Navigating the permitting process requires plenty of advanced planning, but one of the most powerful tools to facilitate the process isn’t software or consulting, but a continued effort to communicate with agencies who own the process to make sure they understand the requirements and needs of construction projects. This requires a low-tech, high touch approach, one that isn’t delivered via email or web portal. 

On this week’s Fiber for Breakfast episode, Ryan Kudera, Manager, Client Services, Finley Engineering, noted, “We’re seeing a lot more electric submissions, a lot more electronic interaction [on permitting]. The one thing we don’t see is your pizza timer [showing when things are done]. You make the order, you watch the timer for when it’s going to get to your house. That just doesn’t exist in permitting. You throw the permit in, it’s in the oven, and most the time it comes out burnt. There is no specific viewpoint of figuring out where the process is, and this is where the relationships come in.” 

Kudera’s experiences in building networks in Wyoming emphasize the need to build relationships with permitting agencies and the people there doing the heavy lifting, not to simply show up when you want an answer. This requires taking the time to sit down with the permitting staff before you begin, once you submit permits, and checking in on a regular basis, preferably by using the power of hospitality. 

“They can’t take donations, but they can accept donuts and coffee,” said Kudera. “Believe me, 20 bucks for donuts and coffee once a month goes a long way when it comes to understanding where your permitting process may be.” 

Kudera outlined four steps for navigating the permitting process successfully. Step 1 is analyzing the fiber route and the permitting requirements needed along it. Step 2 is building the proposed route maps and having the various land ownership and easement records associated with it. 

Step 3 is understanding the regulations that exist around the needed permits and why they are there. “You have to understand the agency, or agencies, responsible for processing the permit,” said Kudera. “You have to understand how they work, what they’re doing. When we have to request meetings with personnel to seek additional information on regulations, process, and unpublished issues, my go to is go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m the stupidest guy here. Can you help me understand this?’ And most people are very helpful and will try and help you get through whatever needs to be done.”  

Step 4 is fostering a community of effort to ease the process for all involved, including the agencies and builders. It requires maintaining the relationships started with permitting agencies and government which (hopefully) started at Step 1 and making sure that permitting is a collaborative effort instead an adversarial one.  

“Once submitted, keep communicating,” said Kudera. “Don’t just set it and forget it. You know what? We all love grandma’s cookies, but even she set the timer.”  

To learn more about the process of permitting and the power of donuts, tune into the latest Fiber For Breakfast.  

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For railroad operators, safety is the top of mind when evaluating right-of-way access for anything near or crossing the tracks. Right-of-way access applications require detailed engineering and legal review with each application unique to a location and there are a lot of applications flowing into railroad companies for evaluation.

“We deal with over 3,000 permanent [new] applications a year across 26 states,” said Alex Saar, CSX, Director of Corridor Services – Business Development & Real Estate, CSX Transportation, Inc. “That’s across 20,000 miles of track we have. It’s a high volume with a good cycle time. It’s something we’re proud of every year. We work very hard to provide that level of service.”

CSX is one of six Class I railroad operators in the United States. Defined as railroads with revenue of at least $900 million, Class I railroads account for around 67% of freight mileage and 94% of revenues, according to the Association of American Railroads’ July 2024 fact sheet. In addition to the six Class 1 railroad operators, there is Amtrak and 615 short line Class II and III railroads. There are nearly 140,000 miles of freight rail spanning the continent with railroads large and small operating in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

“Looking at our data, our average application cycle time is 30 [calendar] days or less for a typical utility crossing,” said Saar. “Obviously, for more complex projects and longitudinal occupancies, other criteria can impact reviews, such crossing over a rail, difficult topography, all those different factors. We also offer an expedited option for an additional fee for those crossing permits that do qualify.” 

The company wants to make it easy for applicants to apply for permits on the belief that the less time spent on having to correct and review applications means less resources tied up to deal with a growing volume of applications. To ensure successful first-time right-of-way applications and reduce processing time, CSX has invested “millions of dollars” into its website and back-end technologies, including readily accessible information with engineering specifications, templates and sample drawings, answers to the most frequently asked questions, and an AI chatbot introduced at the beginning of the year to address pertinent questions. 

And the volume of applications has gone up substantially, with a 30% year-over-year increase from 2018 through 2023. “This year, we’re 15% on top of that right now, and permits are continuing to come in,” stated Saar in late May.

Success in railroad permitting applications can depend on the experience with the process by the requesting organization and their third-party assistance. “I will say we do see companies who repeatedly permit correctly and those who do not,” said Saar. “It all depends on the applicants to read and follow all of our instructions posted on the website. Applicant’s engineer’s should ensure the applications comply with our specifications and submit all the correct fees and insurances. There are absolutely fiber companies who often use the same consultant who knows the permitting process. They submit exactly what is needed on the front end and it goes seamlessly through the process. Master agreements, that’s another good way to streamline the process.”

CSX is not standing still on its website. The company has partnered with state rail associations, participating in state permitting conferences, and held numerous meetings with utilities to get feedback on the permitting process and ways to improve it and the web portal. 

“One of the reasons we go to these conferences is to reach out to [applicants],” said Saar. “As you’re designing this, don’t wait until the last minute. The earlier you can partner with us, do it. Don’t wait until the last minute.”

This article and similar stories can be read in the Q3 edition of Fiber Forward Magazine.

Panelists explore deployment challenges and opportunities at Fiber Connect 2024. (Source: FBA)

The “Deployment Challenges and Opportunities: Streamlining Last Mile Connectivity” panel at Fiber Connect 2024 examined the many issues facing what moderator Brendan O’Boyle, chair of the FBA’s Deployment Specialist committee and PLP’s Communications Market National Sales, described as “an unprecedented era of deployment” being driven by BEAD funding and private sector investment. 

