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.

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.” 

In January, the Fiber Broadband Association – LATAM Chapter released its annual “Panorama FTTH LATAM” market report. Published since 2013, the study conducted by consulting company SmC+ focused on the Latin America market, analyzing fiber deployment in the region, challenges, impacts, trends, and projections for the coming years. 

The 2023 report comes with a different look and new analysis of industry factors. “We are deepening the regional knowledge about the FTTH momentum the region is living nowadays,” said Sebastian Cabello, CEO of SmC+ Digital Public Affairs. “For this new 2023 edition, we added a couple of new indicators like number of sockets, network overlap, and competition levels that reflect different aspects of the growth we are seeing, that is reflected not only in coverage but also in quality levels.”  

Fiber to the home services passed 114 million households in Latin America with a total of 57 million FTTH subscribers in 2022 (51% of total broadband subscribers), at a rate of 22% year-over-year subscriber growth. Over 111 million households had a broadband subscription in Latin America while there are 69 million without any connectivity, making up 38% of total households in the region. Expansions in data traffic demand and government initiatives to close the digital divide are expected to drive growth of 20% annually over the next five years. As a result, FTTH is expected to make up 69% of all broadband subscriptions by 2027. 

“The Fiber Broadband Association is extremely encouraged by the results of this Latin America study, as the strong growth of fiber broadband deployment and adoption will elevate the quality of life in the LATAM region for generations to come,” said Gary Bolton, President & CEO, Fiber Broadband Association.

Among the countries with the strongest growth are Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, and Argentina. Data used to build the Panorama FTTH LATAM was collected from the main vendors in the region and from the regulatory agencies of the 18 countries that make up the region. Over the next five years FTTH and FTTB coverage combined is expected to grow from 62% to 77%, with FTTH/FTTB take rates going up from 50% to 66%. As deployments continue, users in urban areas are expected to have increased competition through multiple fiber choices available in the marketplace. 

The report also recognizes continued challenges and barriers to new service offerings even as growth continues. Challenges for service providers include sustainability, supply chain bottlenecks, expanding coverage to rural areas, and vandalism. Obstacles to deployment include a lack of qualified staff, existing and in-deployment 4G and 5G networks, economic uncertainty and ROI, and a desire by incumbent service providers to maximize their investment in legacy technologies. 

“The LATAM Panorama is recognized as a key tool to reflect the growth of the sector and understand barriers and opportunities around the Latin American industry,” stated Nelson Saito, president of the Fiber Broadband Association LATAM Chapter. An executive summary of the report is available on the FBA website at www.fiberbroadband.org, while the full report is available exclusively to members of the Fiber Broadband Association.

John Deere works with Bridgeforth Farms to track its cotton growing and harvest using the U.S Cotton Trust Protocol, an organization that tracks the crop all the way from the field to mill, making sure that members can prove, measure, and verify that they are buying sustainably produced (cotton) fiber that is free of environmental and social risk. Six key metrics are tracked, including water use, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, soil conservation, soil carbon, and land use. 

A combine picks the cotton and feeds the fluffy loose white balls into another John Deere machine that compresses them into a tightly pressed bail for shipping, incorporating an RFID chip into the outside wrapping material. The chip enables the cotton bail to be tracked from farm to cotton gin, carrying along information about the characteristics of the cotton and how it was grown using sustainable methods. 

Big machinery, sustainable practices, family farms, advanced tech, it’s a feel-good story John Deere highlighted in its vast CES 2024 booth next to its autonomous machinery that is able to precision plow furrows with millimeter accuracy and geolocate each planted seed for tending and harvest. 

Until I asked about fiber broadband.

“It’s very important,” Bridgeforth said. “We don’t have internet on our phone. We use [satellite] and it’s not dependable. The state broadband commissioner has promised we are at the top of the list. We hope to have it sometime this year, but we’ve heard it before. We’ll just keep reaching out to him and hopefully one day they’ll bring us some fiber optic cable.”

