites across the island while Northop Grumman maintains communications with its Antares rocket assembly facility on different strands.

Resilience and redundancy are always in the discussion when WFF pulls fiber since accidents occasionally happen with dramatic effects. The Cygnus Orb-3 launch on October 28, 2014, exploded seconds after liftoff, showering the island with burning fuel and shredded rocket debris. “We used to use an above ground cable tray,” said Schultz. “It could have been a bad day if that vehicle had landed on one. All our cabling on the island was moved underground through our duct system after that.”

The Big Show at KSC Since 1968, the John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Merritt Island, Florida, has been NASA’s primary launch center of human spaceflight, where the Space Shuttle flew from for decades, and the place where people traveled to the Moon and will do so again in the future. KSC sits adjacent to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and its line of launch pads used for commercial and national security operations. (cont. on page 57) Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

17

BABA Arrives at Fiber Connect

By Doug Mohney

Build America, Buy America (BABA) purchasing requirements are an essential part of the $42.45 billion BEAD program, designed to “onshore” and create broadband manufacturing capabilities and jobs for the United States as materials and equipment are purchased for the construction of networks across the country. BABA provisions were top of mind for most Fiber Connect participants, including federal officials, service providers planning to build networks with BEAD money, and equipment manufacturers.

“The goal for President Biden and the Congress is ensuring that this money is spent on products made by American workers,” William Arbuckle, Policy Advisor, NTIA, U.S. Department of Commerce told Fiber Connect attendees in his keynote address. “That’s sort of the crux of it, that infrastructure money, in every case or as many cases as possible, is spent on products made by American workers.

The Buy America Act requires that all the iron, the steel, the manufactured products, the construction materials that are used in infrastructure projects and funded with federal dollars, and this includes the $42.45 BEAD grant program, are produced in the United States.”

Arbuckle said the starting point for BABA, or “Buy America” as he called it in his remarks, was that any project funded through the Bi-partisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) would have to have “the vast majority of stuff” it used to be made in the U.S. “It’s easy enough to say that if it can be made in America, it should be made in America. And that is our broad commitment,” said Arbuckle. “But we know that the reality is often more complex.”

NTIA has been conducting a supply chain analysis for BEAD deployments, mapping out the jobs that will be created, who makes the equipment involved and where it is made, and the ramifications of making any particular piece of equipment in the U.S., including the time, cost, and commercial feasibility of manufacturing within the country.

Arbuckle and his team held nearly 250 distinct meetings with different teams to understand the logistical challenges of complying with BABA. “Two years ago, we heard concerns about the lack of availability of electronics that would be compliant with 18

Fiber Forward • Q 4

NTIA’s William Arbuckle outlining BEAD’s Build America, Buy America requirements at Fiber Connect 2023. Source: Doug Mohney.

the Buy America preference, and specifically how the integrated circuits are almost uniformly made in Southeast Asia,” said Arbuckle. “This was something that we heard about, conversation after conversation, if you’re going to move electronics to the U.S., we have this big challenge, especially around the circuits.”

Arbuckle discussed NTIA’s proposed BABA waiver, released the day before his keynote, and its impact and necessity in striking a “firm, but also pragmatic balance” to expand domestic manufacturing and leading to jobs creation in the U.S. while ensuring that high-speed broadband networks are built in a timely manner.

There are two distinct documents that apply to BABA provisions, one final document from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that is designed to boost the use of American-made goods and sets a standard for construction materials. “If you are determined to be a construction material, you need to be made in the U.S.,” said Arbuckle. Optical fiber is defined as construction material, with a targeted narrow waiver for non-optic glass inputs which can be used as an input to the preform material.

The second document is the proposed NTIA waiver, which provides specific guidance for the BEAD program, with descriptions of what materials and good will won’t be accepted for purchase, including the complexity of figuring out how to handle electronics gear.

“When it comes to electronics, we found that there’s some classes and categories of electronics that are currently manufactured outside of the United States, but for which there is an economic case for onshoring the assembly,” said Arbuckle. “What we’ve done at NTIA is we propose to waive all electronics for the BEAD program, with the exception of four categories of electronics.”

Optical line terminals (OLTs), OLT line cards, optical pluggables that are used for OLTs, and optical network terminals (ONTs/ONUs) being purchased with BEAD funding all will have to be made in the United States. NTIA is providing specific guidance as to the manufacturing process that must occur in the U.S. for those four categories to be BABAcompliant, with a two-part test to be applied.

The first part is if the item was manufactured in the United States. The second part is if the components of the product equal a 55% domestic content threshold, with one caveat.

as lashing wire and other materials of what Arbuckle described as a “catch all category of other network equipment” to make sure network builders have some flexibility to meet deployment goals and budget. Enclosures and electronics are exempt from the De Minimis waiver, and must be made in the U.S. The final version of the NTIA BABA waiver policy should be available this fall once adjustments are made from the comments period that ended on September 21, 2023.

“Last but not least, under this Buy America approach, based on the analysis that we do when we estimate that on a per project basis, we think that close to 90% of BEAD equipment spend will be on American made products and materials,” said Arbuckle. “That means more good jobs, domestically, more successful local businesses and as we saw during COVID, a more resilient domestic supply chain. That is what this [NTIA] rule set is designed to develop.”

Arbuckle noted that a number of network companies were increasing their U.S.-based manufacturing in response to BEAD BABA requirements. “I was in Hickory, North Carolina, several months ago where Corning and CommScope “We heard announced an though, from investment in Build America Buy America provisions are described in OMB and Department of Commerce directives. Source: Doug Mohney. many of you, that their fiber optic the integrated cable facilities, circuits or chips in this equipment makes up the majority of hundreds of millions of dollars, hiring hundreds of the value of these components,” said Arbuckle. “While the workers,” he said. “We’ve gone to Jackson, Tennessee, to Biden-Harris Administration is deeply engaged in efforts visit Prysmian. In the last month, we’ve been in Wisconsin to bring back semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S., we where Nokia announced onshoring electronics. We have determined that for the time being, we’re going to were in Alabama where Adtran announced expanding waive that 55% component test. To reiterate, electronics manufacturing and onshoring. We are seeing companies need to be made in the U.S. We’re waiving that second test step up and I would say I am very confident that there around the 55% domestic content threshold, and that’s due are more companies that are going to be announcing to the difficulty of sourcing those integrated circuits.” domestic manufacturing expansion onshore in the near future. This is not ‘pie in the sky’ thinking. We are seeing In addition, each BEAD project will have the opportunity companies stepping up and beginning to improve their to apply for a De Minimis waiver for certain items, such supply chains.”

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Fiber Forward

17

A Build America, Buy America Scorecard

By Doug Mohney

With over $42 billion in BEAD funding at stake, manufacturers of all types are working to comply with Build America, Buy America (BABA) provisions to make their products eligible for purchase and incorporation into broadband network projects. Here’s a snapshot of companies in the fiber broadband ecosystem that have announced new facilities and production arrangements to comply with BABA. This partial list shows that 850 or more new jobs have been created, with companies investing upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars in new U.S. manufacturing facilities for fiber optic cable and electronics production.

Adtran

The Huntsville, Alabama-based company announced it is investing up to $5 million dollars at its state-of-theart manufacturing facility in Huntsville to increase U.S. production capacity of advanced telecommunications equipment, specifically to expand the current production of OLT equipment and to prepare to onshore the manufacturing of ONTs. The company expects the creation of up to 300 high-quality jobs adding to the company’s American workforce of more than 1,400 employees.

Calix

Calix is working with several U.S. manufacturing solutions companies, including Jabil, Gemtek, and Hisense Broadband, to ramp up equipment production of ONTs, OLTs, and optical modules. San Jose-based Calix will make an initial investment of $4 million to $6 million and conduct an ongoing spend for operations of $10 million to $15 million per year, with the funding going to hire more than 100 U.S. workers in manufacturing, operations, engineering, quality assurance, and administrative roles, with additional jobs expected to be created during the duration of the BEAD program.

CommScope

The company plans to invest $60.3 million over the next four years to expand its manufacturing facilities based in

North Carolina, resulting in increased production and the creation of at least 250 new jobs. CommScope currently has the capacity to manufacture drop cable at a rate of approximately a billion feet per year in its U.S. facilities, with the increase including loose tube production and additional fiber cable counts and styles needed for rural deployment.

Corning

In August, Corning formally opened its newest optical cable manufacturing campus in Hickory, North Carolina. The new facilities will add hundreds of new jobs to Corning’s existing North Carolina workforce of more than 5,000 employees and the new campus is a part of a series of investments by Corning totaling more than $500 million since 2020.

Nokia

Nokia announced in August that it is partnering with Sanmina Corporation to manufacture broadband network electronic products at Sanmina’s Pleasant Prairie facility in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, bringing up to 200 new jobs to the state. It also announced it is partnering with Fabrinet, a global manufacturer of precision optical products, to produce multi-rate optical modules at Fabrinet’s facility in Santa Clara, California. Products Nokia will manufacture in the U.S. with Sanmina, Fabrinet, and others include OLT cards for a modular Access Node, a small form factor OLT, OLT optical modules, and an outdoor-hardened ONT.

Prysmian Group

In 2022, Prysmian invested $30 million to retool and transition its Jackson, Tennessee, copper cable facility to produce fiber optic cable. Retraining enabled Prysmian to keep 80% of its workers at the facility, who are now making fiber. The company is also embarking on a $50 million multi-year modernization project at its Claremont, North Carolina, fiber facility to enhance process capabilities, systems, and technologies to support future growth.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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17

Demonstrating Fiber’s Disruption at Fiber Connect 2023

By Doug Mohney

As communities embrace the capabilities of fiber and companies continue to leverage and expand fiber’s versatility, service providers and vendors came together to demonstrate the growing and thriving ecosystem of applications, services, and technologies to support disruption, change market dynamics, and push the boundaries of what is possible. This year in Orlando, seven different Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstrations at Fiber Connect 2023 showcased the advances being made by leveraging the unlimited bandwidth, low latency, reliability, and lower power consumption of fiber to deliver innovation locally and network-wide.

“When fiber leads, the future follows. Our PoC Showcase is a great example of the capabilities that fiber can deliver and the markets that fiber will disrupt next,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association. “These PoCs are an exciting representation of our members’ ability to redefine what is possible when fiber is the enabling infrastructure that allows any industry, business, or market to go further, faster.”

Three POCs won awards for being the most innovative, best community, and game-changer solutions presented at the show.