Threading through local and state regulation to deploy in a timely manner came up among the primary challenges builders face, especially when the state has one established policy while individual municipalities layer their own preferences on top of it to complicate build processes in each area. 

“For us, it’s really a matter of focusing on ease of deployment, because it’s expensive, it’s hard. It takes a long time,” said Rod Hanson, CEO, Cityside Fiber. “Jurisdictions have their own agenda sometimes…In California, they passed a law requiring microtrenching, requiring cities to have a microtrenching policy and they didn’t dictate what the [exact] policy was. But they did say that you have to have it available, which has helped us tremendously…Most of the cities are fine with microtrenching, but we’ve had cities say you have to restore the entire travel way for a two-inch cut, which doesn’t make any sense.”

“To piggyback on what’s already been said, you can be operating in multiple states, [and also encounter] the lack of consistency at municipalities within the state,” said Jeff Manning, Vice President, Network Strategy, Shentel/Glo Fiber. “Each one has different rules, regulations, how you permit, the process around. It just makes it a complicated process when you’re getting your new construction engine up and running. Every market has different processes to some extent.”

Making sure contractors are suitably qualified and understand the regulations within the markets they operate is also a concern, especially in keeping projects on time and being able to flow field crews to where they are needed. 

“We’re at very early stages,” said Hanson. “Part of that is finding the right vendor by talking to our contractors that have experience in the market. It’s also important that they have experience with the cities that we’re involved with. It goes much easier with cities they are familiar with, with contractors who they are working with, and then they have confidence in the quality of work that they do.”

“One of the keys to be able to hit [deployment] numbers and get the engine really going is the consistency of work for the contractor, so you don’t have to reengage and you don’t have to stall and stop, you can keep him moving to the next level,” said Manning. “Building that model and being able to keep them moving is a great way to perform consistency, maintain the same quality.” 

Training consistency and retaining skilled workers has been a problem for some service providers, with GoNetspeed’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of New York Paul Griswold noting that it becomes a question if the contractors “are training their people to train correctly.”  Griswold added they train their own staff for installations as well, but often end up losing them to the power company. “We lose a lot of people that we’ve trained.” GoNetspeed is paying people more and recruiting more people to allow for the inevitable departures. “Still, we lose people all the time,” Griswold stated. 

Plodding Through Permits and Locates

Before work can start, permits need to be secured for digging and securing equipment, but municipalities may not be equipped for the sudden increase in applications as builders lay out their construction plans. “A challenge is getting an expectation of [work] and having those early meetings with the city staff, [getting] the understanding of what it is we’re going to be doing and why it’s important. If you get support from a city manager and the elected officials, they find a way to get permits out to you, it just takes time,” said Hanson.

Communications with city officials is an important point at the early stages of a project, given the critical nature of permitting. “You let them know what the expectations are, here’s what is coming,” said Manning. “If you look at some of these smaller permitting departments, they don’t even know what the volume [of permit applications] is going to look like. When you get in front of it, and start talking through it, they can start thinking about resource challenges that they have, we can start talking about how we can flow permits and help with those resource challenges when you start to build that partnership.” 

Likewise, the ability to efficiently market buried utilities at the large scale and pace of network construction becomes a challenge for towns that rarely have seen a major surge of construction in their lifetime. Working to build cordial relationships in the beginning can make things flow efficiently for construction and ease issues when something inevitably goes wrong. 

“On locates, we’ve done something very similar, because that’s such an issue,” stated Manning, with smaller towns having trouble keeping up with the sudden workload. “We work with them, looking to get support, other locators to come in. We can get into some shared resources that can help move things along. It’s so important to develop those partnerships early and upfront and keep them going through the whole process because there’s going to be damages, we’re going to hit a water line somewhere, right? Being able to restore them quickly, it helps a lot, when we have that partnership in place so that water line hit doesn’t mean the front page and scare off the rest of the community.”

The First Face-to-Face Customer Experience

The first impression a service provider delivers is very important from the day construction starts, even as the first crews start rolling out to climb up poles and dig trenches to deploy conduit. 

“Your first introduction to a new municipality, to a potential customer, is a messy process of plowing through their property and restoring any damages,” said Manning. “The brand opportunity in doing that well is so critical to being able to later onboard those customers. I think you have to put a lot of focus on quality, on restorations. We take damage prevention and damage restoration very seriously. We’ve set up teams and that’s their only focus. You need to respond to a negative impact in 24 hours. It’s amazing the positive impact that has, because they hadn’t necessarily experienced that before. If you can show how you are a different service provider, I think they appreciate that and you have a higher likelihood of onboarding a customer.”

Once initial construction is complete, field technicians dispatched to connect homes play their role in establishing service provider credibility. The fiber tech turning up service may be the first person from the company to physically meet with the customer. First impressions are important.

“I live in Ft. Worth, Texas,” said O’Boyle. “I just got [fiber], but the young man sent to [my] door, had no idea when they deployed and what the conditions were around it…it’s got to be so important to strategize with your contractors and employers about what that legacy has been, what you’ve gone through, what steps you’ve gone through [to deploy fiber].”

“The product certainly matters, your marketing matters,” said Katie Espeseth, Vice President New Products, EPB. “But that person inside your home, standing in front of your customer has got to know the message and carry the message and act consistently with your brand.”

Market Competition

Service providers today are finding that they aren’t alone in building new fiber networks and some markets which once appeared to be sure winners have become less so for a variety of reasons. 

“If you’re the first or second one in, hopefully the first, you’re in a better position,” said Griswold. “As we look around markets starting to figure out where else to go, if there’s two or three [providers], we aren’t going into that market. Two years ago, when we first started this operation, that wouldn’t even apply that we would have multiple fiber competitors in the market, that many and new ones we’ve never seen before, then you have the incumbent.”

