If You Paid for a Broadband Build, Nobody on Stage Is Asking What It Changed

If you sit on a council, a board, or a budget line that has sent money toward rural or municipal internet, this is the part that should concern you: the industry that spends that money is about to hold its big annual meeting, and the agenda spends far more time on how the money was raised and how the cable got in the ground than on whether households ended up connected, and whether they can afford to stay connected.

I read the agenda for this week's Broadband Communities Summit in Houston. It's an event that has been running for over 20 years, focused on broadband connectivity in communities and municipalities. The agenda is genuinely packed with real wins. But it celebrates raising the money and building the networks while skipping the questions that decide whether any of it mattered.

Five things struck me as missing or misshapen: an industry grading its own homework with the same broken ruler, affordability, a "last mile" that has moved indoors, spectrum, and low-earth-orbit satellite. That matters because the people at this event are the ones who will be absolutely affected if public money moves away from them or moves toward satellite, and the households on the other end of those builds are the ones who find out whether coverage and connectivity are the same thing. I've worked on the digital divide in South Texas and on deploying connectivity for municipalities in low-income areas. I still came away curious, and a little concerned, about what actually ties the event together.

It seems like the industry is finally grading its own homework. The problem is it's grading with the same ruler that was broken in the first place.

The ruler is broken

Day two of the event turns into whether what was built actually works and who's checking on it. Here's the funding, you built it, you were supposed to hit these metrics, did you hit these metrics? That kicks off around 9:15 with the USDA talking about RUS compliance, RUS is the Rural Utilities Service, the federal arm that lends and grants money for rural infrastructure, and "compliance" means proving you delivered what the grant said you would. The session is called "Built to Last or Built to Pass."

That day two panel asks, in its own bullet points, whether performance testing sample sizes actually reflect true network health, and what we're doing about it. Translation: when a provider proves a network works, it doesn't test every home. It tests a sample. If that sample is small, or chosen conveniently, the report can look fine while real households have a poor experience.

That's the part that gets me, because field sampling, speed tiers (the advertised download and upload speeds a customer is sold) and coverage maps (which claim who can get service) are all the same things that have been broken for a while. Coverage maps in particular have a long history of saying a house is served when, on the ground, it isn't. To hear those recurring themes come up year after year makes me ask whether we're finally going to do something about it, or whether there will finally be traction on how all of this gets resolved. We'll find out.

Day one, by contrast, is about getting the money and building it, with voices from the states on funding milestones, public-private partnerships and a lot of private investment. We get to hear from people at Bastrop County, from Monahans, from the Texas Broadband Workforce Grant folks, and a lot of people will be talking about acquisitions and what the lay of the land looks like going forward, because there has been some cool movement in that space over the last year.

The affordability gap is missing

Underneath all the compliance language there's an uncomfortable thread running across both days: the bottom-up, community-level stories are all on the agenda, and all of them are fundraising stories.

• Bastrop County won $47 million.
• Monahans raised $625,000 locally through a Chamber of Commerce fundraiser.
• Bastrop County Cares is completely volunteer-led, with a retired geologist credited as a GIS volunteer on that panel, GIS being the mapping work that figures out where lines and households actually are.
• There's a session on nonprofits and digital navigators, the people who sit with a household and help them sign up, get a device and learn to use it.
• Thursday has a building buy-in and reaching the unserved session.

Not one of those is a story about what actually changed in the household afterwards. There's a lot of back-patting going on where people are happy that they raised the money and happy that they could build the networks, but who's monitoring what that money did for the community?

The digital equity language is still there, it's just a matter of where it sits. On the keynote stage you've got Angela Siefer from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance on Wednesday, and the Cleveland model session talks about bridging Cleveland's digital divide. I hope those sessions talk about the affordability gap, because that continues to be the thing, at least in my community down in South Texas, it's still the number one reason connectivity isn't happening, and it's the fact that people can't afford it.

When you get groups like SpaceX telling the FCC that no more subsidies are needed because coverage is everywhere and ubiquitous across the United States, that's an issue, because it may be ubiquitous, but it may not be affordable. That distinction is the whole argument. If a regulator accepts "available everywhere" as the finish line, the subsidy money that funds the projects in that Houston ballroom becomes much harder to justify.