The fiber industry has a lot of work over the next five years and challenges that need addressing. In the excitement of $42 billion of BEAD funding, it’s easy to take fiber deployment as a done deal, a given until you hear Mr. Bridgeforth’s story. 

Communication and education will be vital in the months to come. CTA’s annual “Tech Trends” presentation at the beginning of CES 2024 proclaimed 92% of U.S. citizens are connected to the internet today, but their numbers didn’t talk about the quality of that broadband. There’s no way of telling which part or how much of that 92% is barely usable. Certainly Mr. Bridgeforth has broadband, but it’s not reliable or fast enough for his current needs, much less future requirements to support 21st Century precision agriculture. 

Lack of adequate broadband isn’t limited to family farms in rural zip codes. The cities of Ft. Worth, Texas, and Newark, New Jersey, have had middle mile struggles that handicap their citizens gaining access to quality broadband and impinge upon healthy economic development. It should be no secret that more middle mile money is needed, based on the $7.5 billion in applications to NTIA’s Middle Mile Grant Program last year. Only $1 billion in award money was available, which should be suggestive of the work that remains, especially when you consider that the average grant match was a whopping 40%.

It’s going to be a busy year, but let’s not only focus on what we can do today, but what we need to do today to prepare for the most optimum tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Doug Mohney

Like most large congregations of punditry and pontification, this year’s event delivered a mixture of wows and “What were you thinking, bro?” It is best to view the announcements and predictions from CES 2024 with a mixture of quiet joy and healthy skepticism, with truth emerging over time. This year, advances in health, AI, precision agriculture, vehicles large and small, aging tech,  AR/VR, and other sectors underlined the need for robust, high-speed, low-latency fiber broadband for today and many tomorrows to come as shiny new gizmos and innovative new services move from product announcements and exhibit halls to the real world.

Lumen Brings the Power of Wi-Fi 7 to Fiber

One doesn’t often see large carriers talking about fiber at CES, despite all introducing multi-gigabit offerings over the past twelve months. Wi-Fi 7 is likely to shift the conversation in the months and years to come, delivering a better, more robust in-home broadband experience in terms of coverage, lower-latency, and multi-gigabit speeds, making it the perfect complement for fiber service providers offering gigabit and faster services today.

Lumen Technologies Wi-Fi 7 display at CES 2024. Source: Doug Mohney.

The Wi-Fi Alliance officially announced its Wi-Fi CERTIFIED 7 program in early January, providing test lab certification for device interoperability with the finalized standard.

First out of the gate to be certified was Lumen Technologies for its custom-developed Wi-Fi 7 router and optional Wi-Fi extender to pair with its bespoke ONT. At the close of its third quarter in 2023, Lumen’s Quantum Fiber service passed 3.5 million locations and had 896,000 fiber subscribers. New subscribers will be the first to receive the new Wi-Fi 7 gear with the company working out the details on potential migration options for existing customers.

“We’re excited about our Wi-Fi 7 devices because we’re trying to create an experience for our customers that’s best in class,” said Andrew Dugan, Chief Technology Officer, Lumen Technologies. “It’s something we’ve been working toward for multiple years. When we released our XGS-PON implementation ONT capable of 8 Gbps symmetrical customer data speed, it was something we felt was a first in the industry, an in-home device that can leverage the full 10 Gig capability of XGS-PON. We’ve now added the Wi-Fi 7 router to complement it. And it is ready to deliver that excellent experience for our customers.”

Through its initial internal testing program, Lumen saw dramatic performance improvements with Wi-Fi 7 over its predecessors, including double the coverage area over Wi-Fi 6. The Lumen box includes a GPS chip to support Automated Frequency Coordinate (AFC) service so that it can broadcast up to 4 watts of power in the 6 GHz band if there are no other licensed users of that spectrum in the area, providing larger area coverage for both home and business users.

The extended coverage provides immediate benefits for both customers and Lumen since no or fewer Wi-Fi extenders are needed, so customers can benefit from the Wi-Fi 7 router immediately without having to upgrade the entire home to Wi-Fi 7 devices. Fewer extenders reduce hardware expenses and inventory while Lumen gains a simplified in-home wireless environment to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot, part of an holistic approach to customer service that’s winning them rave NPS scores.