MOST INNOVATIVE AWARD

“Multi-Vendor Middle Mile Use Cases Enhancing PON Infrastructure via Infinera’s XR Optics Point-To-Multipoint, Automated by netFLEX®,” presented by Infinera and LightRiver.

The two companies showcased a multi-vendor FTTX PON network implemented with a 400G DWDM Middle Mile point-to-multipoint solution from the router to the OLT, illustrating how service providers can mix and match various network elements while using advanced network intelligence to discover, monitor, and troubleshoot them as needed.

BEST COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD

Infinera and LightRiver accepted the award for Most Innovative PoC. Source: FBA

“Get Ready for The Next Generation of Applications by Deploying a Disruptive Broadband Architecture” presented by Ciena.

This PoC explored how service providers can rethink their network architectural approach, leveraging disaggregation and virtualization, to push network access closer to the user to deliver and scale capacity where needed. Featuring contributions from Plume and Heights Telecom, Ciena demonstrated how it can provide end-to-end services from the network core to the edge while working with third-party solutions to deliver the best customer experience.

GAME CHANGER AWARD

“Superior Network Performance – Every Way You Slice It” presented by Nokia.

Nokia’s PoC explored how operators can guarantee quality of service with complete granularity across the network from the IP core to a user appliance in the home. With this level of control, operators can use their fiber network for anything and generate new revenues with guaranteed performance for any service type.

Additional PoCs presented at Fiber Connect 2023 included: y “Digital 3D Georeferenced Fiber Network Roll-Out Management and Documentation,” presented by DeepUp. y “Enhancing the Customer Experience and Streamlining Operations with CloudBased Provisioning, Billing, and Orchestration,” presented by Ting Internet and Wavelo. y “Leveraging Fiber to Efficiently Capture Small Businesses in Your Markets,” presented by Calix. y “Enhancing Fiber Reach with Ultra-High Capacity mmW Radios at Network Edge,” presented by Ceragon.

Ciena won the Best Community Impact Award for its PoC demonstration at Fiber Connect 2023. Source: FBA

Nokia’s PoC demonstration at Fiber Connect 2023 won the Game Changer Award. Source: FBA

All PoC demonstrations were evaluated live at Fiber Connect 2023 by industry analysts examining the merits of the presentations.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

23

F I B E R

C O N N E C T

2 0 2 3

MIDWEST LEGISLATORS Talk Broadband

By Doug Mohney

Iowa House Representative Ray Sorensen, II, and Missouri House Representative Louis Riggs explore state broadband policy with Pew Charitable Trusts’ Kathryn de Wit during the State Broadband Summit. Source: FBA.

The State Broadband Summit was among the highlights of Fiber Connect, bringing together state and federal government officials with service providers and industry leaders. Among the Wednesday sessions focusing on the rollout of BEAD funding, the “State Broadband Policy: Walking the Halls with Legislators” discussion with Representative Louis Riggs from the Missouri House of Representatives, Representative Ray Sorensen II from the Iowa House of Representatives, and moderator Katheryn de Wit of Pew Charitable Trusts provided insight into the processes and discussions going on at the state level.

De Wit pointed out that both Riggs and Sorensen had run on a platform for getting everyone in their communities connected to broadband. “You have [legislators] who are working actively not just with the providers, but other members of the community, other folks who drive industry in the state,” she said, with agriculture being a prominent voice in the conversations.

“Broadband is one of the great unifiers,” said de Wit in her opening remarks. “It crosses state lines, it crosses

24

Fiber Forward • Q 4

party lines and I’m very proud to work on one of the few remaining bipartisan issues left in this country.”

“The role is pretty broad [for state legislators],” said Sorensen. “Because first and foremost, I’m not an industry expert, I’m a mural painter by training. Just bridging that education gap and making sure we know exactly what we’re talking about. [I’m] leaning heavily on my broadband office. We have a great Chief Information Officer in Iowa.

“Our role is mostly to get government out of the way when we’re in the way for connecting broadband… In a rural area, it’s so much about connecting that middle mile to the last mile. Where it doesn’t make sense for a lot of the private industry to serve Maw and Paw Jones, three miles down the gravel road, when they’re the only person they’re serving and you’re running fiber for three miles, that’s where the state comes in.”

Like Sorensen, Riggs describes himself as “self-taught” on technology and internet policy. He noted that state legislators are both policymakers and appropriators that

are closer to their constituents than Congress. “We hear from them all the time,” he said. “We go back to our districts every weekend, we go into the same grocery stores, we go to the same events. ‘Where’s my internet?’ We hear that mantra a lot. I get it from all over the state because I chair a committee in that jurisdiction for broadband.”

Riggs said that broadband policy is a bi-partisan issue in Missouri, with 25% of the state’s suburbs without good internet, leading to plenty of discussion with all stakeholders. “We communicate constantly back and forth to providers, within the General Assembly, it’s not just the lobbyists, we talk to everybody,” said Riggs. “That’s been a real godsend for us. It’s basically the understanding that we’re all in this together. And the only way to solve this is all together at the same time.”

When Sorensen entered office in 2018, he was a relatively lone voice promoting broadband. “It was pre-COVID,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of push for everybody being connected and that was what I was pushing for. One of the things I ran around saying was, ‘Let’s get everyone in Iowa connected to FCC standard broadband connection or better.’ I had that same [position] with a handful of other legislators coming in, we started a group called the Broadband Bros.

We met after caucus and talked about ways that we could further engagement with the lobbyists and the governor and other stakeholders. What we could do as legislators, like I said before, to get out of the way, or to fund or to implement stuff into Iowa code AV, which is what’s set aside for all this, this code and law that focuses on broadband.”

COVID ended up changing the rules and perception of broadband for the state at large. “COVID was a blessing in this industry in the sense that it highlighted how deficient we were not only across Iowa but across the country,” said Sorensen. “It went from me begging to get $5 million

in 2020 right before COVID and I was able to get $100 million in 2021. It had people calling me from all over the state, republicans, democrats, the governor, everybody was like, ‘You’ve been bringing this up forever,’ you know, and so you kind of fall backwards into becoming the IT guy. And then the Speaker of the [Iowa] House started a special IT committee specifically for this because we realized how important it is.”

Riggs noted he was able to work with the Missouri executive branch and having a similar lightbulb moment with the pandemic. “COVID was good for us in the sense that people understood telemedicine in ways they had never experienced before, the use of online education out of necessity,” he said. “But I go back to something with us, we really need a statewide point person on broadband.

Governor Carson was from one of the most rural counties in Missouri, period. He asked what that looks like, he just sat there and shook his head a little bit and said, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ And that was easy.”

Within three months after that meeting, Missouri held a massive meeting with over 100 broadband providers and stakeholders. “Everybody behaved themselves, called the meeting, basically sat down and had that ‘Come-to-Jesus’ moment,” Riggs said. “We’re going to do broadband. And we look at it very simply. The only reason you shouldn’t have broadband in Missouri is if you don’t want it. And if you don’t want it, God help you, it’s time to sell the house.”

Missouri and Riggs view BEAD funding as a once-ina-lifetime opportunity to provide broadband to all the state, requiring an “all hands-on deck approach” with constant communication between the executive and legislative branches of the state government. The Governor expanded the state broadband office from one person to a dozen, including hiring one of the people out of Riggs’ office.

COVID was a blessing in this industry in the sense that it highlighted how deficient we were not only across Iowa but across the country. It went from me begging to get $5 million in 2020 right before COVID and I was able to get $100 million in 2021.

– Iowa State Representative Ray Sorensen (cont. on page 58) Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Honoring Outstanding Contributions to the Industry AT FIBER CONNECT 2023

By Doug Mohney

Stephen Hardy, telecom industry veteran, received the Fiber Lifetime Achievement Award at Fiber Connect 2023.

FBA President & CEO Gary Bolton was surprised to receive this year’s Chairman’s Award at Fiber Connect 2023.

At Fiber Connect 2023 in Orlando, the Fiber Broadband Association once again recognized the individuals and organizations who have contributed to the betterment of communities around the country and the industry at large.

Such efforts are increasingly important as the association continues its growth and fiber reaches millions more households through the efforts of its members and others.

Chairman’s Award

“The Fiber Broadband Association is proud to recognize those that go above and beyond to advance our mission to connect every community and person to reliable fiber broadband services,” said Gary Bolton, President and CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association. “They’ve shown unrelenting dedication to the fiber broadband industry.”

Gary Bolton, President & CEO, Fiber Broadband Association

Each year, the Chairman’s Award honors an individual or company that has shown tremendous effort to promote, educate, or accelerate Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). Bolton received this year’s award for his leadership in fiber broadband advocacy and championing FBA members’ ability to advance fiber deployments across North America.

His work is helping to close the digital equity gap so that every community can access the benefits of reliable, highquality internet.

Stephen Hardy was presented with a Fiber Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his more than 40 years of service covering the industry. As Editorial Director for Lightwave and Broadband Technology Report, Hardy has been a trusted pillar of the fiber broadband editorial community.

“Gary’s passion for fiber broadband is contagious. He works diligently to create awareness about the elite capabilities that only fiber can deliver and his efforts are convincing North America that when fiber leads, the future follows,” said Joseph Jones “JJ,” Board Chairman at Fiber Broadband Association and President at On Trac, Inc. “Gary is a pillar of our industry and leading an organized effort to connect every American to fiber broadband services and raise the quality of life for generations to come. We are proud to recognize him with this year’s Chairman’s Award.”

“Stephen has dedicated his entire career to reporting on the telecom industry’s ups and downs, innovations, trends, and market pressures and did it with fairness and accuracy,” said Bolton. “He has been a trusted source in our industry and while we wish the best for him in his retirement, we will miss him dearly.”

Bolton’s leadership has expanded fiber broadband’s public policy influence, workforce development initiatives, FBA’s research library, and FBA membership—more than doubling it in less than three years. He has worked to ensure policymakers are well-versed in fiber’s benefits, leading FBA to provide resources to committees and

Fiber Lifetime Achievement Award Stephen Hardy, Lightwave/ Broadband Technology Report

Source for all photos: FBA. 26

Fiber Forward • Q 4

S&N Communications won the Gene Scott Education Award. Andy Gibson accepted the award at Fiber Connect 2023.

Brendan O’Boyle from Preformed Line Products and Chair of FBA’s Deployment Specialists Committee won this year’s Photon Award at Fiber Connect 2023.

departments. Within the last 18 months, the U.S. Department of Commerce and NTIA declared priority for BEAD projects using end-to-end fiber; the Treasury Department encouraged American Rescue Plan Act funding recipients to prioritize fiber; and the FCC rejected Starlink’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund long-form application.