GoNetspeed didn’t know it was going to encounter the level of new competition that it is seeing today and is now in the process of backing out of certain markets and looking for other opportunities it hadn’t considered before. Shentel’s fiber build criteria is similar to GoNetspeed’s. 

“We don’t want to be the second fiber provider in the market or the third fiber provider in the market,” stated Manning. “We’re looking for those markets where we can be the first provider, have a technical advantage over what the incumbents have there. And I’ll tie this back to what we said about quality and branding, the image you’re putting out there and how important that image is in competitive market.” 

Being viable in competitive markets requires an investment of time, initially with city officials and then more broadly with the people who live there. “Because we’re aerial [deployment] so much, we don’t need to meet with those towns and villages [for permits], but we do, so they know we’re coming in,” said Griswold. “If we do need permits, we can get permits faster because they understand what we’re trying to do…We really do enjoy getting to know the communities and supporting their community events and things like that. We have to, because then they sign up.”

EBP, now operating broadband fiber in Chattanooga for over a decade, invested considerable time rallying the community in support of the electric co-op’s efforts to install fiber to every household and business in the area, a model which has worked well for it over its many years of operation as a service provider. 

“First, we had to make sure that we had the support of our local officials,” said Espeseth. “Then we spent a lot of time with the business leaders. We met with a group of business leaders every week for an hour and talked to them, this is what we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to spend, this is what we think it will do for our community. Are you for us, are you against us?

“Then we took that message out to any organization that would talk to us. We spun up a speaker’s bureau internally and trained our employees, let them put in their own words, and then we sent them to any civic group that would listen to us and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do. If you want us to do it, but more importantly, if you don’t want us to do it right here. We don’t want to do this if nobody’s going to be behind it.’ I think building those partnerships early on and before we ever put the first fiber in the air or underground was what led to our success.”

This article and similar stories can be found in the Q3 edition of the Fiber Forward Magazine.

“Evan Roe, Choptank Fiber AMI Network Technician, carefully splicing fiber cables together in Choptank Fiber’s trailer. (Source: Choptank Electric Cooperative)”

“The need for fast, reliable internet was undeniable among our membership,” stated Tim McGaha, Vice President of Technical Services, Choptank Electric Cooperative. “Choptank Electric had hundreds of miles of fiber that it already deployed to connect substations, downline equipment and grid operations. The membership saw it and said, ‘We know you’ve been running all this fiber for the last decade. Isn’t there some way you can make residential broadband work?’ The pressure got to be substantial.”

A changeover in management in 2019 led the incoming executive team to evaluate its options and the needs of the communities in Choptank’s service footprint. The vast majority of members are residential. The cooperative’s biggest business customers are a Solo® Cup factory, a Walmart store, and SunMed Growers cannabis company. 

“It’s a really heavy lift to build out an entire broadband company and all the residential infrastructure needed,” said McGaha. “But when you see the folks that are just starving for internet, and you know you’ve got these existing fiber assets that can be utilized to help, you have to make the effort. The fiber is a valuable asset, and it gave us a head start. It’s one of the reasons we were able to get as far as we have so quickly in just a few years.”

Incoming Choptank President & CEO Mike Malandro got approval from the Board to move forward, despite the challenges of deploying residential fiber in rural areas that had anywhere between six to eight houses per mile. To leverage its electrical assets to deploy fiber, Choptank Electric had to get the Maryland General Assembly to change its status from being a publicly regulated utility accountable to the state Public Service Commission to a member-regulated one.

“We became deregulated in March 2020 and then we had to have a vote of our membership,” said Valerie Connelly, Choptank’s Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Relations. “I think 97% of those that cast a vote, voted to become member-regulated because they knew it was tied to getting broadband. That made it possible for us to use the trucks, the staff and the poles that were already in our electric system for this dual purpose of providing broadband.”

The critical need for broadband among its rural members has led Choptank to provide financial support to customers who may not be able to otherwise afford it through their Low-Income Access Program (LIAP). This $30 monthly discount will be provided to fiber customers who already receive energy assistance on their Choptank Electric account. “We have been trying to find ways to help make it possible for all families to take service. At the end of the day, we don’t want the reason they say ‘No’ to be that it’s not affordable for them.” 

This article and similar stories can be read on the latest edition of the Fiber Forward Magazine.

Early North American sales numbers for PON equipment are up in the second quarter of this year, making for a “surprising” upside, according to the latest industry research. Future years for PON are expected to be up over the next five years. DOCSIS equipment sales are expected to peak in the next two to three years as cable providers continue their shift to all-fiber networks.

“When it comes to equipment sales into service provider networks, things have been relatively slow in 2023, and also extending in the first quarter of 2024,” said Jeff Heynen, Vice President Broadband Access and Home Networking, Dell’Oro Group. “We’re expecting 2024 total spend to drop about 9% [due to inventory drawdowns in 1H24]. I’m going to raise that a little bit, so maybe it will decline about 7%, but clearly there’s a lot that’s going to happen in 2025 and beyond, with BEAD funding shovel-ready projects and a reinvestment cycle now that Tier 1 operators have gone through their inventory correction.”

Heynen expects continued growth in the North American PON equipment sector, comprised of OLTs and ONTs, to be up 2% year over year over the next five years, due to $130 billion in federal spending on fiber broadband by 2030 with private capital by investment firms and operators “dwarfing” that amount, continued growth in data consumption at a normalized 18% compound annual growth rate from 2027 through 2026, more use cases for PON including IoT and edge transport, and the unknown impact of generative AI and other data-intensive applications.