“We also have a strategy for creating a digital twin of all of our devices in the cloud,” said Dugan. “In real time, we extract all the operating parameters from our devices and pull those back to a cloud image, we’re monitoring 60,000 parameters per device in real time. We have an image of exactly how that device is operating in the home in real time in the cloud. It enables us to run algorithms and logic against that data, using AI tools to be able to understand how that customer’s experience is in the home. That will allow us to deliver a better experience. It also reduces our costs over time, as we can better support customers when they call in or even prevent them from calling in by making sure that the device is operating in optimal mode.”

Lumen started out building Quantum Fiber with the vision of providing the world’s best fiber experience, opening with a fully digital customer ordering process, simple subscription billing, and a customer support process with a single point of contact instead of being handed off between multiple groups within the organization when issues arose.

“We did a lot of research around customers’ broadband experience and the pitfalls and the challenges and doing business with providers of all sorts,” said Maxine Moreau, President of Lumen’s Mass Market division. “We wanted a customer experience that was very different from telco. The number one challenge consumers have when they purchase broadband is connectivity within the home and the number one reason customers call us today after they get their service is because they’re not getting the throughput. Very few devices are hardwired to benefit from 1 Gig, 3 Gig, and 8 Gig. The Wi-Fi capabilities leap between 6 and 7 provides a significantly better in-home or in-business experience.”

Moreau noted the Quantum Fiber brand already receives positive customer NPS scores of over +60 across all touch points, with digital twin technology enabling Lumen to proactively diagnose issues in the home and resolve it before the customer knows there is a problem, resulting in significant operational savings. 

“Many times prior to digital twin, we would get a phone call, we troubleshoot with the customer, we tried two or three different things, they tried two or three different things, we’d hit a dead end, and we’d need to send someone into the home,” Moreau said. “With this technology, we believe we can cut those customer visits down significantly because of the data that is being extracted from the network and the AI overlaying to be able to self-heal the network.”

Another principle included in Lumen’s Wi-Fi 7 router and extender devices is sustainability, a point Lumen executives highlighted several times during the discussion with Fiber Forward. Using less materials saves the company money in several ways, including shipping and storage since the products take up less volume and weigh less.

“There’s lots and lots of passion with our green packaging,” said Crystal Dowds, Vice President, Architecture, Engineering, and Technology, Lumen Technologies. “We went to Vietnam a couple of years ago and walked through everywhere all our products are made and saw our manufacturers using recycled plastic. That started us on this great sustainable journey. All our Wi-Fi 7 devices are manufactured from day one with recycled plastic and then you’ve got the new packaging. We’re looking at reducing our costs by about a third because of the reduction in cardboard, recycled plastic in the device and then all the packaging will be sustainable products.” 

Could other fiber providers tap into Lumen’s multi-year work in hardware and operational support systems? Company officials seemed to be open to the idea of making it available on the appropriate terms.

AI, VR, and Holograms

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the overhyped buzzword/concept at this year’s show, but it and Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) have emerged as key building blocks entrepreneurs are using to build new services across all sectors. One may wonder about the ultimate value of an AI-enabled pillow or mattress or a smart pet collar collecting data and feeding it to a generative AI, but there’s no doubt that the technology is embraced and leveraged by health tech entrepreneurs looking to deliver better patient care while reducing loads on doctors, emergency rooms, and insurance companies.

AR/VR has moved out of the gaming zone and into many other applications. Startup Rendever is bringing senior living facilities together with AR as a social interaction tool for residents to visit with their friends and family, as well as a method to assess and improve balance and mobility. In four weeks of use, older adults improved their working speed by 9%, with 48% of participants reporting less concern about falling after VR exercise. 