Under Bolton’s leadership, FBA also addressed the fundamental industry issue of workforce development.

FBA published the Workforce Development Guidebook, providing an extensive framework for how states can use BEAD funding to solve local fiber workforce needs, and distributed it to all 56 state broadband and workforce development offices. FBA completed the Optical Telecom Installer Certification (OpTIC Path™) program pilot course in May 2022 and has since spread program engagement to 40 service providers and 67 community colleges and training institutes across 39 states.

Gene Scott Education Award S&N Communications

Before his passing in 2022, Gene Scott served as Chairman of FBA’s Education Subcommittee and was instrumental in the development of FBA’s OpTIC Path workforce development program. The Gene Scott Education Award recognizes a person, community, or institution that has significantly impacted the advancement of education in the fiber industry. S&N Communications has been an enthusiastic supporter of FBA’s Optical Telecom Installer Certification (OpTIC Path™) workforce development program.

Among its many contributions to the OpTIC Path program, S&N Communications leveraged its practical experience employing fiber optic technicians to develop the popular “Documentation, Values, and Success in the Field” module for the OpTIC Path course. The module distinguishes FBA’s program from other fiber optic training courses by highlighting actions to help make technicians successful in the field, including a focus on safety, craftsmanship, documentation, and customer service.

S&N Communications also served as a valued participant in the OpTIC Path Train the Trainer classes, implemented new video recording tools for the course, continues to enthusiastically promote the program to state organizations,

Northern Colorado Community Fiber received the Star Award at Fiber Connect 2023.

and pioneered a partnership with the Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware Association of Electric Cooperatives (VMDAEC) to leverage the OpTIC Path program, expand training focus, grow the fiber technician workforce, and support intense fiber network construction plans across the U.S.

Photon Award Winner

Brendan O’Boyle, National Sales Manager, Preformed Line Products; and Chair, Deployment Specialists Committee, Fiber Broadband Association

The Photon Award honors a Fiber Broadband Association member who, through volunteer contribution, has demonstrated a high level of dedication to the organization and has contributed greatly to the industry.

Brendan O’Boyle is a long-term active member of the Fiber Broadband Association. He helped create the Deployment Specialists Committee and devotes countless hours of service to the committee, the broader association, and its events. He led the arduous effort to craft the first Fiber and 5G whitepaper and played a critical role in the development and rollout of the Fiber Broadband Association’s OpTIC Path workforce development program.

Star Award Winner

Northern Colorado Community Fiber (NOCO Community Fiber)

The Star Award recognizes a person, community, or company that has gone above and beyond what is expected in the advancement of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH).

NOCO Community Fiber is a partnership between municipality-owned communications utilities and the county they empower. It is dedicated to the delivery of reliable, highquality, affordable fiber broadband and has demonstrated that this critical connectivity is achievable when communities collaborate on creative solutions and profitability is removed from the equation. Collectively, the city-owned broadband utilities in the partnership have stood up the option for Fiberto-the-Premise to over 125,000 addresses in five years. Now with an additional $10,000,000 in county and state funds, NOCO Community Fiber is working to serve 2,650 rural and harder-to-access locations, with more to come as financial resources are available.

Source for all photos: FBA. Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Fiber Connect 2023 Photo Gallery

FBA President & CEO Gary Bolton provides Fiber Connect 2023 attendees with the annual State of the Association Address.

Andy Berke, Administrator for the USDA Rural Utilities Service, has a Fireside Chat with Evann Freeman, FBA Conference Committee Chair & EPB Dir. of Government Relations, about lighting up rural communities with fiber during the C-Suite Forum.

Eric Beightel, Executive Director of the Permitting Council, sits for a Fireside Chat with FBA’s Marissa Mitrovich during Monday’s General Sessions. Beightel also keynoted during General Sessions and at the C-Suite Forum.

Evann Freeman, FBA Conference Committee Chair & EPB Dir. of Government Relations, explores the next five years of fiber with state broadband officers at Wednesday’s State Broadband Summit.

Ariane Schaffer, FBA Board Member & Google Fiber Public Policy and Government Relations Manager, poses for a unique photo opp with the real Gary Bolton and the popular #flatgary in the Expo Hall.

Source for all photos: FBA.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

29

Joseph Jones “JJ,” FBA Board Chair & On Trac, Inc. President, cuts the ribbon to officially open the sold-out Expo Hall.

30

Google Fiber’s Dinni Jain delivers a Light Talk about how fiber is disrupting the future of the internet.

Sitetracker was one of the many companies that leveraged the Fiber Threatre to engage with attendees in the Expo Hall.

Jade Piros de Carvalho, Dir. of Broadband Development for the Kansas Dept. of Commerce, discusses her state’s broadband future during the State Broadband Summit.

Attendees from FBA Premier Member Cisco enjoy some networking time before General Sessions on Monday morning.

Fiber Forward • Q 4

Source for all photos: FBA.

HFCL chats with an attendee in the busy Expo Hall.

Ready.net, Inc.’s Scott D. Woods and Craighead Electric Cooperative’s Jeremiah Sloan enjoy talking about mapping rural expansion in the middle mile during Pre-Conference Workshops.

NTIA Digital Equity Director Angela Thi-Bennett explores how diversity, equity, and inclusion create opportunity during a Fireside Chat.

Alejandro Roark, Chief of the FCC’s Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, has a Fireside Chat during the C-Suite Forum about digital literacy.

Leaders from across the fiber broadband and state broadband ecosystems gather at Fiber Connect 2023 to network and collaborate.

Source for all photos: FBA.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Fiber Forward

17

FIBER CONNECT 2023:

Executive Light Talks from AT&T and Consolidated Communications

Consolidated Communications’ Gaurav Juneja explores how fiber disrupts rural communities during a Light Talk. Source: FBA.

Fiber Connect 2023 was a showcase for the fiber broadband ecosystem, enabling service providers, equipment manufacturers, construction contractors, policymakers, consultants, and analysts to exchange views on the state of the industry and where it is headed.

Among the keynote speakers sharing their thoughts and positions through the event’s “Light Talk” series were telecom executives Chris Sambar, President, AT&T Networks, and Gaurav Juneja, President - Consumer & SMB, Consolidated Communications.

Fiber joins a long line of AT&T telecommunications innovations since the first telephone in 1876. “In 1977, the first commercial fiber was laid in America,” said Sambar.

“That was AT&T in Chicago. It’s been going strong now for almost 50 years.” Calling fiber “future proof” and “a great investment we’re making in America,” Sambar suggested fiber could have a useful lifespan of 100 years or more, given some copper installed in the 1880s is still in use today, nearly 150 years later, while some of the initial fiber deployed in the ‘70s is still in production use today.

Unlike copper, fiber provides superior speed, flexibility, and reliability and is the literal backbone media of all AT&T’s services today, providing hundreds of gigabits in its core network spanning the globe to support everything from consumer connectivity through 5G wireless. AT&T is already looking at ways to increase speeds, having tested 20 Gbps symmetrical speeds in its production network last year. Upgrading will mean simply replacing the electronics on the end points, rather than having to dig, replace, and add more copper capacity as it had in the past.

“Ten years ago, we started deploying consumer fiber, 1G gigabit service. Back then, people were asking, ‘What

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Fiber Forward • Q 4

does the consumer need a gigabit of speed for? That’s crazy,’” Sambar stated. “Fast forward to last year, we launched 2G and 5G speed tiers. People are buying 2G and 5G speed tiers. They’re obviously doing something in their homes where they need it.”

Reliability has substantially increased across AT&T’s network with fiber, given that copper wires and water don’t mix well, requiring elaborate air pressure systems to keep copper dry in central office locations. AT&T is also benefiting from the energy savings that fiber delivers as well, helping it meet its carbon reduction goals. “The energy to provide a bit to a customer is 70% lower with fiber than it is with copper,” Sambar stated.

“You’ve got a service that’s more reliable, more energy efficient, fewer repairs, fewer truck rolls, and less carbon so better for the environment.”

Like other service providers, AT&T is working to close the digital divide with its own investments along with public and private partnerships. “We’re trying to grow our fiber network as quickly as we possibly can, because we want to serve as many Americans with fiber as we possibly can,” said Sambar. “We want to provide competition in those areas that don’t have great access to high-speed broadband services. Last year, we deployed over 60,000 miles of fiber. We have 25 million locations now covered by our fiber broadband product.”

AT&T doubled the number of locations it had passed with fiber since 2019, investing $140 billion into its network infrastructure between 2018 and 2022, with a significant amount of the construction going into fiber services. The company has also created joint ventures such as Gigapower with investment group BlackRock and public-private partnerships with cities to build fiber

networks. Sambar cited AT&T’s success to bring fiber to 20,000 locations in Oldham County, Kentucky, using a combination of its funds and American Rescue Plan funds provided through the local government as an example of how private-public partnerships can work for the benefit of all.

Consolidated’s Rural Reach

While not as large as AT&T, Consolidated Communications traces its history almost as far back with its founding in 1894. Today, Consolidated delivers consumer and business services in over 20 states with a fiber network of over 58,000 route miles, making it among the top 10 largest providers in the country.

“Our mission is to bring broadband services to unserved and underserved communities, ultimately connected to people and enriching how they live and work,” said Juneja.

“We have done this through a significant fiber network expansion, known as Fidium Fiber internet, and through public and private partnerships.”

Fiber has had a positive disruptive effect on rural communities, said Juneja, enabling small businesses and single owner proprietorships to compete with their city counterparts. “Fiber broadband is an equalizer, an essential utility that levels the playing field for education, remote work, telehealth, entertainment, and so much more,” said Juneja. “We’re seeing incredible collaboration from network operators, towns, municipalities, residents, business owners, and government agencies to make high-speed fiber internet a reality and enabler in rural America. This can sometimes take months or even years of planning and none of this can be possible without a true team effort.”

Rural communities and their residents are being opened to a world of opportunities through high-speed broadband, as well as creating additional wealth. Juneja said that 1G fiber service can add more than 3% to a home’s value and increase rental values by 8%. Bringing fiber into Chesterfield, New Hampshire, has resulted in a housing boom, with new families arriving and houses selling as quickly as they hit the market.

“Better connected communities create better employment opportunities,” Juneja stated, noting that 70% of all jobs are now posted online. “Studies show that higher rates of access to and adoption of wired broadband like fiber lead to higher employment in rural communities, higher median incomes, and increased entrepreneurial activity.”

