2022.08.19 – Open Broadband News

FCC Rejects LTD Broadband, Starlink Bids for Subsidies

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected the long-form applications of LTD Broadband and Starlink to receive support through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program.

The Commission determined that these applications failed to demonstrate that the providers could deliver the promised service. Funding these vast proposed networks would not be the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars to bring broadband to unserved areas across the United States, the Commission concluded.

Applauding this development, Gary Bolton, President & CEO, Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) commented, “Today in Washington, the FCC took a bold step forward in rejecting Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) long form application, denying the company of the $885.5M award announced on December 7, 2020.

“This is a huge victory for the 640,000 families that had been previously relegated to Low Earth Orbit Satellite service as a result of the 2020 RDOF auction results. Further, as these families that were designated as “Starlink locations”, they were at risk of being redlined from being eligible for fiber broadband from the $42.45B NTIA BEAD broadband infrastructure funding and other federal, state, and local broadband programs. Today’s action by the FCC, rejecting SpaceX’s Starlink from RDOF funding, provides clarity and a path forward for fiber and closing the digital divide, while returning $885.5M of this precious funding back into the RDOF fund for more appropriate broadband projects.”

Fixed Wireless Grabbed Broadband Market Share in Q2 2022

Leichtman Research Group (LRG) is reporting that fixed wireless broadband providers gained market share in Q2, 2022, with 800,000 net ads while the largest cable operators lost 60,000 broadband subs and the top wireless phone companies lost 85,000 subs.

Overall, the largest cable, wireline phone providers and fixed wireless services in the US acquired about 670,000 net additional broadband Internet subscribers in Q2 2022, compared to a pro forma gain of about 1,000,000 subscribers in Q2 2021.

“Top broadband providers added about 670,000 subscribers in Q2 2022, reflecting over 800,000 net adds for fixed wireless services, along with modest net losses for cable and wireline phone providers,” said Bruce Leichtman, President and Principal Analyst for Leichtman Research Group, Inc. “Over the past year, there were about 3,260,000 net broadband adds, with fixed wireless services accounting for 56% of them.”

Despite post-pandemic slump, worldwide wearable shipments will reach 344 million by the end of 2022

Demand for wearables and accessories slowed during 2021 due to economic and geopolitical factors impacting consumer’s priorities. Despite this decline, global technology intelligence firm ABI Research expects continuous growth until 2027. More than 300 million wearables devices were shipped by the end of 2021 and will reach around 344 million by the end of this year. Additionally, more than 650 million of these devices are expected to be shipped worldwide by 2027, a CAGR of 13.2% between 2022 and 2027.

Up to the end of the current year, the growth in the wearables market is foreseen to be driven mainly by two segments, namely sport, fitness, and wellness trackers and smart home-enabled smartwatches.

“The reason behind the rise of these two segments is the continuing direct consequence of the pandemic on consumer’s habits. This year, smartwatches will continue to dominate the wearables market due to the strength of the Apple smartwatch and the growing number of companies offering smartwatches with impressive functionalities,” says David McQueen, Consumer Technologies Research Director at ABI Research.

5G in India could open up open RAN – eventually

Open radio access network (RAN) proponents, particularly in the US, are hoping that a broad move to 5G in India will help create opportunities for open RAN technology to proliferate globally. But that likely won’t happen anytime soon, according to some industry observers, and others don’t think it will ever happen on a major scale.

“This will not change anything,” said John Strand, CEO of an advisory company called Strand Consult. He argued that open RAN is something that big, established telecom companies talk about but don’t actually buy. His company forecasts that open RAN will sit atop less than 3% of all 5G sites in 2030.But equipment vendors and other open RAN proponents disagree with Strand’s pessimistic assessment of the technology’s potential. India’s move to 5G is a “game changer” for open RAN, wrote Pardeep Kohli, president of open RAN vendor Mavenir, in a recent LinkedIn post. “There will be new entrants in the market. Open RAN architecture provides opportunity for new players to enter the market.”

Cable network spending set to rise amid pressure from fiber, FWA

With competitive pressure from fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) expected to surge in the coming years, cable operators are likely to respond in kind with heavier spending on network upgrades, according to a new broadband access forecast from Dell’Oro Group.

Revenue for cable distributed access architecture (DAA) equipment is set to rise to nearly $1.3 billion by 2026, up from about $1 billion in 2021, the research firm predicts. That DAA category includes elements such as virtual converged cable access platforms (vCCAPs), remote PHY devices (RPDs), remote MACPHY devices (RMDs) and even remote optical line terminals (OLTs).

Remote OLTs, a relatively new focus of the Dell’Oro forecast, are devices that can be snapped into DAA fiber nodes to support passive optical network (PON) services alongside DOCSIS and even some wireless/mobile applications. Remote OLTs are expected to generate more than $100 million in revenues by 2025, with the bulk of that spending coming from the North American cable market, said Jeff Heynen, VP at Dell’Oro Group.

“What we’re finding is that there’s a need to compete sooner than later, in some cases, where they [cable operators] might be losing subscribers maybe to fixed wireless or to fiber overbuilders,” Heynen said.