DOCSIS equipment makers are a more modest run, with Tier 1 cable providers investing in DOCSIS 3.1+ and DOCSIS 4.0 through 2027 as they replace legacy equipment and upgrade their outside plant to compete with fiber offerings, but the future beyond that is much less optimistic as cable providers overbuild their own territories with fiber due to competitive and economic reasons.

“We expect cable share to decline from 64% of total broadband subs in 2022 to around 55% by 2028,” said Heynen. “The reason being in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 market. We hear a lot about smaller cable operators moving away from having to make the decision with DOCSIS 3.1 to DOCSIS 4.0, taking advantage of the reduced operational costs that PON and fiber networks bring, going ahead, making sure that they protect their existing territory by having a fiber offering. Too many variables for them to risk jeopardizing their business by not moving to fiber.”

If that wasn’t enough to make cable equipment manufactures worry, Heynen said that MSOs survey their outside plant every year and 3% to 5% find that their equipment has aged to the point where it becomes “cost parity” to replace everything with fiber rather than refreshing everything with coax and its associated electronics.

To learn more about PON’s bright future and cable’s steady embrace of fiber, listen to the latest Fiber for Breakfast.

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Does faster internet lead to more productivity? According to the latest research conducted by the Fiber Broadband Association’s Technology Committee and RVA LLC Market Research & Consulting (RVA), if work-from-home broadband users subscribed to a gigabit or more of fiber broadband connectivity, the U.S. could add a whopping $326 billion, around 1.2%, to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

“Is there true value to gigabit [service]?” said Michael Render, Founder and CEO, RVA. “Yes, I think there is, based on looking at bandwidth, time savings, and efficiency, effectiveness as well.”

Based on publicly available Open Vault data looking at user usage on a monthly basis, RVA estimated delays for uploading and downloading data using a 60 Mbps service wasted about 20 minutes daily waiting for web pages and files to transfer during the course of a typical online day. “We don’t think about it all the time, because it’s 20 seconds here, 30 seconds there,” Render said. “But it all adds up into a staggering figure on an annual basis, 120 hours, almost 14 eight-hour days.”

How much is that wasted time worth? At $35 per hour, the average wage rate in the U.S. in 2023, waiting for uploads and downloads costs the average user around $3,700 per year. Increasing speeds to the gigabit level resulted in reducing wait times to around 2 minutes per day, something barely noticeable to most of us on a daily basis. Applying a gig speed boost to the 23% of work completed in the U.S. from home and assuming a 10% productivity improvement through the increase in efficiency using cloud-based services, websites, searches, and other business applications, delivers a 1.2% increase in GDP.

“There are similar impacts for workers in the office,” stated Render. “Just as an aside, I don’t think we understand the value that fiber has to GDP in general. It is the basis of all high tech today, the internet, the cloud and database networks, cellular networks, AI, and quantum and everything else that we talk about with excitement today. A big portion of those things are owed to fiber in terms of the productivity and GDP improvements they bring.”

And while many people think that gigabit speeds are sufficient for today, John George, Senior Director, Solution Engineering & Professional Services of OFS and chair of FBA’s Technology Committee, notes that the growth in speed isn’t grinding to a halt anytime soon, driven by adoption of 8K streaming, AI, and AR/VR/XR. “We see two gigs symmetrical required by 2030,” said George. “As we’re extending into 2040, another 10 years, even at a lower 15% growth rate, 8 gig symmetrical.”

To learn more about why gigabit speeds are good, why latency is truly king, and how fiber is the way to meet the requirement for single-digit latency and higher bandwidth, listen to the latest Fiber for Breakfast.

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Fiber Connect 2024, Nashville, Tenn. – Running an award-winning National Hockey League (NHL) franchise would seem to have little in common with broadband and service provider operations, but Nashville Predators CEO Sean Henry is no ordinary sports entertainment executive. Twenty-one years ago, he started out selling hotdogs in Detroit Red Wings games and steadily worked his way up through the ranks to where he is now running the hottest arena in professional hockey. Many of his learnings in the sports world are equally applicable to new and current service provider management and their customer service teams as they build fiber networks around the country. 

“I tell every young person, love where you work, love the mission and jump on board,” Henry stated, noting he was ready to step up and help out other departments once he had his job mastered and running well. Hopping in got him noticed and led to increasing responsibilities and learning different aspects of the business. “You’ll be the biggest company guy in the world, because there’s a lot more opportunities.” 

Henry said success requires focusing on the moment and creating a supportive work environment that lets people thrive. “Worry about your job interview or the job you have,” said Henry. “Don’t worry about the job three jobs later. Everything we do is how to be better today or yesterday, not how to be the best at what you do… It’s fun when people do their jobs the best they can.” 

The Nashville Predator’s arena has been recognized as one of the top 10 venues in the country over the past twelve years and the top arena twice in that time period, due to Henry’s focus on celebrating successes and “not getting down” when people inevitably make mistakes.  The arena has delivered significant economic benefits to the city, generating the ability to build three satellite ice rinks in middle Tennessee to introduce the next generation of fans to skating, hockey and the Predators. Building the facilities has served to revitalize the surrounding areas, leading to public and private sector investments that includes a new library, rec centers, a hotel, a new soccer field and restaurants, along with companies relocating their operations so they can take advantage of the economic boom. 

Broadband has been a significant enabler for the Predators to engage with fans both in the arena and outside of it. “The more we can feed [information to] our fans, the more we can position our spots with partners messaging in a pretty cool way,” said Henry. “Whether it be around stats or real time gaming, or maybe it’s gambling as well, the better we’re going to make it. That wasn’t always the way. Every time there’s been a wave, an evolution in electronic digital, there’s always someone that fights it. A lot of sports owners fought against radio. The Islanders wouldn’t put games on TV for 20 years because they thought if the games were on TV, nobody would come to the games, how foolish is that? But their loss was two generations of fans,” 

Henry is all in to provide immersive experiences for fans, be it through live events, bringing the game to fans in bars and their living rooms, and on their phones. Fiber is providing the backbone for a new Wi-Fi system at the arena to provide new channels and incentives to interact with fans.  “We’d be irresponsible if we didn’t take every connection for every one of our fans to sell them more often or to [interact with] them a little bit more often,” said Henry. “And then really leverage our partners messages to them.”  