Fiber is also benefiting Consolidated’s small business customers. “A shoe store in beautiful downtown Keene, New Hampshire, saw a 30% increase in ecommerce sales,” Juneja stated. “Now they’re experimenting with new technology that will allow virtual running shoe fittings via

AT&T’s Chris Sambar delivers a Light Talk focused on how fiber will enable a host of new connected features inside the home, at work, and at educational institutions. Source: FBA.

his website with his fiber connection. Imagine finding the right shoes for a pronator with an uneven stride from the local shop without having to leave their homes.”

Consolidated wants to bring the success of fiber to more communities, but it won’t be easy, even with BEAD and other factors. “Wiring rural America with fiber is hard work and it’s expensive, but it is the catalyst for new opportunities,” said Juneja. “Network operators such as ourselves make tough decisions every day on CapEx investments, given the geography and scale of rural communities and this requires considerable financial and operating discipline. However, the benefits of fiber broadband to rural America will not be fully utilized until the last mile and the network is fully built.”

To do this, Consolidated Communications is embarking on the largest private expansion plan in the company’s 130-year history, with the goal to upgrade at least 70% of its current service area with fiber direct to the home and business. “We are well down this path and have recently surpassed 1 million fiber passes as we bring Fidium Fiber service to hundreds of thousands of people across rural unserved and underserved communities throughout the U.S.,” said Juneja.

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FIBER CONNECT 2023:

Understanding the

Cornucopia

of Federal Funds

By Doug Mohney

Nicole Gerald, Policy Advisor for the U.S. Department of Treasury, rationalizes broadband funding options during a panel at the State Broadband Summit. Source: FBA.

W

hile NTIA’s BEAD program is the biggest federal broadband program that is coming into fruition, State Broadband Officers look to leverage billions in available funding from existing federal programs to determine how to best connect communities and constituents. Each different federal program has its own criteria, milestones, and procedures to determine funding awards and distribution, creating challenges sorting through and making the best use of the opportunities available.

“We look for the one government agency, one department that is going to coordinate everything,” said Rick Talbot, Principal Analyst, ACG Research. “It doesn’t work that way. There are multiple departments and programs. Some are taking applications. Some have taken applications and they’re disbursing funds. But in order to reach out [and extend coverage], you need even more funding.”

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Fiber Forward • Q 4

At Fiber Connect 2023, the “Rationalizing Broadband Funding” panel at the State Broadband Summit brought together representatives from four federal agencies to discuss best practices when navigating their respective programs. Introducing the panel, Talbot noted the complexities involved in application, coordination, timelines, and the need for finding matching funds as necessary for grant programs, a point further highlighted by the panel’s moderator.

“There are over 25 different federal programs that are administered by seven different federal agencies,” said Carol Mattey of Mattey Consulting, the panel’s moderator.

“The challenge is ‘How do all of these programs fit together?’ Everybody is focused on BEAD, the big game in town. But these existing [federal] programs are already in place, they’ve already committed funding, they’re in the process of dispersing funding. How will state broadband offices be able to get all the pieces of the puzzle together?”

Representatives from the Department of Treasury, USDA Rural Development, the White House Council of Native American Affairs at the Department of Interior, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) outlined the characteristics of their respective broadband funding programs in play outside of BEAD. In applying for BEAD, state broadband offices are required by NTIA to identify existing federal state and local efforts already underway to address the digital divide in their initial proposals and to remove from eligibility locations that already have an existing commitment to deliver reliable 100/20 Mbps service, making coordination between agencies and state broadband offices vital.

Department of Treasury – ARPA/Capital Projects Fund

Established under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Capital Projects Fund (CPF) allocated $10 billion for projects to help households and communities access health, education, and work resources through broadband infrastructure, digital connectivity, and multipurpose community facilities.

“First and foremost, our speed standards aren’t symmetrical,” said Nicolette Gerald, Policy Advisor, U.S. Department of Treasury. “There are cases in which it is impractical to invest funds in certain areas because of geography, topography, or excessive costs. The speed standard is 100/20, but it must be scalable to 100 symmetrical in the future. We also have a preference for fiber and last mile.”

Since ARPA is a COVID relief program, projects funded by CPF must be fully operational by December 31, 2026, the expiration date of the Act. At the time of the panel in August, Gerald said Treasury had approved over $6.9 billion in broadband infrastructure projects in 45 states that expected to add about one million locations across the country.

Department of Agriculture (USDA)

USDA’s telecommunications programs reside within the agency’s rural utilities and rural development mission

area, with five existing programs plus the addition of the Broadband Technical Assistance (BTA) Program in the spring of 2023 through the Inflation Reduction Act. “We received about $20 million in BTA to be able to have technical assistance and getting into broadband deployment,” said Lakeisha Hood Moise, USDA Rural Development State Director for Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands. “You’ve probably heard ad nauseum about ReConnect. It is the go-to program for broadband access in rural communities, particularly because it is not just a loan program, but loan, grant, or loan/grant combination.

In instances in communities that are persistently impoverished or socially vulnerable, we can do 100% grant and we can do no matching requirements.”

Other offerings from USDA include the agency’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Loan and Loan Guarantee Program, the Community Connect Grant Program to provide broadband service to rural, economically challenged communities where service doesn’t exist, and a distance learning and telemedicine program to build on top of rural broadband connectivity. In addition, reauthorization of the Farm Bill every five years results in a direct loan broadband program being incorporated into it, with the next reauthorization due this year.

Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)

HUD’s urban development mission provides Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) that go out to roughly 1,200 counties, cities, and states, with cities and counties receiving the money directly and the states passingthrough the money to cities and counties not receiving the money directly. Funding from these grants can be applied to public facilities and infrastructure to improve quality of life. CDBG money is relatively unique in that it can be used, unlike most federal dollars, as a local match source for other federal programs.

To address broadband needs, HUD issued CPD Notice 2204 in 2020, requiring each state and local government to (cont. on page 49)

At Fiber Connect 2023, representatives from four federal departments discussed their broadband funding programs and how they work together to avoid overlap and support grantees. Source: FBA. Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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17

F I B E R

C O N N E C T

2 0 2 3

Middle Mile Funding

By Doug Mohney

For rural communities, middle mile networks are enabling infrastructure necessary to build high-speed broadband access for homes, schools, health care, libraries, and businesses. Over the summer, the NTIA Enabling Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Program awarded $1 billion in funding to expand middle-mile infrastructure across 40 states and territories, but many applications were left disappointed.

“The Middle Mile program is a force multiplier in our efforts to connect everyone in America,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communication and Information Alan Davidson in a press release announcing the awards. “Middle mile infrastructure

brings capacity to our local networks and lowers the cost for deploying future local networks. These grants will help build the foundation of networks that will, in turn, connect every home in the country to affordable, reliable high-speed internet service.”

NTIA’s new middle mile grants will deploy 12,000 miles of new fiber that will pass within 1,000 feet of 6,961 community anchor institutions, with awards investing an additional $848 million of outside matching into the projects, according to the agency’s press release announcing the awards. The 36 awards range from $2.7 million to $88.8 million with an average award amount of $26.6 million.

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Colorado is one of many states looking to leverage NTIA funding to expand middle mile broadband infrastructure. Source: Adobe.

It’s a lot of money to be sure, but with over 260 applications submitted last year and totaling $7.47 billion in funding requests, there is still significant need and demand for additional resources to build out middle mile projects. At Fiber Connect 2023, several organizations involved with applying for NTIA middle mile grants discussed their experiences on the “Middle Mile Grants – How to Take Middle Mile Further” panel held on Sunday, August 20, 2023. Participants included Josh Leonard, Broadband Business Lead, Burns & McDonnell; Dennis Pappas, Director – Fiber Network, NextLight of Colorado; and Travis Ralls, Principal Account Manager, Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) in Texas.

“We did not get cash,” said Pappas. “We asked for $4.7 million. We were going to edge out our network into Hygiene, Colorado, which is an agricultural area west of Longmont. There’s also some land that was recently annexed by the city of Longmont that has existing homes that don’t meet the FCC minimum requirements for broadband. We planned to add two huts off our existing network and place the splitter cabinets there.”

NextLight’s grant application offered to provide 30% of the project in cash and in-kind services and do the build within 48 months. During the debrief, Pappas was told by NTIA that they would have received extra scoring points if NextLight had offered to put in up to 50% and do the build in two years.

“I don’t know if that was the tipping point,” Pappas stated.

“They wouldn’t give you any sense of how you scored against the other applicants. It was those different nuances in there that were considered, but not stated, that we missed out on. That was probably the biggest ‘Ah ha’ for me.”

Leonard, who assisted Lower Colorado River Authority and several other organizations in applying for NTIA grant monies, sat in on several post-application reviews and agreed with Pappas. “I was taken by surprise a little bit by the comments about the match as well, because there wasn’t specific guidance about that,” said Leonard. “They didn’t say they would give preference to a 50% or more 40

Fiber Forward • Q 4

match. If you’re a commercial entity that’s been doing this a long time and you know how to get the lion’s share of the money, you just come in with that.”

Ralls felt the NTIA evaluation of matching funds was less about specific percentages and more about moving goalposts. “What we saw through the NTIA debrief is that there’s a look of a moving target,” said Ralls. “We thought the target was X. We debrief and we find out we should have matched more. In our case, we’re matching about 36% to 37% of a $42 million total. The next thing we heard is ‘Why don’t you tell us about your latency?’ I think if you were to bring down your latency, then you had a better chance of getting this grant. Where did that come from? We know how to build networks, we understand latency, but we didn’t know that there was a requirement to put in latency in our application.”

Leonard believed NTIA had done well in rewarding partnerships with utilities and ISPs, due to the synergistic benefits of working with utilities. “If you follow the power, the money will go a lot further,” said Leonard. “An average state has at least 10 or more co-ops that cover that state and that rural territory. Why wouldn’t it make sense if we invested all this money for us to do [broadband networks] like we did the electrical grid 80 years ago? I would encourage statewide cooperation, as much as possible, find your like interests. In the long term, I would argue, we’re very much the same in terms of what we need to develop our communities.”

Leonard said utilities should be more forward thinking in terms of their make-ready access and future building, especially since the distribution grid and supporting infrastructure poles has anywhere from 60% to 80% of its expected lifespan gone and utility poles that are 60 years or older. Utilities may have more qualified money to put into projects than they initially realize if they apply modernization funds.