Global conglomerate Siemens used CES as an opportunity to embrace the Industrial Metaverse, a concept including AI and immersive engineering. “We envision the Industrial Metaverse as a virtual world that is nearly indistinguishable from reality, enabling people — along with AI — to collaborate in real time to address real-world challenges,” stated Siemens CEO Roland Busch in a press release. “This will empower customers to accelerate innovation, enhance sustainability, and adopt new technologies faster and at scale, leading to a profound transformation of entire industries and our everyday lives. Designers and engineers will be able to create and work with design concepts in a VR immersive workspace and use mixed reality to review those designs against the real world, with Red Bull Racing among its first customers applying the tools to its problems.

Howie Mandel holograms live into AARP AgeTech exhibit panel
discussion, the next step in interactive real-time conferencing
technology. Source: Doug Mohney.

Holograms have always been a key science fiction trope, but they made a real-world appearance throughout CES thanks to Proto and its Epic hologram box, capable of creating a real-size, real-life 3-D moving image of a person in real time using a cool 20 Mbps of bandwidth. Proto “beamed in” America’s Got Talent judge (and company investor) Howie Mandel using Epic to the exhibit for a live interactive discussion at the AARP stage. William Shatner was also beamed in, but he was pre-recorded. Over 100 companies in fields including health care, live entertainment, and retail are working with the technology, which includes a touch screen for interactive applications.

Growing Precision Agriculture

Two years ago, John Deere introduced its first automated tractor at CES. Now every piece of farm equipment that the company makes will have the option to operate without a human behind the wheel. John Deere’s booth included the real-time operation of an autonomous tractor tilling a field in Austin, Texas, and monitored remotely through multiple windows on a large display. 

“We have examples throughout the booth of us using technology to help farmers at their highest point of need,” said Lane Arthur, Vice President of Embedded Software and Solutions (ISG), John Deere. “The tractor is actually turning the dirt. In general, farmers don’t like to do this work. It’s kind of boring. And labor has been a huge issue for them. An autonomous solution allows them to deploy their labor to other places that are more high value.”

This video and information dashboard is representative of where
precision agriculture is going. Autonomous vehicles, such as John
Deere’s line of equipment, require plenty of bandwidth for control,
monitoring, and software updates. Source: Doug Mohney.

Reliable broadband is necessary to operate autonomous vehicles remotely. “We need constant connectivity for that machine to work,” said Arthur. “If we lose connectivity, we can’t see it anymore, then we stop the tractor. High levels of connectivity are critical for use to be able to do what we do.” 

Available in limited quantities today, John Deere is making automation available through add-on kits that can be retrofitted to existing machinery with the appropriate electronics package, keeping the seat, pedals, and wheel in for a human to drive it at other times. “Farmers would use this tractor for other jobs besides what it is doing today,” Arthur stated. “Second, we’re not going to do autonomy on the road.” 

John Deere is steadily applying automation to harder problems, with “Furrow Vision” their latest challenge. “We put a laser down where we can measure how deep the furrow is going to be, so we can measure the depth of the trench. Farmers usually need to know how deep they are planting. I’m doing cotton, it could be an inch or less that I need to plant. The planting unit has other sensors that will tell you exactly where a seed is planted geospatially, how many seeds are there, and we use that data to create a geospatial map.” 

The geospatial map, combined with other data, provides the ability to directly apply the exact amount of water, fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticides necessary to keep the plant healthy and growing, saving resources and money. When it’s time to harvest, the map knows where the plants are and can tell the appropriate machines what to do to bring in the crops. 

AgeTech Booms

Technology is more important than ever for many communities, but few are embracing it more than the American Association of Retired Persons, better known simply as AARP. The association has created and fostered a huge ecosystem of companies involved in using technology and artificial intelligence to help older adults “live longer, better, and more independently,” according to a January 4, 2024, blog post.

AARP had a massive 12,000 square foot showcase of AgeTech, which included a stage that hosted more than 20 talks and exhibits from over 30 companies. The association’s AgeTech Collaborative ecosystem is made up of nearly 370 companies which anticipate serving a $28.2 trillion dollar market by 2050. Anywhere from 50 to 60 new AgeTech startups are sourced each year through its accelerator program from fields including smart home, mobility, fintech, and health tech. 

