The FWA Reality Check and the BEAD Final Numbers – Episode 25 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:16)
All right. I guess we’re gonna we’re gonna do another show. I think we’re gonna we’re gonna call this one unbuffered or something. I don’t know. We got some guy named Doug. Doug, how’s it going?

Doug Dawson (00:27)
it’s gone great, Chris. That is a new that is a new introduction.

Christopher Mitchell (00:33)
I thought I’d try nonchalant and like sort of downplay it a little. we’ll see if that makes a difference. I don’t know.

Doug Dawson (00:42)
well it it could. That was nonchalant. I wasn’t even sure they had started yet, so yes. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (00:46)
It’s kind of indifferent.

This is this is unbuffered, a show that’s not afraid to start off the show in a dumb way. I’m Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self Reliance, and I’m back with Doug Dawson, who’s with CCG Consulting, which is his shop there in in North Carolina. How you doing, Doug?

Doug Dawson (01:07)
I’m doing great today, man. It’s beautiful weather. It’s I’m loving it’s almost fall. So yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (01:12)
yeah, you have to tell me. We we’re we’re sitting at low humidity. I think on Sunday we’re not gonna get above seventy degrees. so you know, it’s this is the prime time here.

Doug Dawson (01:19)
Wow. Wow. Nah, it’s still eighty

seven here. It’s not really that yet, so yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (01:25)
Yeah. We are going to talk today about some stuff around Internet access. we’re gonna talk a little bit about the shape of the market, particularly what’s going on with fixed wireless access. There’s some numbers from Ookla, so we’ll talk about that a little bit. I’m gonna get a little bit, I don’t know, worked up, possibly talking about AI and whether it’s gonna put stress on networks. And this is kind of a nebulous topic. It’s it’s a specific reaction to something I’ll talk about when we get there.

but we want to cover also that NTIA, the the federal agency running the BEAD program, is announced how they’re gonna plan to true up funding for people that are kind of falling through the cracks. we’ll talk a little bit about that. Also, the government accountability office has a whole thing on like on like the FCC should identify and address difficulties that local governments and tribal nations faced in the bulk broadband collection challenge process.

And Doug, I think I’ve just put that on the agenda for you and I to laugh at it. because that’s hilarious.

Doug Dawson (02:27)
Well, no.

It is h it is hilarious. I just love it that a one federal agency just bitched out the other.

Christopher Mitchell (02:35)
Right, which for

for something that was like so horribly and totally broken.

Doug Dawson (02:37)
Years completely. It’s

the worst thing the last twenty years, I think, was that process, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (02:45)
And and then finally, we we I saw Doug, one of the other Dougs, Doug Adams, reported on the final BEAD numbers. And so we just we’ll wrap up with that. We’ll keep that as a cliffhanger for people who are desperate to know how much money or how many people, families, households, locations all went to the the low Earth orbit satellite providers. People that are very interested in that but can’t bother to look it up themselves will we’ll tell them at the end of the show.

Doug Dawson (03:12)
Good.

Christopher Mitchell (03:13)
All right, so

Ookla and Fixed Wireless. I saw this because you wrote about it. So everything that I know about it came from your brain already. What it was what’s new with fixed wireless access from the big cellular providers and Ookla?

Doug Dawson (03:28)
so yeah, what Ookla did was they took a deep dive into the three FWA carriers. That’s AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. And FWA is the

Christopher Mitchell (03:38)
it’s FWA is not like NWA, the hip hop group from my youth.

Doug Dawson (03:41)
It is not. Now

FWA is plain old cellular, but you put a receiver in your house and use it for for home broadband. Exactly same signal, exactly same frequencies as your cell phone, but it just happens to be your home broadband. And

Christopher Mitchell (03:57)
When you and I talked about

this before, in fact, I’ve talked multiple times with you on different shows, just a quick break. which is that I’ve learned the actual classifications now. They have these different prioritization levels. And

Doug Dawson (04:09)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (04:09)
so if you’re a direct like customer of T-Mobile Verizon or or them, you’re like level eight, which is like a decent level, or like level six. Let’s call it level six. I forget exactly where it was.

And then if you’re one of the the like mint mobile, like I am, Mint Mobile uses the T-Mobile network, and I think might actually even be owned by T-Mobile now, but it you pay less and you have a lower priority. And so like during the evenings, my service sucks more in a lot of the city. And then the next level of deep priority is home users. And so that gives you

Doug Dawson (04:41)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (04:42)
a sense like when they have extra capacity, that’s what they’re selling. And then that traffic comes in at a lower priority than people that have a direct relationship or a sort of indirect.

Cell phone relationship.

Doug Dawson (04:53)
And what that means in practical life is when the school bus comes home to the neighborhood and all the kids get off with their cell phone, your broadband gets worse. That’s that that’s what happens. It literally does, and you can see it. If you use FWA, it just goes up and down and up and down all day long of coverage. Because it’s the leftover. It’s the leftover spectrum. So yeah, it it’s I mean, the cable companies love to make fun of these guys because it’s so variable, but it’s thirty dollars a month.

Christopher Mitchell (05:21)
Yes.

Doug Dawson (05:22)
That’s the killer. It’s not that it’s good or bad, but people are going like, huh, eighty dollars for

Christopher Mitchell (05:27)
And so

Doug Dawson (05:27)
char eighty dollars for charter or thirty dollars for half ass broadband? Let’s take the thirty dollar one, right? So Yes, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (05:33)
And so that’s seventeen million homes have subscribed to that now, which is like,

I don’t know, approaching twenty percent of the market, I’m guessing.