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As states continue to receive final BEAD Volume II approvals, eyes across the country are turning to Colorado and its process, seeing an opportunity to provide clarity not only for that state and its grant applications, but others as well.

“Colorado is the first that I’ve seen to have a public notice on a draft grant agreement under BEAD,” said Ryan Roberts, Partner at SheppardMullin. “We wanted to highlight some of the key points, our main takeaways, in part because you’ll have an opportunity to weigh in. Typically, you draft an agreement, you mark it up, go through that song and dance. This [Colorado] public notice and comment period is a little unique. Anyone on the line can submit public comments on any aspect of the agreement.”

Roberts believes that the Colorado comment period for the grant application could provide clarity for different aspects of the BEAD funding process to the state, NTIA, and other states, especially in areas where there are questions or concerns. For example, NTIA provides multiple options states can use to pay grants, with the most likely option grantees would prefer is receiving partial payments upon completion of certain milestones in the contract.

“We’re looking to see what those milestones are going to be, so you can get interim funding to continue funding your operations,” said Roberts. “The agreement is really lacking in this respect, it’s circular. There’s a mean agreement and statement work attachment. The mean agreement says to look to the statement work attachment to figure out when you’re going to get paid. The statement work attachment says you’re going to get paid in accordance with the mean agreement. Nowhere do they actually say how you are going to get paid upon achieving X milestone or X timeframe, whatever it might be. For me, that’s one of the things I would really seek clarification on.”

Roberts believes the intent was for the state to establish milestones in the process with the milestones being determined upon negotiation or final agreement. The open comment period provides an opportunity for discussion with the state as to how the process should work as one area for improvement.

To learn more about Colorado’s draft BEAD grant agreement comment process, other areas of clarification network providers might want to review and comment on, and how that could influence NTIA and other states in their processes, tune into the latest Fiber For Breakfast.

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Next-generation gigabit fiber speeds are running up against the limits of trailing-edge home Wi-Fi gear and other in-home factors, much to the chagrin of service providers and their customers, according to the latest research insights from Ookla. With FCC Consumer Broadband Labels now required to provide expected network performance information, consumers need to understand both what the labels are communicating and the potential limitations they may have in their homes to take full advantage of the speeds they are getting.

“As these new fiber networks are rolled out, the level of service, throughput, and latencies being provided, and the way those numbers are [improving] is bringing a whole new level of capability to homes and businesses,” said Bryan Darr, Vice President, Government Affairs, Ookla. “But that doesn’t mean that people can necessarily experience it. The Wi-Fi devices that most people have in their house, they’ve ordered from Best Buy or Amazon or bought at Walmart or Target or some other Big Box store. These older devices aren’t capable of handling the throughput speeds that are now being delivered, particularly with new fiber connections.”

Most fiber providers deliver gigabit speeds today, with some already offering multi-gigabit services, but only the most recent versions of Wi-Fi technology provide the throughput to support multiple in-home devices at gigabit speeds. Most users and devices access the home broadband connection via wireless, so being able to measure performance at multiple points along the network from the service provider to the end-user is vital. Ookla’s Speedtest technology provides a window into service provider performance into the home and within the home through its software being embedded in customer premise equipment (CPE) and able to be run via mobile and PC clients.

“What happens inside the home is very significant,” said Darr. “It’s one of the reasons why we report so many different metrics associated with speed tests. It’s not just about average test; it’s not just about summarizing mean average or median, which has become a very important metric. We also report on the best tests and the worst tests that people are experiencing because this is all critical to understanding what that consumer perception is. Customer perception of the networks is going to play a very, very large role in their satisfaction with your service, regardless of what you are delivering to the address because the consumer will continue to use wireless and Wi-Fi capabilities.”

For more on Ookla’s speed measurements and how they can help service providers understand their networks and customer experiences, listen to the latest Fiber for Breakfast podcast.

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While some question the necessity of fiber in rural areas, current FBA Board Chair Jimmy Todd refutes that position from long-held, real-world experience. As CEO and General Manager of Nex-Tech, a communications service provider in northwest Kansas, he’s seen the essential need for fiber to deliver education, health care, and economic progress in America’s heartland over the past decade. 

“Nex-Tech was the first to bring fiber to a rural community,” said Todd. “At the time, people didn’t like the fact we wanted to deploy fiber because that was perceived to be ‘Gold plating.’ But looking at the future and asking where are we going, where we needed to be, fiber made sense. We knew that fiber was the future, we can’t look backwards.” 

Policy makers often are focused on the “right now,” rather than where we need to be in a few years, leading to policy, regulation, and decision-making that’s delayed, said Todd, but “technology doesn’t wait” and rural communities need the benefits that fiber delivers to schools, public safety, healthcare, and businesses. 

“A small business in rural Kansas can have customers all over the world, not just in their small town,” Todd said. “It used to be the only way [a small business] could survive was by the local residents. Now you have an online presence, you have connectivity, and can provide your services or your product all over the world. It really makes a difference when you have that available in our rural areas.” 

Fiber provides reliable, high-speed, low-latency broadband to the local hospital, enabling it to provide specialist care, while the schools can connect into the state broadband network to access universities and other educational resources. For one local dairy, Nex-Tech extended fiber so it could do business with Danone North America, the producer of Dannon Yogurt. The payoff was significant. 