“What does that mean?” said Leonard. “Think about your own long range infrastructure plan. We have a grid replacement coming. We also have smart grid, two-

way energy distributed energy from a power plant to individuals, energy battery storage is coming in electrical vehicles. Fiber just happens to be the first thing that money is available for and everybody’s talking about. What we learned is NTIA’s grant requirements didn’t say 50% [match]. But 50% clearly made a difference.”

Ralls cited the need to bring in more third-party support from the community as another point LCRA would work on.

“We didn’t look at getting all the stakeholders involved,” he said. “We had 20 plus support letters, but that wasn’t good enough. We needed to show how we were going to use these partners, how we were going to have a community that was involved. If we had all together wrote one joint letter that we were going to work together, I think that would have helped and we didn’t know we needed to do that.”

Leonard felt, if anything, NTIA didn’t take as much consideration into multiple stakeholders working together while Lower Colorado River did an excellent job of reaching out to and gathering support from local communities and organizations. “If they’re doing that, why was that not getting a preference?” he wondered. “On the debrief, it was literally verbatim said it was not given preference. And that blew me away.”

Another area where NTIA seemed to have less interest was in the previous operational successes of grant applications. Both Pappas and Ralls felt there should have been preference given to organizations which had solid and documented business track records over those who had, “floundered for years and years and haven’t returned money on that investment yet,” Pappas said. “You know, we’ve built the electrical network and connected almost 27,000 customers. From the revenues we generate, we reinvest into the network.”

“We’ve been in operation for 80 plus years,” said Ralls.

“We provide and generate electricity in the state of Texas. We don’t get any funding from the state but as a subdivision we abide by the rules of the state government.

A company that’s been in business for 80 years should probably get some bonus points.”

NTIA Middle Mile Grant Process An End or a Beginning?

All the panelists saw the end of the NTIA grant process as an experience, providing an opportunity for their respective organizations to refine and apply their work towards other funding programs and mechanisms to secure middle mile funding. “Our plan is to try to go for some dollars through

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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the BEAD process,” said Pappas. “We’ll take what we put together on the middle mile application, because that includes both middle mile and last mile and we’ll just build off that. We took pretty good notes from the [grant application] debrief and there’s a recording as well. We’ll listen to the recording when we get back [from Fiber Connect] and figure out what we can do better the next time around.” He said they would also have money to expand their middle-mile infrastructure through revenues from their current broadband customers, albeit at a slower, more measured pace of expansion.

Ralls said LCRA, as a sole middle mile provider without any last mile mission, as dictated by the Texas legislature, would team with rural communities in its region on BEAD projects. “We’re planning to work with partners that want to go into certain areas,” Ralls stated. “We think we can help out as a transport or middle-mile provider. We’re still trying to figure out if we become a sub-applicant or however that’s going to work.”

In addition, Ralls said the citizens of Texas this fall will vote on a constitutional amendment to create a $1.5 billion Broadband Infrastructure Fund that would be funded by part of the state’s current budget surplus, creating more state funding that LCRA could access. “It

will have different rules than the NTIA programs,” he said.

“It will shore up some funding and enable us to grow our network. We believe we’ll have a great opportunity.”

While LCRA and NextLight didn’t see their organizations tapping into private capital, Leonard said there would be some opportunities for service providers and utilities to do so. “There are infrastructure investors, large investors that are coming up with business models where they say we want to help you modernize your community, but they’re looking at the total perspective of the modern infrastructure, not just your broadband project,” he stated.

“They’ll do it on 30-year terms and better than bank [interest] rates. It’s a lease on one side for the infrastructure owner. It usually doesn’t require a bond or a tax.”

Enabling such an arrangement wouldn’t be likely for a single rural public utility, but a group of them would be attractive to some types of private equity arrangements.

“If you’ve partnered with your neighbors who have some population density, they’ll treat you as a pool of assets rather than an individual asset, just like owning a diversified EFT in the stock market vs just owning Apple. If you can get a partnership together of multiple communities, it becomes very attractive as a solution,” Leonard stated.

Client-Focused Technology-Driven

Leading the Way in Future Connectivity Creating Tomorrow’s Fiber Solutions Pioneering innovation, our dedicated team excels in advanced fiber-optic network design. With a vast experience in broadband engineering services 42 Fiber Forward • Q 4 & grant writing, we’re supporting connectivity for your ever-evolving needs.

engr.readitech.com

JJ’S

(AKA “CAPTAIN LIGHT”)

SUPER VIEW OF 2023

By Doug Mohney

FBA Chairman Joseph Jones welcomes the attendees at Fiber Connect. Source: Joseph Jones.

Fiber Broadband Association Chairman of the Board, Joseph Jones “JJ”, had plenty of good things to talk about as he sat down with Fiber Forward, with a successful annual event and an organization that continues to grow as it listens to its members and responds to their needs and requests. For anyone familiar with JJ’s decades-long involvement with Fiber Connect and the FBA Conference Committee, including serving as its Chair, it’s no surprise he led the September conversation discussing the August event as we spoke with him in September.

“What’s fresh on my mind is we just got done pulling off the most successful fiber industry event in history,” said Jones.

“We were in Orlando, Florida, for Fiber Connect and had 4,000 attendees. We had great content, great speakers, great exhibitors, and great feedback. I couldn’t be prouder of the conference committee and our leadership team. We’ve also been hosting regional events this year leading up to Fiber Connect. We’ve had four regional events throughout the U.S. and have been receiving great attendance at those, focusing more on specific regional issues and trying to capture leaders from rural communities.”

JJ cited progress in public policy and workforce development as areas where FBA has made progress.

“A lot of this has been Gary Bolton’s vision and what he’s been trying to accomplish through expanding our reach through the entire fiber industry eco-system,” said JJ. “Another piece we’re doing well is listening to our members and responding to their concerns. We’ve had feedback for

the last couple of years on some of the areas we’ve been missing, and I think we’ve answered the call.

“We got laser-focused on public policy. For a lot of operators, number one on their wish list was having a stronger presence in DC and getting a dedicated person working on government affairs and public policy. We listened to our members and the Association has recently brought on this year a Vice President of Public Policy.

Marissa Mitrovich has done a fantastic job thus far. I feel she’s delivered, and we are continuing to have a strong presence in D.C. and starting to have that with leaderships at the states as well.”

With an industry-wide labor shortage and a need to add between 200,000 to 250,000 workers over the next decade to end the digital divide, the Association had to do its part in creating the conditions to have more skilled technicians in the fiber industry.

“FBA jumped to the forefront by starting the OpTIC Path™ workforce development program,” said Jones. “We’ve got staff dedicated to that and FBA is partnering with different states and groups through community colleges, technical colleges, veteran programs, and incarceration education programs. OpTIC Path is providing hands-on training in broadband and fiber splicing and it’s making a big difference.”

Over the past year, membership growth has increased both overall and through the active participation of members at the Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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premier level. “By year’s end, we’ll probably be close to 500 member companies,” said Jones. “Over half the membership are network operators. It’s really encouraging that we’ve got that much support from operators. But I also continue to see new vendors entering the space, equipment vendors, consultants, engineering firms, and fulfillment service groups.

There are a lot of new champions for the industry.”

But it’s the growth in Premier Membership that has Jones excited for the future of the organization, based upon his own experiences and the participation of his company, On Trac, Inc., going back two decades. “Since we joined as a premier back in 2005, we’ve seen tremendous value for our company,” said Jones. “FBA historically had 25 to 40 premier members for several years. Over the past two years, we’ve gone from around 40 to over 100 Premier Member companies. The Premier Members of the Association get to have a true voice in FBA; they’re the ones that get to vote on bylaw changes, vote for the board of director nominees, and run for the board. To see the growth of our Premier Members now be over 100 in just a couple of years is really encouraging.”

But with growth comes challenges and the need for more people to step up. “We’ve got more opportunities to serve the entire ecosystem of the industry and what that looks like from an association standpoint is a lot of different committees, a lot of different working groups,” said Jones. “What do we need to make this happen? We need volunteers. We need to continue to get the best people from member companies serving to have strong committees because the committees are run on an allvolunteer basis. They’re not staff run. The committee volunteers are the backbone to the Association.”

FBA committees contribute and advance the industry through activities such as white papers, new initiatives, and creating new areas of focus. “To continue to have strong committees, we need strong leaders in those committees,” said Jones. “There’s a lot of vision and ideas. Having volunteers step up is, I think, a challenge for us as we continue to grow. We want to make sure that we’re getting people plugged in to the right committees to help make a difference for our industry and the Association.”

Potential areas for new FBA efforts could include quantum networks, AI, telehealth, and a focus on customer experience which would cover all customer touchpoints from service announcements to construction of the infrastructure to the customer installation. “I believe that a great customer experience is the best differentiator for all our network operators and their partners. If we want to make a difference and serve well, we have to look at the whole customer experience.”

Developing and involving new leaders is also on JJ’s punch list as he moves from Board Chair to joining the

FBA Chairman Joseph Jones on the floor of Fiber Connect 2023 with Mike Hill, Senior Consultant, On Trac. Inc. and Jeff Kavadias - FBA Strategic Partner - Association Accountant. Source: Joseph Jones.

FBA’s Senior Committee. “It’s going to take initiative and mentorship from our current leadership on the board and our premier members,” he said. “As a board, we have talked through ways we can bring on future leaders. I think the brunt of it falls on member companies pointing out young talent and getting them involved. The best way to do that out of the gate is through committees and working groups. Through that work, you’ll see them rise to the top and become great candidates for the board. That’s an organic way of doing it.”

Jones sees a bright and busy future ahead for FBA as it continues to expand and grow to serve the needs of all its members for the benefit of the industry and the country.

“I think at the forefront for FBA is to continuing to serve the operators,” said Jones. “What do they need from the Association? How can we best serve them and what they’re trying to accomplish? They’re connecting the end users, connecting families, connecting communities, and through that we connect America and that’s ultimately our goal. When we connect all of America, both urban and rural, we end the digital divide. We’re bringing digital equity to this country, to families and communities who never had it, from Medina, OH; to Johnson City, TN; to Dalton, GA.; to Lafayette, LA.; to Canyon Lake, TX; to Fort Collins, CO. We have to continue to serve those communities moving forward, whether that’s through public policy, technological advances, or through different ways of support like workforce development. It’s about offering FBA’s knowledge, expertise, and support to all those operators and providers. For such a time as this, we have been placed in the greatest industry, at the greatest time in our history. One day the history books will call all of you in this industry, heroes.”

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Public Policy Update

By Marissa Mitrovich, FBA Vice President of Public Policy

As we close out 2023, this year went by faster than data transmits through fiber. The FBA Public Policy Committee, which doubled in size this year, had many accomplishments in 2023. We focused mostly on the implementation of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, seeking to preserve the fiber preference and facilitating participation by our members.