Most of these startups are working with bandwidth-rich tools such as AI, AR/VR, robotics, real-time communications, and health and wellness data monitoring systems requiring symmetrical bandwidth for video and other interactions. Samsung’s Health House in the AARP booth featured 10 startups designed to monitor and assist in improving aging at home, including an AI health care coach, contact-free (no wearables required!) sensors to track health rate, respiratory rate, motion, and presence, and a toilet seat that can measure heart rate, blood oxygenation, and soon blood pressure. While a health-monitoring toilet seat isn’t the most glamorous application, it’s practical and requires reliable connectivity to a secure cloud. 

Once you start incorporating AgeTech smart devices into the home and add in some videoconferencing and AR to communicate with relatives, the need for future-proof bandwidth becomes apparent for people of all ages. AARP is demonstrating high-speed, low-latency connectivity is no longer a desire for hard-core gamers, but necessary for people of all ages.

Much has been said about the rural digital divide being a problem of physical distance and higher installation cost leading to limited access. Less has focused on urban challenges of legacy infrastructure and the disruptive necessity and expense digging up city streets and sidewalks to replace limited and decaying copper-based networks with modern, resilient, and more power-efficient technology. 

Fiber provides urban governments and communities with substantial economic benefits. Municipal ownership of fiber enables city departments to communicate on their own secure networks, reducing the need for external services and their ever-increasing expenses. Available dark fiber can be leased to third parties, providing the city with monthly long-term revenue and used as an incentive to extend services to unserved areas. Finally, the availability of fiber and high-speed broadband services for business is a necessity for attracting and retaining businesses. 

Securing funding for urban broadband projects has proven to be a challenge for cities, despite an established need to reach “digital deserts,” areas that have not been modernized by incumbent vendors due to a calculated lack of return on capital investment. This has led municipalities to establish public-private partnerships for building broadband networks into unserved and underserved areas that have been historically bypassed in favor of wealthier zip codes. 

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Any Lone Star State origin story usually starts with cowboys and cattle, but few segue into the importance of networks for 21st Century commerce. 

“Ft. Worth was a border town right where the West began,” said City of Ft. Worth Chief Technology Officer Kevin Gunn. “We like to think of cowboys as the original entrepreneurs and they thrived because they were entrepreneurial. We had lots of head of cattle that were free for the taking down in the Rio Valley. They could bring them up here to Fort Worth and could sell them for $4 a head. If they could get all the way to Chicago, they could sell them for about $40 a head. They did that by creating a network way back in the 1890s, the Chisholm Trail, that ran all the way from South Texas up to Abeline and then on by rail to Chicago.” 

Ft. Worth CTO Kevin Gunn says the city’s fiber deal locks in
operational costs while enabling unlimited bandwidth growth.
Source: City of Ft. Worth.

Over time, the Chisholm Trail was replaced by a network of railroads, carrying not only cattle but other goods. Ft. Worth became a transportation nexus moving goods and people across the country as it grew. In the 1950’s, the Interstate Highway System supplemented the railroads, with three major thruways merging in the steadily growing city and giving an additional boost to the economy.

“We all know that the network of the future is the internet,” said Gunn. “We want to ensure Ft. Worth is well connected to that network, where commerce is performed and get all the other benefits that flow from that network. That’s why we’re interested in broadband and what the infrastructure for broadband is in our community. We saw some gaps or challenges there out of the pandemic, we saw segments of our community were not well connected or not connected at all to the internet infrastructure.”

The City of Ft. Worth defines four pillars for digital equity, including network access; device access; the knowledge, skills, and support for using the technology; and affordability. “Even if we have the first three in place, if it’s not affordable, we’re still going to have people left out,” said Gunn. “We also see economic development aspects to having good internet infrastructure in our community. There are lots of relatively inexpensive parcels of land here. We’ve got good electric power. We want to make sure we’ve got world-class broadband infrastructure so we can attract internet-focused and internet-based businesses here in Ft. Worth.”