“They had an opportunity to provide their product to Dannon,” said Todd. “They needed fiber connectivity, to have that connection with Dannon and to monitor what was going on with the operation with the milk product, help with how they fed [the cows], all these different things that are hugely important for the quality that they have to maintain. That business has significantly grown in the past decade. They’ve started another location, they’ve more than doubled the size of their operation, and they would have never been able to do that without fiber.” 

To learn more about fiber and its impact upon rural communities and how it unlocks the productivity of precision agriculture, listen to the latest Fiber For Breakfast podcast.

The city has taken a similarly diverse approach to the different types of licensing agreements it has put in place for fiber. “We want to encourage full market coverage, competition, and availability. We have four license agreements for fiber for the city,” said Mark Leech, Director, Technology and Innovation (CIO) for the City of Albuquerque. “There’s a combination that covers different parts of the city with different business models. Some are supplying end-to-end fiber to the home and businesses. Others are putting fiber into the ground for an open access network, contracting out the last mile to others.”

Albuquerque hosts a vibrant arts community, hosting such events as the annual Balloon Fiesta. (Source: Vexus Fiber)

Albuquerque’s current economic base, anticipated growth, and dearth of fiber is attracting interest from numerous firms, including the privately-financed Gigapower open access fiber network provider, which is building projects in cities around the country. “One of our missions is to bring fiber to markets that really don’t have it. We feel we can bridge that gap and provide a different class of service than what they have today,” said Tom Kearney, Chief Operating Officer, Gigapower. “There’s definitely a need to be in that market to augment and provide different classes of service.”

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History are just as tied to Albuquerque’s history and culture as its vibrant art scene. (Source: Doug Mohney)

Vexus Fiber, which has committed to covering 97% of the city, also sees a bright future for the city.
“The prospects of Albuquerque from an economic development perspective are just continuing to grow,” stated Kevin Folk, Regional Vice President of Operations Southwest, Vexus Fiber. “Intel is a big presence here. You’ve got Sandia Labs, the Air Force base, solar companies looking to move here. There are a lot of huge things. It brings more workers to the city that require better, higher quality [internet] connections.”

Currently Albuquerque has what Leech describes as an “adequate” standard of broadband, but notes that different parts of the city have been skipped over due to geographic and economic reasons. “We’ve got digital deserts, with no infrastructure there,” said Leech. “There are pockets all over the place. If you think about the whole of Albuquerque as a piece of chart paper, we have areas that are red squares without coverage, yellow squares that have more than one incumbent, and green is the best broadband we can provide. We want to cover Albuquerque in green.”

The lack of broadband in parts of the city is not only a macro concern to city officials but also one that affects city operations in a rapidly growing municipality. As the city purchases older properties and puts up new buildings as the government develops, selling off older properties they’ve outgrown, having broadband everywhere is vital to ensuring the IT needs of departments moving into their new facilities. 

Fiber is used in many typical ways by the city and to support some unique applications as well, tying back to the city’s embrace of the arts. “Within our portfolio, we provide fiber for traffic management for stoplights,” said Leech. “There’s an increasing push for our smart community efforts, that’s more about putting cameras in high-crime areas. We may have locations that have one connection and need to support six cameras. We’re working closely with law enforcement for those needs at that point.”

Various wireless services utilized by the city, including the LoRaWAN® Internet of Things protocol, generic Wi-Fi, and CBRS services to provide bridging connectivity to Wi-Fi hotspots are all supported by city fiber that it owns or, more typically, is leased from a third-party. Connectivity will follow around the city’s bus lines and a seven-mile urban Rail Trail designed to link Albuquerque’s downtown area to nearby neighborhoods, cultural destinations, entertainment districts, and its historic Rail Yards. One area where fiber isn’t going are the city’s arroyos, dry gullies outside the city that quickly fill with fast moving water when it rains, leading to flash floods that can endanger people and property. 

“We will use the fiber along the Rail Trail to monitor things like pedestrian flows, smart trash cans, and enable art being created through a collaboration with Central New Mexico Community College,” said Leech. “I’m really excited about the collaboration. We’re on our third cohort of artists. We put artists through IoT classes, and they build art that incorporates it. We put the pieces on the Rail Trail or in our city art gallery. It supports Albuquerque’s thriving and vibrant art community.”

Multi-state service provider Vexus Fiber believes in Albuquerque’s current and future potential, as well as that of the surrounding areas. The company is putting $250 million into covering the city, along with another $50 million going into the town of Santa Fe, roughly an hour’s drive north, and plans to expand to the adjacent township of Rio Rancho directly northeast. Albuquerque will be the company’s largest build to date, passing its projects in Texas and Louisiana. 

“This is going to be a five-, six-year build. Albuquerque has about 360,000 homes,” said Folk. “Our commitment to the city is 97% of the homes passed, so we’re talking 350,000 homes. We’ve already got over 2,000 homes passed and we are anticipating a ramp up of our construction activities to be in multiple locations throughout the city at the same time. Our goal is 20,000 homes passed by the end of the year, and we’ve already started our project planning for the next year.”

Vexus Fiber has been working with the city government for several years, obtaining its license two years ago and trying to smooth out the various requirements it needed in order to move forward with construction, including the volume of permits it needs as it increases its construction tempo.

“Albuquerque is a little bit different than some other markets that we operate in,” said Folk, compared to the company’s operations in Louisiana and Texas. “A lot more restrictions, permitting requirements. The city has had to figure out a permitting approval process with the amount of workload that we’re bringing to them and how they work. That took a little bit of time, it took a little bit longer as well with pole attachment permits.”

The service provider is deploying a combination of underground and aerial fiber, working with energy provider PNM for pole access in both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. “In Albuquerque, we’ll be on 40,000 poles,” said Folk. “That’s a lot of work for a company to ingest that resource load into their system. 