We increased our advocacy on why fiber is the critical infrastructure for all Americans and raised awareness and on other issues like rural connectivity, permitting reform, and affordable broadband. FBA also participated in other federal public policy activities and in state proceedings and legislative activities. We are planning for an even more robust agenda in 2024 and want you to participate in our activities, policy discussions, and engagement.

Quarterly Overview

Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Grants

Initial proposals for BEAD have begun to stream into the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). While we assess these initial Volume One and Volume Two submissions, FBA continues to advocate on critical aspects of these proposals to ensure that all unserved and underserved locations are connected to high-performance, affordable broadband infrastructure, with a preference for fiber.

Some of this advocacy includes expanding the Letter of Credit (LOC) requirement, clarifying the application of Build America, Buy America (BABA) provision for fiber, and improving the Extremely High-Cost Threshold.

BEAD Letter of Credit Requirement

FBA sent NTIA a letter requesting that they reconsider the 46

Fiber Forward • Q 4

irrevocable standby Letter of Credit (LOC) requirement for subgrantees receiving support under BEAD. Many FBA members will face challenges raising the collateral to meet this requirement and it will likely cause providers to divert capital away from fiber deployment. FBA supports assuring that all parties have the financial capabilities to complete projects, but the proposed goes beyond what is necessary to achieve that goal. We are most concerned that requiring a LOC will minimize competition and participation in the BEAD program ultimately disadvantaging communities and their residents.

Build America, Buy America (BABA)

On August 22nd, NTIA issued a proposed waiver for the BABA requirements. FBA and our members reviewed the waiver and submitted comments to NTIA about it.

The proposed waiver is broken down into three parts, addressing optical fiber and fiber optic cable (considered construction materials), electronics, and enclosures (both categories considered manufactured materials). FBA has weighed in with recommendations on all three of these areas and our members have submitted their own individual comments. Our proposals included a limited waiver – “for non-optic-glass inputs (e.g., an overclad cylinder) to preforms used to manufacture optical fiber and fiber optic cable in BEAD program projects.” This need is due to supply chain concerns at peak building times.

We also suggested the waiver include a more precise definition of the “covered” electronics or clarification of the scope of the waiver. We recommended the Commerce Department issue a more expansive nonavailability waiver for enclosures. Should Commerce decide not to adopt such a general waiver for all enclosures, FBA proposed that the Department provide a limited waiver that permits

multiple options for achieving compliance. All submitted comments are currently being reviewed by NTIA.

BEAD Threshold Financial Model

grids, and other advanced technologies and applications.

A full complement of FCC Commissioners will be critical to ensure a functional and effective regulatory landscape.

FBA, in partnership with research firm Cartesian, unveiled a financial model in August 2023 that helps states calculate their extremely high-cost per location threshold (EHCT) for fiber broadband deployments using their BEAD funding. The sophisticated tool leverages geospatial analysis to build a financial model that states can use to develop their own cost thresholds for fiber deployments. NTIA’s BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) directed states to expend program funds for all-fiber deployments except in the highest-cost areas, where alternative broadband technologies can be used.

Importantly, no single EHCT threshold will universally meet program goals for each state’s specific allocations because the economics of deploying broadband technologies vary greatly across the country.

Title II Reform

The model allows states to test various inputs and visualize the implications of different thresholds. It considers the extent of fiber coverage, the extent of alternative broadband technology coverage, and whether any funds remain. What is most valuable about this model, is that there are many ways to calculate a cost per location and to maximize fiber coverage for the greatest population while still ensuring universal connectivity.

In September, the federal government avoided a shutdown at the 11th hour by passing a stopgap bill that was signed into law by President Biden just before the expiration of current appropriations. At the time of this column being drafted, uncertainty is the theme of this Congress and that shows no prospect of abating.

Broadband Infrastructure Playbook 3.0

In August, FBA in partnership with NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association and Cartesian, launched a series of new modules for FBA’s Broadband Infrastructure Playbook. These modules were developed to further assist state broadband offices in their ongoing development of BEAD infrastructure funding administered by NTIA. FBA published “Playbook 3.0” modules on the following topics: Permitting, Extremely High-Cost Threshold, Challenge Process, and Cybersecurity/Supply Chain. These Playbook 3.0 modules are fundamental to key elements of each state’s BEAD funding implementation plan, and a resource to ensure that each state broadband office gets these critical policy elements right. Additionally, this group hosted a webinar on these important topics in mid-October that may still be viewed on the FBA website.

A Full FCC

In September, Anna Gomez was confirmed to be an FCC Commissioner, bringing the Commission to full capacity.

Brendan Carr and Geoffrey Starks were both also reconfirmed for additional five-year terms. FBA supports the confirmation of all three nominees. The U.S. remains in the midst of an enormous investment cycle to bring high-performance broadband service, especially fiber connectivity, to every household, business, and anchor institution, as well as to support 5G/6G, smart cities and

In early October, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to reclassify broadband under Title II of the Communications Act. The NPRM was voted on and adopted at the October 19th FCC Open Meeting by a 3-2 vote. There will be a 60-day initial comment period and FBA will participate in this comment process. FBA has always and continues to maintain that there must be a measured approach to regulation in this space, ensuring that the market is able to function in order to continue extensive investment and deployment of our nation’s critical fiber broadband infrastructure, as well as affordable connectivity for all Americans.

Under the Dome

Rural Broadband

The House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee held a hearing on rural broadband and broadband funding on September 21, 2023. FBA submitted a letter for the record to voice our support for increased coordination and funding for broadband deployment and adoption programs to ensure unserved and underserved locations in all areas, including rural communities, have access to high-quality and affordable fiber broadband services.

Permitting Legislation

In September, Senators John Barrasso (R-WY) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) introduced the CLOSE THE GAP Act. This bipartisan bill brings solutions to the table that will contribute to long-needed reforms to help streamline permitting and facilitate fiber broadband deployment. FBA fully supports this legislation and hopes to see similar solutions introduced in the House and ultimately enacted into law.

Fiber Broadband Association Public Policy Leadership

The FBA Public Policy Committee is led by co-chairs Chris Champion, Vice President, Government Affairs, C Spire; and Jordan Gross, Manager of Federal Government Affairs, Corning. Ariane Schaffer, Government & Public Policy, Google Fiber, is the FBA Board Liaison. If your company is interested in joining the public policy committee, please email mmitrovich@fiberbroadband.org to join.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

47

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17

(cont. from page 37) evaluate the availability of broadband access, particularly among low- and moderate-income households.

“Broadband is one of the big [needs] that has come up after COVID,” stated Savin Ven Johnson, Deputy Director, Office of Block Grant Assistance, Office of Community Planning and Development, HUD. “We’ve put out several resources to help with navigating the broadband world.

We’ve also put out a broadband quick guide that will provide examples of how the grantees can work with private companies, nonprofits, on the eligible infrastructure development and other projects and activities that can be used and be funded by CARES Act money.”

Department of Commerce - Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program

have access to the capital that they may need for matching funds. We have communities who are in our pipeline for funding that may need to tap into some of those other resources, whether it’s CDBG or if it’s state appropriated funding. It’s important that we have the relationships to be able to make those connections.”

HUD sees its CDBG program as an enabler for facilitating broadband infrastructure in urban areas, with funds used to permanently affix equipment and fiber optics in an urban area, with local governments able to place the material on public buildings and public facilities. Grant money can also go to telecom businesses in those areas so long as they provide jobs for low- and moderate-income people.

A total of $3 billion dollars in grant funding has been allocated to tribal broadband, $1 billion under ARPA and another $2 billion under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Eligible entities include tribes, tribal colleges, universities, Alaska Native corporations, tribal organizations, and the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, with applications closing on January 23, 2024.

“An all-of-government approach is often necessary for successful broadband deployment,” said Morgan Rodman, White House Council on Native American Affairs, Department of Interior. “It helps with coordination of the authorities of resources and expertise. The Council’s worked with the Department of Interior, for instance, on making federal permitting more streamlined.”

Tribal governments are also eligible to apply for funds under USDA’s ReConnect Broadband Grant and Loan Program while Native American higher educational institutions can tap into funding under the Department of Transportation’s Tribal Colleges Initiative Grants for broadband network construction as a part of making capital improvements to their educational facilities and to purchase equipment.

Cooperation is mandated with BEAD between states and tribal governments on a state’s BEAD plans, which can provide substantial dividends to both sides. Rodman explained this is a mutually beneficial scenario in closing that digital divide. “Tribes present significant economic opportunities as well, which is why an investment in them is a solid investment. One need only look here in Florida, where there are two federally recognized tribes that contribute billions and billions of dollars to the local economy, not to mention all the jobs that are created.

Where I’m from in Oklahoma, it’s a similar situation. The tribes are economic powerhouses with billions and billions of economic impacts, well over 100,000 jobs created.

When the tribes are doing well, when they’re connected, there’s a positive widespread community impact. Tribes make contributions to physical and social infrastructure by donating to school, roads, and infrastructure for the state,” Rodman noted.

Broadband Interagency Cooperation

Panelists emphasized their respective agencies are working together to streamline broadband efforts to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible. In January of this year, USDA the FCC, and the NTIA entered into an interagency agreement to make sure their agencies were coordinating efforts, said Hood Moise, including sharing the information they have on potential projects and potential awards, and making sure award decisions are based on the same broadband coverage data.

Hood Moise also noted the good relationship between her agency and the Florida State Broadband Office is critical and useful to avoid funding overlap and find additional resources as needed. “We all stay in constant communication, we have personal numbers, we text each other and work things out,” she said. “Deconfliction has been really big for our programs and making sure that there’s no duplication of program funding in areas and making sure that we’re taking a really critical look at what those areas look like. If there’s any flexibility, any wiggle room, we’re working that out amongst each other. There’s a leveraging piece of [funding] which is so critical, especially with the rural areas that we work with, a lot of which don’t

Don’t be BEAD Blinded

At the conclusion, the panel emphasized that while everyone is focusing on BEAD and 2024, there are lots of other federal resources available for states to tap into today. “Don’t forget the billions of dollars that are on the table right now that have not been spent, and that are being spent,” said Gerald. “The [ARPA] Capital Projects Fund being a fourth of BEAD [$10 billion], it’s still a massive amount of investment and it is happening at this very moment. I would implore you all to connect with your state broadband office to see where you could get involved if you could apply, because that money is there right now.”