Gunn cited North Dallas’ Metroplex area with its numerous data centers as a business development model that Ft. Worth would love to replicate, except for the fact that the nearest Tier 1 provider is 40 miles east of the city because there’s no available fiber to service the combination of low-cost real estate and available power. “We want to have peering and [Internet Exchange Point] cross-connect opportunities here in Ft. Worth so businesses don’t have to worry about constructing a path 40 miles to get Tier 1,” Gunn said.

Ft. Worth also plans to use new fiber in its own operations by leveraging its secure networking properties for city IT operations and incorporating smart city technologies across town to gather video and traffic information, weather conditions, and storm water and wastewater infrastructure performance.

When looking at the combination of needs for digital equity, economic development, and city government use, Ft. Worth decided to partner with a third-party broadband service provider to build its network with plenty of extra capacity. The central core of the network would enable the provider to use its private dollars to connect passed neighborhoods with PON to provide fiber to the home and for commercial customers. 

“We just awarded a contract to Sprocket Networks, an internet service provider based in Dallas who wants to expand into Ft. Worth, to construct it,” stated Gunn. “They came out as the best value for the city in construction costs and in digital navigation and making sure we address the equity and equity concerns we have in the community. It’s about 300 miles of cable, 192 strands. We have indefeasible right of use for 36 strands for our governmental use. That leaves the remainder [of the middle mile capacity available] for partnering with internet service providers in our community.”

Ft. Worth’s network will connect all the 224 facilities around the city, including fire stations, police substations, government storefronts, community centers, libraries, and fleet maintenance locations. Once connected, the city will switch off its current set of leased lines and the pay-as-you-go model with its existing telecommunications providers, saving considerable operational expenses in the years to come.

“Our bandwidth needs grow at about 5% per year,” said Gunn. “Our bill for those services grows along with it. By provisioning our own WAN service and using our unlit fiber, our bandwidth growth is unlimited and locks in our operating costs at today’s levels.”

The $65 million project is being funded through $4.5 million in ARPA funding and $3 million from the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) transportation improvement plan in up front capital, and the remainder paid out as annual installments to Sprocket over a 34-year term. “Our annual payments are going to be the same as our current payments to other service providers, so we’re locking in our recurring operational costs for the network. It’s a great way to leverage our purchasing power, but not to have a lot of upfront capital.”

There are 376,000 households in the Ft. Worth corporate limits with around 76,000, over 20%, that don’t have access to reliable or high-quality internet service. Other proposals didn’t include the dark fiber which the city wanted to reduce long-term operational costs. Construction of the 300-mile network is expected to take place over three years, but that will only be the beginning for the Ft. Worth/Sprocket Networks partnership. Gunn anticipates funding opportunities for BEAD monies to be available around January 2025 or later, depending on how the NTIA approval process goes. 

“We intend to partner with Sprocket to apply for that funding when it becomes available,” said Gunn. “That will definitely help build our PON networks into neighborhoods, particularly MDUs, multi-dwelling units. We find there are quite a number of MDUs with 100/100 Mbps at an addressable location, but you may have 300 units at that location. If 300 of those units have to share 100/100, that’s not served.”

Ft. Worth hopes to tap into Texas’ newly created $1.5 billion Broadband Infrastructure Fund to expand coverage to its unserved and underserved communities, with Gunn saying he’s “cautiously optimistic” that there’s a lot of state and federal funding available to address connectivity shortfalls. “We still have urban areas that don’t have good internet infrastructure,” said Gunn. They have ADSL for connectivity and that’s not adequate to meet the needs of remote education, remote working, and remote services, especially when Mom and Dad and kids and grandparents are trying to do that all at the same time.” 

Brick City, Scarce Glass

Settled in 1666, Newark, N.J., is one of the oldest cities in the United States and the largest city in New Jersey with over 311,000 residents. Nicknamed “Brick City,” Wikipedia paints a vibrant picture of Newark, citing its many white-collar jobs in insurance, finance, health care, and technology. Firms calling the city home include Audible, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, Prudential, Mars Wrigley, WebMD, and Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG). 