“We’re also very conscious of the impact [our construction] has on the city’s resources as well as the residents. We’re not tearing up roadways, we’re doing boring as well as aerial work, but it does have an impact on the communities, in the neighborhoods where we work. You’ve got to be mindful of that, we’re very conscious of that impact because you know, where we’re building these are potential customers for us.” 

Folk anticipates that Vexus will create around 150 new permanent jobs in Albuquerque and the company is now working to establish partnerships with community institutions and the larger businesses in town, such as Intel, NBC/Universal, Netflix, and Amazon, along with the Mesa del Sol master-planned community of 30,000 homes being built in the southeast corner of the city. 

However, Vexus faces a well-funded challenge from Gigapower, jointly owned and governed by AT&T and BlackRock investment management group. “We’re making a several hundred-million-dollar investment in the market,” said Kearney. “We keep it open-ended, but it’s close to several hundred million in Albuquerque holistically. Our minimum commitment to the city is to service 150,000 homes and businesses while constantly evaluating opportunities to increase and add to our build plan.”

Gigapower will offer services up to 8 Gbps symmetrical services initially using XGS-PON with the ability to scale upward to a minimum of 25 Gbps in the future. Construction will include a mixture of aerial and underground fiber deployment, leveraging PNM’s network of electric utility poles where available to increase speed to market. 

Access to PNM utility poles in Albuquerque and the surrounding region is key for deployment of fiber in the area. (Source: Vexus Fiber)

Kearney said Gigapower is very far along in its initial engineering and construction plans and expects to start breaking ground and placing fiber this summer. “We’re working side by side with the city, PNM, and other municipal partners for permitting.” 

Gigapower has two unique characteristics in its fiber builds in Albuquerque and other cities. First, it is an open access commercial wholesale provider and AT&T is its anchor tenant.  “We’ve had conversations with dozens and dozens of ISPs that are interested in partnering with us and we’ve had discussions with various service providers.” 

Other announced areas and cities Gigapower is competitively building out are Las Vegas; Chandler, Gilbert, and Mesa, Arizona; parts of Northeastern Pennsylvania, including Scranton and Wilkes-Barre; and parts of Alabama and Florida outside of AT&T’s current service areas, with company officials suggesting more announcements would be forthcoming in the future. 

Vexus says it is ready for competition in Albuquerque and feels some providers will not be able to deliver. “There are some big challenges for city resources as you bring more competition. You have four to five providers that want to build their own network of attachments to the poles, that means somebody’s going to miss out,” Folk said, with Vexus having an advantage by being first in the market for a city-wide build and working with local officials to scale up the permitting processes. “We feel that with our customer engagement, customer service, local technicians, and local footprint, we can compete against the big boys.” 

“We launched our telemedicine program because of our recognition that so many patients had challenges accessing our specialty providers,” said Dr. Karen Rheuban, a pediatric cardiologist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and co-founder and Director of the UVA Center for Telehealth, which now bears her name in recognition of her work.

“The University of Virginia traditionally served patients in the western half of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which extends to the far southwest corner of Virginia, which is in fact as far west as Detroit, Michigan,” said Rheuban. “For many decades, my pediatric colleagues and I traveled to Bristol, Virginia, to see patients every other month. With that came the recognition that in between our visits, it was a hardship for our patients to travel to Charlottesville to access our care. That was the genesis of the development of our telemedicine program.”

Advances in personal computing and increased broadband availability enable virtual office visits delivering care to individuals and families who would otherwise have to travel long distances for specialized needs. Source: UVA Health.

Specialty medical care such as neonatal care, pediatric and adult specialty care, and other services such as acute stroke intervention or high-risk maternity care has always been more accessible in urban areas and municipalities with established medical schools, such as Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. For rural patients, there are often sufficient numbers of primary care providers, but accessing specialized providers is a challenge due to the travel time necessary to reach them.

In The Beginning

“Thirty years ago, we launched our telemedicine program to provide improved access to specialty care from healthcare facilities such as hospitals and clinics. Medicare and Medicaid regulations related to reimbursement required patients to be at healthcare facilities. Of course, most homes were not equipped with connectivity to support telemedicine encounters,” said Rheuban. “At that time, few patients or providers knew about telemedicine and broadband was certainly a far cry from ubiquitous.”

Establishing on-site rural telehealth facilities in the mid-90s was no trivial task. Running a (then) state-of-the-art 1.54 Mbps T-1 connection to a southwest Virginia community hospital or health center cost $6,000 per month, along with $150,000 per site for networking and proprietary video equipment. Electronic medical records (EMR), if they existed, had to be accessed through a separate dial-up process.

“It was an environment where there was little to no reimbursement of telemedicine services, and a lack of understanding of the applicability of telemedicine both by patients and by providers,” said Rheuban. “However, when patients began to use telemedicine, even as far back as the mid-1990s, the value and convenience was clear. After testing a telemedicine link to a remote community hospital, my longstanding patient’s father said, ‘Tell everybody that if I don’t have to drive back to Charlottesville, I’m never coming back. I want all my son’s care to be this provided this way.’”

Navigating technology, pricing, and payments weren’t the only challenges UVA faced as it built and established telemedicine standards. The regulatory environment had to be modified as well to permit the practice.

“Early on, every provider who was to deliver a telemedicine service to a hospital, contractually would need to be fully credentialed and privileged at that hospital,” Rheuban said. “You can imagine what it would take for a 25-bed rural critical access hospital to credential and privilege 1,000 UVA providers; a huge amount of work and a gigantic burden. We were very fortunate to work with the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO), now known as the Joint Commission, and CMS to facilitate new regulations that enabled credentialing and privileging by proxy. In other words, if I’m credentialed and privileged at the University of Virginia, the medical staff of a community hospital could elect to accept my credentials by proxy. That policy change eliminated a huge burden for telemedicine providers and patients originating at site hospitals as well.”