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

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Fiber Preferred by Nearly Two-Thirds of U.S. Consumers

By Doug Mohney

The survey asked households to indicate their interest in At Fiber Connect 2023, the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) and RVA LLC Market Research and Consulting (RVA) potential broadband applications, ranging from medical released their annual consumer research report. This year’s and safety to using VR to work remotely. Individuals research, titled highly valued “The Status of high-speed Most Desired Single Family Home Amenities U.S. Broadband: broadband to FBA/RVA Consumer Survey 2023: Features Rated Very Important The Growing provide access Laundry room 69% Preference to medical Very high speed/ reliable broadband 65% to Fiber care (71%), Energy efficiency 61% Modern or Updated Kitchen 59% Broadband,” independent Built in Wi-Fi with strong signal throughout home 55% 2+ car garage with storage space 51% documents that living for seniors Walk in closet in master bedroom 50% fiber broadband (70%), and Outdoor patio 47% Hardwood, Hardwood look or tile in parts 42% is considered home safety Open floor plan 40% Natural disaster protection (storm, earthquakes rooms…)

37% the best internet (69%) among Security system with cameras 36% service delivery the highest Walk in pantry 32% Smart home features (Thermostat, lighting, watering…)

28% method in terms applications, Mud room 16% EV Charging system 15% of speed and with more exotic 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% reliability among uses such as The Growing Preference To Fiber Broadband 63% of all U.S. being able to consumers, inhabit and including 54% of socialize with a cable users. remote Avatar-esque robot cited by more than a third of the respondents surveyed.

“The Status of U.S. Broadband” annual report is built on Clean Clothes and Broadband consumer research, with the study focusing on internet use RVA examined the relationship between reliable highamong U.S. online customers. The 2023 edition, conducted speed broadband and other amenities sought in single in May 2023, had a sample size of 4,000 households. Mike family homes and apartments and came up with some Render, Founder and CEO of RVA, presented findings from interesting results. “We ask people every few years the study on the October 11, 2023, episode of FBA’s Fiber about what’s important when you buy a house,” said for Breakfast podcast.

Render. “The laundry room always comes out number one, very high-speed broadband is number two.

“People see broadband or high-quality internet as Broadband beats hardwood floors, a great kitchen with extremely important in their lives and increasing over time,” granite countertops, and all those other things.” The said Render. Overall interest in broadband has gone up laundry room came in at 69% while broadband rated from 60% to 75% since 2019, when the first RVA consumer survey was conducted. very important at 65%.

People see broadband or high-quality internet as extremely important in their lives and increasing over time.

– Mike Render, Founder and CEO of RVA 50

Fiber Forward • Q 4

The exact same results emerged in the multiple dwelling units (MDU) space of apartments and condominiums, with an in-unit washer and dryer being the number one feature most desired and high-speed broadband coming in second. “It’s more important than good parking, soundproof walls, storage space,” said Render, with the in-unit washer/ dryer at 59% while broadband was ranked at 52%.

Render expects the fiber shift to happen more rapidly than most predict due to the increasing number of public and private fiber networks being built over the next five years.

“Service providers are anecdotally telling us that they’ve never seen getting to their first 20% uptake rates faster than it’s happening currently. So we expect that the sheer take was going to happen fairly quickly.”

Fiber’s Gains in 2023

The growth in fiber leaves cable companies dependent upon legacy coax plants and vulnerable, with the lagging deployment of DOCSIS 4.0 only expected to start later this year or early next year insufficient to counter the surge. “It will be a next step in their case to try again, to move fiber deeper in many cases, but it’s still coax for the last leg. It improves the upload speed and reliability somewhat, but it probably is not going to be sufficient.”

Over the last two years, fiber has gained a net change of 15% over other types of broadband connections in operation as consumers change their providers, while cable modem took a net 14% decrease in usage between the gains of fiber and fixed wireless, a point Render said was more evidence of fiber’s gains since the media is only available in less than half the country.

Overall, fiber holds a 23% market share, compared to cable’s 47%, with other types such as wireless and satellite at 17% and DSL at the bottom with 13%. “You can see over time as fiber continues to grow in market share, cable is starting to dip.”

Render said that cable companies simply advertising gigabit speeds is not enough to get past fiber’s reputation of speed, reliability, and latency, leading many operators to transition over for cost savings and competitive reasons.

“I’m going to have fiber from Cox, so you know cable companies are While fiber getting into is gaining Fiber Adds To Home Value the game, but FBA/RVA Consumer Survey 2023: Discount Needed To Consider Similar Non-Fiber Home in market for the biggest share, it is ones, it’s hard also providing for them,” said gains in value Render. “They’re 3.2% MDU/ Condo Own to the housing steadfastly trying market. to hold to coax 12.8% MDU/ Apartment Rent as long as they “For singlecan, but I think family homes, it’s going to be 4.9% Single Family Home Own you’re adding more difficult than 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% almost 5%, they think.” Fiber which is the may pass cable’s highest number U.S. market share The Growing Preference To Fiber Broadband we’ve seen,” within the next said Render. seven to ten “People are seeing it is important and they’re willing to pay years, Render speculated, but RVA will have to conduct some extra price for fiber.” MDU condo owners receive some more research to be confident of that timeframe.

3.2% additional value by having fiber available while renters will pay nearly 13% more for units that have fiber Building new broadband access networks with anything broadband. other than fiber “with rare exceptions” using government funding is “irresponsible,” stated Render. “There are Fiber is perceived to be the best delivery method for mountaintops and so forth out there, so there’s a reason to broadband, according to the survey. “Sixty-three percent, get fiber closer, but not all the way. But generally, the public nearly two-thirds of everyone says fiber is the best, with gets it that it’s important if we’re spending government cable second and fixed wireless third,” stated Render. money. We want to spend to build something that’s going “Fiber’s mindshare has never been higher. We know this to last. When the Rural Electrification Administration came from the greatest movement to fiber during broadband with funding to do electricity, there were options of putting churn. We know it from the real estate premiums that we in a pretty windmill that would cost less. It would have saw and the greatest percentage calling fiber best, so the powered light in a room and maybe a radio, but it certainly consumer is getting it. This matters because the market wouldn’t have handled everything that came out over the share move to fiber will probably be faster and deeper than next 80 years. They were smart to go all the way to the most expect.” best solution.”

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

51

The O.C. Gets Lit

By Doug Mohney Orange County, California, is one of the most densely populated counties in the state, but it had little in the way of broadband alternatives. Cityside Fiber is using private funding to build out an all-fiber network in the southern half of the county, bringing a much-needed option to residences and businesses in the area.

“We really wanted to go to a place where we can make the biggest impact,” said Rod Hanson, co-founder and CEO of Cityside Fiber. “About 85% of South Orange County currently has no fiber and has only one choice for high-speed internet.

We feel like this is where we can make a big impact.”

Hanson and his team looked at competitive network opportunities across the country but kept returning to their home territory since they were familiar with the demographic and regulatory landscape. Cityside Fiber looked at operating as a wholesale open access provider but found problems with the business model and finding qualified ISPs before settling on a retail offering with the ability to lease dark fiber to business customers.

After refining its business plan, obtaining a CPCN license from the state to become a regulated telecommunications carrier, and securing full funding from SDC Capital Partners in February 2023, the company started construction of its fiber network in May. Today, Cityside has its core network turned up and passes an initial 1,200 homes with great expectations for the years to come.

“We’ve identified in our target market around 250,000 homes passed that are available to us, that’s our long-term plan,” said Hanson. “Over the next five years, we’re looking primarily at South Orange County. We see it as a great market for us. We know the market very, very well and like much of America, there’s very little fiber here.”

52

Fiber Forward • Q 4

Eighty percent of Cityside’s fiber will be underground with the other 20 percent going on aerial as needed. The XGS-PON network will offer residential speeds of 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps, and 5 Gbps delivered using Calix CPE and cloud services, including a managed Wi-Fi offering. A video “partnership” is being developed, but the company would like to direct people to available streaming options in the near-term.

“We anticipate at some point we’ll be adding additional features,” said Hanson. “Right now, we’re focused on just getting the infrastructure in place and delivering great broadband and a great experience. Our biggest focus point, honestly, is customer experience, because we think anybody can come in and utilize XGS-PON and provide speeds. One of the biggest differentiators that we have is that the customer experience is our key focus.”

Along with its residential offerings, Cityside is targeting small and medium-sized businesses. “We do anticipate at some point we will have an enterprise offering as well,” said Hanson. “And the network is being developed and deployed to support other use cases. There is a layer of dark fiber that we’re deploying that will support [5G] small cells and fiber to the cell We’re very aware of the opportunities that are there and we’re making the investment to make sure that we’re well positioned to do that.”

Hanson sees more opportunities for private sector investment in urban areas. “Orange County’s not unique,” he said. “The need for fiber is everywhere. If you look across the country, dense suburban markets are in the same boat. It’s great that we have federal dollars going to those areas that are unserved or underserved. But it should be private money going after the areas where there’s a good economic case to be made to go today.”

Grab your spot now in the upcoming Fiber Forward issues!

2024 Editorial Calendar 2023 EDITIO

N3

“Ladies and G Start Your Enentlemen, gines!”

March 2024

Materials due January 16, 2024 • Utilities Super Charging Fiber • FBA in 2023 - The Year in Review • Consumer Technology & Broadband • Urban Digital Divide • Executive Insights | Federal/State Update Community Profiles | Innovation at Workation at Work

June 2024

Materials due April 22, 2024 • Sustainability • Permitting Progress • Enterprise Fiber • Executive Insights | Federal/State Update Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

August 2024

Materials due July 18, 2024 • Workforce Development and Diversity • Progress One Year after BEAD Allocations • Measuring Progress in Closing the Digital Divide • Executive Insights | Federal/State Update Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

November 2024

Materials due September 25, 2024 • BEAD Building Milestones • The WISP transition to fiber • Cities Driving Change • Executive Insights | Federal/State Update Community Profiles | Innovation at Work

Contact Lucy Green at lgreen@fiberbroadband.org for sponsorship opportunities.

Please note editorial topics may be subject to change based on future events and market shifts.

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

55

Gateway Fiber Expands from Missouri to Minnesota

By Doug Mohney

After building out fiber networks in a few small Missouri communities on its own in 2019, Gateway Fiber received a combination of private equity and federal grant funding that enabled it to expand its all-fiber network to over 21 communities in the St. Louis western metro area. Its success has led it to add Minnesota to its service footprint, using the same business model and practices to compete against legacy incumbents in both the cable and telecom fields.