It's one thing to raise the money and build the network and make sure it's working and monitor and test it, but dude, a Ferrari is a great car. Not everybody can afford it, and I think we really need to look at that and make sure the affordability conversation comes up.

The last mile has moved indoors

"Last mile" is the industry's term for the final stretch of network that reaches an individual home, as opposed to the long-haul lines between cities. It used to be a term everybody used back in my younger years. Now that last mile has moved indoors: it's no longer, can we get it to the house, it's what happens once it's inside the home, or once it's inside the MDU, a multi-dwelling unit, meaning an apartment building or similar, or the apartment complex or the housing community. Where does the connectivity go from there? A fiber line at the curb does nothing for a family if the Wi-Fi inside can't carry it to the far bedroom.

That indoor last mile is a radio problem, which is why the near-silence about the radios matters. The word spectrum, the airwave frequencies that all wireless depends on, and which governments license or open up for use, appears in the program only as a cable company's name. For a two-day broadband conference there's no spectrum policy, no CBRS (a shared mid-band spectrum that lets smaller operators build wireless service without buying a national license), no 6 GHz (the newer band that modern Wi-Fi uses for faster indoor connections), and nobody's talking about Wi-Fi 8, the next generation of the standard. There's one radio session, with Ruckus and my buddies over at Cambium, but the technical side isn't front and center on the stage. That's a little crazy given what's happening right now with SpaceX and the rumors going back and forth, and given what's coming down from the FCC on spectrum auctions and who's going to take advantage of that.

LEO gets two bullet points

Satellite comes down to two bullet points on two panels: the rural panel Thursday at one o'clock on the role of satellite, fixed wireless access (internet delivered by radio from a tower to an antenna on the house, instead of by cable) and other alternative technologies, and another one on disaster resilience.

That's two sessions about the single most threatening technology to the people in that room, because it isn't only going to provide connectivity in rural areas and broadband across the United States, it's also going to affect all of the funding that all of these projects run on.

LEO, low-earth orbit, the class of satellite constellations that fly close enough to deliver usable internet, Starlink being the obvious example, appears zero times as a technology. The only time LEO is on the program is Leo Anderson, the CTO of Paul Bunyan Communications, on the esports panel. NRECA, the national association of rural electric cooperatives, will be there, and NDIA, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, will be there, so I hope questions pop up, because two bullet points is all satellite gets and I really hope to hear more people have something to say about that.

AI is OpEx, never a product

AI shows up only as OpEx, operating expense, a cost line, and as load on the network. I don't see any conversations about it as a product: reducing tier one support (the first level of customer service calls, the expensive high-volume kind), predicting failures before customers notice, real-time monitoring, workforce readiness. There's a lot AI can do.

On the other side, there's a data center as broadband hub session about AI's fiber and energy demands, and Dr. Nicol Turner Lee from Brookings closes out day one. But nobody here is selling AI to subscribers, and that restraint is notable in itself, because there are so many sessions and conversations about AI everywhere else that I'm curious what this industry is actually saying about it.

So what am I hoping for in Houston?

The wireless conversation is more about business and finance than about technology and the application of technology, and it does make me wonder who the audience is. Being a nerd who walks into a conference that's all finance and management sometimes doesn't land right for me, but I'm always curious to see different and alternative perspectives when things like this pop up. There will be some great faces there, Terry Holmes and other buddies from back in the day, and hopefully I can talk tech with them.

This really seems like a chance for us to look back and see whether these networks have been built correctly, and how we're measuring what correct actually means, but also to address the elephant in the room, which is communications from space.

What you can do with this

• Ask the keynote speakers, Angela Siefer and the Cleveland model panel included, whether they'll address the affordability gap and not just coverage.
• Push every panel, and every grant recipient you fund, to report what actually changed in the household and the community after the network got built, not just how the money got raised.
• Ask how many homes were actually tested to prove a network performs, not just what the headline speed number says.
• Put the SpaceX subsidy filing to the NRECA and NDIA representatives while they're on stage in Houston: if a regulator believes coverage is already ubiquitous, what happens to your funding?
• Look past the last mile to the connectivity inside homes, MDUs and apartment complexes, because that's where the problem lives now.
• Show up and talk tech on the show floor even if the stage is all finance, and ask who's monitoring the networks after the ribbon cutting.

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