The Pandemic Accelerator

Telehealth is incredibly important today in terms of delivering health care and contributing to better outcomes – in other words, making people better and keeping them out of the ER and hospital when not needed, along with saving patients time and money. Any topical discussion about telemedicine goes hand in hand with the changes in regulation and mindset that took place during the pandemic, when face-to-face meetings with a doctor or a visit to the ER for anything except the most necessary critical care were discouraged.

Telemedicine emerged as a necessary lifeline for doctors and patients alike. “The COVID-19 public health emergency truly transformed telehealth,” said Rheuban. “Those of us who were already using telemedicine were able to rapidly scale to provide services across all the disciplines, and not just for specialty care, but also for primary care. That was probably the one blessing of the COVID-19 public health emergency…scaling up telemedicine. We learned a lot during the last four years in terms of utilization, technology, integration, broadband, and what works, what doesn’t work. And hopefully, as we scale our broadband infrastructure, access to telehealth becomes available to every patient – wherever they are located. And adopted by every provider and health care facility as well.”

Public policy waivers issued during the crisis enabled health care organizations to implement telemedicine service more broadly and integrate them into everyday care, particularly since Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance companies issued waivers that enabled reimbursement for telemedicine services, regardless of patient location. That being said, Congressional action is necessary to make those changes permanent.

“Policy changes at the state and federal levels exponentially increased the availability of telehealth services to patients. Reimbursement is critical for adoption by providers, and broadband is critical to patient engagement and a high-quality encounter,” said Rheuban.

Better and faster bandwidth to health care facilities and homes delivered via fiber has opened a wider range of uses, including early access to care in the home, a possibility that was literally science fiction when UVA first started its telehealth program three decades ago. Virtual telemedicine visits are now integrated with electronic medical records, patient portals, scheduling systems, peripheral devices, and remote monitoring tools.

Today, UVA Health conducts approximately 8% of its ambulatory visits via telemedicine across all specialties and via many different modalities. Although down from 30-40% of visits during the peak of the pandemic, the transition to virtual care is here to stay.

Prior to COVID-19, the use of telemedicine saved UVA Health patients more than 35 million miles of driving. “We stopped counting after the public health emergency when we scaled telemedicine exponentially,” Rheuban added.

“Nearly every specialty can incorporate a form of telemedicine in its care delivery model. The modalities range from synchronous telemedicine supported by real-time video to asynchronous evisits conducted through a patient portal and econsults between providers,” Rheuban said. “Telemedicine facilitates earlier access to care, and remote monitoring programs allow for the monitoring of vital signs obtained at home and tracked by the care team to enable timely interventions and better outcomes.”

FBA Board Member Kimberly McKinley with University of Virginia Center for Telehealth’s Dr. Karen Rheuban discussing about how fiber is essential for telemedicine and the future of health care. Source: FBA.

Delivering mental health service using broadband in the home has grown in utilization and offers some advantages compared to a traditional office visit, Rheuban said. “Behavioral health visits represent one of the most utilized of all telemedicine services. Some say, ‘Think inside the box’ because the video connection is often non-threatening for patients, reduces no shows, and helps to maintain continuity of care.”

Higher broadband speeds enabled by fiber have significantly expanded the tools beyond simple video consultations between doctors and patients, enabling a telemedicine wave of specialized care available to hospitals regardless of location. There are many reasons to deploy and integrate telemedicine solutions in both rural and urban settings, to make the right care and right provider available at the right time to the patients that need them.

“We have deployed technologies to hospitals that require significant bandwidth,” said Rheuban. “Hospital-to-hospital, and hospital-to-clinic services require more bandwidth than does a home telehealth visit because of the need to transmit large files necessary to manage higher acuity conditions. For example, in a telestroke encounter, we require high-quality video to enable detailed patient examinations and expeditious review of CT scans and other imaging modalities to render an opinion and initiate care when every second counts.”

There is still a need to ensure sufficient reliable high-speed broadband availability across the spectrum of care — from in-home services, to care through local clinics and hospitals, and through facilities providing specialized care. Not every condition can be treated virtually, particularly when hands-on care and ancillary services such as imaging, laboratory testing and procedures are required.

Rheuban noted that there are communities 20 miles from Charlottesville that don’t have sufficient bandwidth to avail themselves of telemedicine services, forcing patients to drive back and forth for care. “We are exploring the feasibility of alternative access points for patients if they don’t have access to broadband in their homes,” said Rheuban.

Preserving and extending many of the advancements gained following the COVID-19 public health emergency will require more legislative effort. Making permanent the Medicare telehealth waivers put into place during the COVID-19 public health emergency represents a priority for patients and providers alike. The Medicare flexibilities currently extend through December 31, 2024, and require Congressional action to be made permanent.

Other policy considerations include licensure, which is a function of the states, and to ensure equity in access, the deployment of ubiquitous broadband. Federal BEAD funding is rolling out to the states for broadband expansion. A number of federal agencies have taken additional leadership roles, such as the FCC, USDA and HRSA, in expanding telemedicine services.

“We’ve worked with the FCC in their universal service programs and the USDA to scale telemedicine to rural and underserved communities,” said Rheuban. “The Rural Healthcare Program and the Affordable Connectivity Program enabled providers and patients to secure bandwidth, and under certain circumstances, covered the acquisition of devices. These programs impact low-income and rural patients who truly need [broadband] as a health equity consideration.”

In partnership with state and federal policymakers, Rheuban sees an ever-expanding future for telemedicine. “Patients and providers have become very comfortable with telemedicine following the public health emergency. The evidence is clear – telehealth IS healthcare in the 21st century, and with universal broadband access, we can deliver on the promise of connected care.”