“We’ve been in business about five years,” said John Meyer, Chief Marketing Officer, Gateway Fiber. “The first two years were focused on building one or two very small communities without the support of a private equity partner. Since then, we’ve gone from serving 1,000 homes to serving tens of thousands of customers, starting from scratch with fiber to the home and focusing on reinventing the relationship people have with their internet service provider.”

Gateway Fiber’s approach starts with simple transparent pricing and quality customer service and builds upon that approach by “acting and thinking local,” said Meyer, by being an active participant in the community through sponsorship dollars and various give-back initiatives, all the while building up its internal capabilities and customer support team to scale as the company continues to grow.

Money to build first came through seed funding by the company’s founders, followed by Crosstimbers Capital Group investing private equity in 2020. CBRE Investment Management acquired the equity position in 2023. Grants have been awarded through ARPA and NTIA federal programs for a total of $35 million.

“The grant portion is not how we’re funding our growth,” said Meyer. “It’s subsidizing areas where the economics are not as attractive as a business to build. Through those [federal] funds, we can deploy our resources and help serve those homes, extending our network into more rural areas. Many of these communities have been screaming for us -- or anyone -- to come. Deploying fiber optic internet to their houses is a big deal and it’s changing their lives.”

Gateway recently added a 2 Gbps tier to complement its 300 Mbps, 600 Mbps, and 1 Gbps offerings. Services are

54

Fiber Forward • Q 4

Gateway Fiber moves into Minnesota Source: Gateway Fiber.

Source: Gateway Fiber.

delivered with Calix equipment with Wi-Fi included and provisioned using Plume, with its suite of parental controls and monitoring and security features. “We try to pack in as much as we can into our flat-rate, all-inclusive monthly broadband service prices starting at $65 per month.”

Add-on services available on the residential side include VoIP and third-party streaming options. “We’re acting as the conduit for helping people migrate away from their tangled web of bundled contracts for phone, broadband, and TV,” said Meyer. “We have partnered with DirecTV and MyBundle.TV to deploy additional streaming options.

We don’t want to be in the TV business. We want to be an educator and a value-added partner to our customers to help them cut the cord and find ways to save money.”

Success in Missouri has led Gateway to take the next step by launching services into Minnesota, with its first deployments into the northern suburbs of Blaine and Coon Rapids and the first customers expected to be lit up before the end of the year. “We have developed a very capable, and of course I’m biased, an industry-leading new market selection team and that team helped us identify our new state.”

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2023 FBA Premier Members Meeting December 4-6, 2023 Palm Springs, CA

2024 Regional Fiber Connect Workshop February 8, 2024 Richmond, Va.

2024 Regional Fiber Connect Workshop April 16, 2024 Little Rock, Ark.

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Fiber Connect 2024 Conference & Expo

July 28-31, 2024 Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center Nashville, Tenn.

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55

Kennedy Space Center covers 144,000 acres, with legacy infrastructure dating back to the 1950s. Source: NASA.

(cont. from page 17) Since the retirement of the Shuttle program in 2011, KSC has transitioned from a NASA-only facility to a multi-user spaceport supporting more than 90 private-sector partners and nearly 13,000 people in the 700 buildings and facilities spread across 144,000 acres. Upgrading KSC over the past decade to support commercial activities as well as to address the burden of legacy telecom media has been a long and ongoing process, with fiber playing a key role in providing more reliable and resilient communications less impacted by lightning and other weather events.

“We would be in a world of hurt if we didn’t have fiber, because the number of bits we’re required to supply would just not have been feasible,” said George Dutt, Center Mission Integration Lead, Exploration Ground Systems (EGS), NASA. “Our legacy infrastructure was totally inadequate.

We started with a copper infrastructure and transitioning over to fiber helped us out tremendously. We have a lot of legacy infrastructure which was originally designed by the Army Corps of Engineers back in the early ‘60s. Our main infrastructure is underground. We have no aerial presence at all, because of the lightning and moving things on roads. It basically consists of orange ducts encased in concrete with manholes spaced around 700 feet apart. We installed our first fiber optics cable around the mid-80s, a mixed cable of multimode and single mode. Eventually we graduated into being just a single mode outside plant facility.”

Switching over to fiber has enabled KSC to repurpose its legacy telecom infrastructure, removing large copper cables out of four-inch ducts and filling it full of innerducts to get very high capacity and routing diversity. There are about 800 route miles of fiber across the campus, with the minimal installation a 72-strand cable and the largest at 432 strands, “because more seems ridiculous at this point,” commented John Wolff, Outside Cable Plant Design Engineer, KSC. The KSC campus operates a number of 100 Gbps optical rings to provide wide area connectivity around the facility with 10 Gbps connections going into facilities and 10 Gbps copper connectivity available to the desktop. Depending on their requirements, on-campus users outside of NASA, such as contractors and commercial launch operators, may request anything from dark fiber to simply plugging into the local Ethernet port, with dark fiber connected at a demark point to a commercial carrier leaving the facility as needed.

Video cameras providing launch coverage are connected using a variety of media. Newer 4K high-definition cameras are on fiber, while legacy ones remain on coax.

While KSC has steadily removed copper from the physical infrastructure, it hasn’t been fully eliminated. “It’s not used very much, but there are a lot of legacy circuits,” said Dutt.

“We’re talking circuits that go back 30 to 40 years that just never transitioned off copper. The amount of copper [in use] has shrunk tremendously. If you go into our central office, and you look at the main distribution frame there for copper, it’s shrunk down to maybe one-tenths the space, because we’ve gotten rid of all the copper.”

A significant chunk of legacy infrastructure was removed when KSC transitioned to VoIP, a decade-long migration completed in 2021, but some equipment will remain on copper because of its age, such as weather instrumentation and other sensors.

“Some of this copper will stay that way forever. I can give you an example to visualize,” said Wolff. “Say there’s weather instrumentation 40 yards into a field. That’s 40 yards of buried copper cable back to the nearest point where it would be converted back to fiber. The possibility of that ever getting changed is really slim for outlying reporting of that type because it’s expensive to go trench and add another 40 yards of buried innerduct for the fiber and they still have to have power to convert it back over at its equipment.”

Trenching and new construction also requires various permits, depending on where construction takes place, since Merritt Island is a National Wildlife Refuge and various sites at KSC are of historic importance. “All the digging operations out at KSC have to go through a site plan, an Environmental Impact Statement, and Habitat approval and locates before they can start digging,” said Wolff.

While there are no squirrels to chew on fiber and field crews must keep an eye out for the occasional alligator that they may stumble onto, there are other animals which cause problems. “Rodents can cause a disruption, but it’s rare. About two decades ago, we had some endangered beach mice that got into one of the pad comm rooms and ate some of the fiber cable under the floor,” said Wolff.

“They had to be collected. They couldn’t be exterminated, because they’re endangered so they had to trap them and get them out of the bed.”

Fiber Forward • fiberbroadband.org

57

(cont. from page 25) The $1.7 billion allocated to Missouri, the third highest in the country, “wasn’t an accident,” stated Riggs. “We jumped through all the hoops, we were very robust in our approach. When the speaker appointed an interim committee in 2021, we’d sit down all over the state, we had subject matter hearings, issued a report, which I wrote 26 pages, in which you can actually read. Every one of those recommendations in some way, shape, or form was enacted into law in 2022. All are. We take a very measured approach and we are transparent, everybody understands the nature of the problem, and we basically put our heads together and just figured this thing out.”

Sorenson emphasized that high-speed broadband was essential for attracting jobs and people to the state. “I’m chair of economic development, too,” he said. “It’s a huge economic driver for a state to be like, ‘Come to rural Iowa, because you can work in New York City from a very affordable acreage in Iowa.”

With all the talk about technology, Riggs said the major policy factor that stood out over the last five years was the need for higher broadband speed standards. “We weren’t able to get 100/100 symmetrical,” said Riggs “We tried. Didn’t work.

100/20… They tried to put in 25/3 and to put it in statute. We’ve looked at and said, ‘Why on earth are we spending money to do bad technology?’ They’ve done that before and it didn’t end well. Having said that, we did a victory lap. Our economic development folks have been celebrating what we’re able to do with the first round of funding. Frankly, the providers who are out there doing it are our neighbors, they don’t treat us like colonists, they are not there to extract wealth, or they’re basically to go into places where people don’t go.”

Being a farming state, Iowa is also looking towards the future of agriculture and how broadband will enable it.

“We look at it from the last acre standpoint, we’re finally hoping to have that conversation, we’re to that point,” said Riggs. “We know the next generation of farming [equipment] isn’t going to have cabs [for drivers]. It’s all GPS. It may be drone-enabled, it may be a [wireless] tower, we don’t know yet. You’re still working out the bugs in the software, but we know that’s our future so we need to get ahead of that.”

Affordability and sustainability for new broadband connectivity is a concern for both Riggs and Sorensen.

“You’ve spent $100,000 to dig to reach these people and then they can’t afford [to connect] to what you’ve just done - it is kind of an upside-down model,” said Sorensen.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory. You’ve got to make sure people are connecting the dots.”

58

Fiber Forward • Q 4

Sorensen and Riggs said they ended up in broadband leadership positions without a formal background on the issue. Source: FBA.

Both representatives are looking forward to the next steps in effectively implementing BEAD funding. “With $1.7 billion on the way, we need to put every last cent to work in Missouri for Missourians, first for unserved and underserved,” said Riggs. “This is our once-in-a-generation opportunity, we get one chance to get it right.”

“I think that’s great, how they put this big box [of funds] and states are able to customize how they’re going to accept it and work with that funding,” said Sorenson.

“What’s next is how are we going to spin it and roll it out, making sure your maps are accurate, making sure that all the broadband offices across the country are working in concert with the passion of telecommunications, following all the rules. The big thing for me is like Ronald Reagan said, for the government to say ‘we’re here to help’ sometimes sounds pretty scary. Making sure we get out of the way when we’re in the way and making sure that we’re solving problems.”

Each had a different request to the fiber broadband ecosystem as the panel ended. “Honestly, talk to us,” said Riggs. “The key to good advice is taking it in. The more you inform us, the more we can inform ourselves as policymakers and appropriators. The lines of communication are always open.”

“My ask is understanding the educational shortfall,” Sorensen stated. “We’re not industry nerds, so we don’t understand every single aspect of the industry. I liken it to my parents thinking I’m an industry wizard because I can turn the iPhone on and off. If I say 100/100 or 25/3 to my parents, I might as well speak Greek.”

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