However, the fiber broadband fueling the business sector’s successes is out of reach for many of the people who live there, with access and affordability major issues. About half of Newark’s 110,000 households are eligible for the $30/month ACP discount, while nearly one in five Newark households do not have an internet subscription, according to 2021 U.S. Census data, and 10% of Newark families lack a computer. 

The city of Newark is using multiple methods to promote ACP to its residents, including mailings and pop-up tables at community events.
Source: Invest Newark/Tehsuan Glover.

“During COVID, it became apparent that there were a number of households that did not have broadband, some didn’t have computers,” said Marcus Randolph, President and CEO, Invest Newark. “Asking people, particularly young people who were trying to learn remotely to do something off their parent’s phone or take a school-issued laptop to some place where they could access free Wi-Fi just wasn’t acceptable to our Mayor the Honorable Ras J. Baraka. He made a mandate to make sure that we make available to people an affordable and reliable internet option. Then, timely enough, here comes the ACP program that can go hand in hand with our efforts to expand fiber and make it available to residents here in the city.”

Invest Newark CEO Marcus Randolph is open to partnering with
third-parties to close the digital divide by deploying fiber into
more of the city’s wards. Source: Invest Newark.

To promote ACP enrollment, Invest Newark received a grant of $400,000 from the Federal Communications Commission in 2023. With outreach in progress, nearly 30% of the city is enrolled, with over 10,000 households added last year. The city’s goal is to increase adoption up to 70% of eligible households by June 2024 and expects it will surpass that number. To address the device gap, Invest Newark has had discussions with “a few organizations” who have reached out to provide funding or help identify gently used equipment that can be recycled into a second life with those that need it.

While Newark works on affordability, it is also wrestling with improving and extending physical access. “We certainly do want fiber everywhere,” said Randolph. “We spent the last two years maintaining what we have [in our city network], we’re currently addressing some deferred maintenance. We’re trying to work out a plan to extend our fiber throughout the city so it’s more resilient and reliable.”

The City of Newark currently has a network of 26 miles of fiber it owns and wants to expand that into a metro-area ring by adding another 22 miles that would provide middle-mile infrastructure for expanding access throughout the city’s five wards, including residential homes and MDUs. Randolph said Newark had applied for $22 million in NTIA middle-mile funding last year but, like most applicants, was turned down.

Newark is working on other funding solutions to build its metro ring, with a total expected cost of $30 million. “This is not an inexpensive endeavor,” stated Randolph, noting the expense and challenges of building in the city. “We do need to look at ways that we can cover that. It might require some conversations with philanthropic organizations that might want to take on a part of this. Obviously, the goal is to have a ring around the city, but if we can stretch what we have today further into more wards, we’d consider it a win.”

While there are incumbents providing high-speed broadband within the city limits, they do not offer service to all residences. “We recognize the bigger players are not going anywhere,” said Randolph. “But we want to be able to provide options to folks who either A) Live in a place where the bigger players are not currently or B) We want a more affordable, reliable service for them. Ultimately, we want to make sure that the next time there’s some catastrophe that we find ourselves all having to distance from one another that no one is so distanced by the fact that they don’t even have broadband at home.”

Newark has leveraged ARPA funding to catch up on its deferred maintenance and as well as extend fiber coverage to all its recreational centers and some senior centers. It is planning to get fiber and Wi-Fi into all its public housing buildings, with its first trials taking place with the Newark Housing Authority. “We’ve done some installations and it’s going quite well,” said Randolph. “We’ve learned a couple of lessons from the first few buildings and hopefully we can just rinse and repeat and get fiber and good service to all the public housing buildings in the city.” 

Future fiber expansion will require more investment with either public or private funding. Newark is open to working with the private sector to make fiber happen. “Part of our approach to doing this residential expansion is to create a free and open access network,” said Randolph. “We’ve had some firms express interest, but we’ll figure this out, we’ll get this fiber spread out throughout the city.’”