Doug Dawson (05:40)
it’s getting up there and and and it’s still good climbing. It’s been going up a million every quarter, so it’s probably up to 18 by now since that came out. So, anyhow, what they said was T-Mobile was the fastest than Verizon or AT<unk>T, and they actually made a mistake in doing that because if all you gotta do is compare the same test to actual cellular, and it’s not that big of a difference. The difference is T-Mobile only sells it very close to the tower.

‘Cause ’cause they’re not in the other business, but the other two guys are legacy providers. And remember, they’re they’re selling this stuff as a replacement for tearing down your copper. So they they’ll put they’ll put this stuff

Christopher Mitchell (06:17)
Right. So previous

Doug Dawson (06:19)
out where you can only get ten megabits a second and it’s still F W A and of course it just makes the speed test look terrible, right? So

Christopher Mitchell (06:27)
Right. So you might

be like you’re in a in a area that’s less dense and you

Doug Dawson (06:31)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (06:32)
used to have DSL and they decided to get rid of that. And that DSL

was

Doug Dawson (06:35)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (06:36)
bad anyway. And now you’re on the cell pro but you’re like four miles away from the tower or something like that.

Doug Dawson (06:42)
Yeah.

And so you might get five megabits a second and they’re only giving you a voice replacement. They’re not promise you and it’s data, but it still gives you a speed test and it still looks terrible. So it says, AT&T’s FWA is terrible. Well, it’s actually not. They’re all about the same. Almost all of them are around 300 megabits per second these days, if you’re right by the tower. And it just

Christopher Mitchell (07:03)
Right, they’re all using

the same gear from Ericsson or Nokia, right?

Doug Dawson (07:06)
Exactly

the same gear. There’s only two vendors of it and they all use the same stuff. It there is no real difference. So the only difference is they use slightly different frequencies. So one cell tower is not exactly the same as the neighbor. But anyhow, so UKO didn’t Ookla, believe it or not, didn’t doesn’t have that intimate knowledge of the of the industry to understand that nuanced difference. So they kind of blew that. But the fact is what they did show was, you know.

Like upload speeds suck. They’re n they don’t even meet the FCC standard. It’s not great broad i i it’s not great broadband.

Christopher Mitchell (07:39)
they were all below twenty.

Doug Dawson (07:40)
They are. It’s not great broadband. You know, it is what it is. It’s what you get for thirty-five bucks, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (07:46)
Do you remember Ookla

did a study in which they compared public entities not that long ago? And the methodology of that was poor also. I mean, it it looked

Doug Dawson (07:55)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (07:55)
good for municipalities, which I’m always happy to see. I think that reflected reality. But they were like comparing municipalities to each other when they had different plans. And so it was like,

Doug Dawson (08:05)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (08:05)
well, you get like higher speeds from this one. It was like, well, yes, people there are paying to be on a gigabit plan. And this other carrier has a bunch of people on a 300 megabit plan. And

Everyone’s getting what they pay for, but like w if you

Doug Dawson (08:15)
Yeah. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (08:18)
average them all together, there will be different numbers.

Doug Dawson (08:21)
Yeah, you can’t say one fiber provider is better than another. They have the exactly the speed that they give the customer. They can Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (08:27)
Well, well run networks, yes. I mean we can say that Frontier

is worse for many years.

Doug Dawson (08:35)
Yes, you you can run it poorly, but the municipalities, none of the municipalities do. So that’s what’s crazy about it. So yeah. So yeah, that I again they don’t they really UCla’s just saying here’s the numbers, they don’t really do the deep analysis on it, so

Christopher Mitchell (08:49)
Right. Now it’s been, I don’t know, a very long time. I don’t know if it’s ever been the case that the Federal Communications Commission has increased the definition of broadband during a Republican administration. If so, it’d be the George W. Bush, I think like in two thousand seven or something like that,

Doug Dawson (09:05)
I

don’t remember the year w they went from four megabits to twenty five. That I I can’t remember.

Christopher Mitchell (09:09)
That was that was under Obama. but I think they may

have gone from originally the broadband definition in the nineties was two hundred kilobits per second

Doug Dawson (09:17)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (09:17)
in at least one direction, and then they moved that to four by one, I think. And that may have happened during the second Bush second and time in office. So but

at any rate, like we’re not expecting the the Federal Communications Commission under Carr, the champion.

Of connecting people better in their homes. That’s the only thing he cares about. Deep sarcasm here.

Doug Dawson (09:38)
wait a minute,

wait a minute. In his last one of the rulings that he put out lady in his comments section on in one of the NPRMs, he’s asking if we should lower that definition. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (09:50)
Yes. Yeah, no, this is

this is something that I thought we we might touch on. And the the federal the Federal Communications Commission is required on a yearly basis to report

Doug Dawson (09:59)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (10:00)
on the progress of getting everyone basically good Internet access. And the O under the Obama administration, one of the few things that I think Jessica Rosenworcel got right as the chair, she began reporting on digital divide sort of metrics like you know, basically

if the connection is available, are people able to use it? Is it affordable? These things are very related and I would think re and so Carr got rid of those things and then is also

Doug Dawson (10:27)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (10:27)
suggesting that we don’t need to think about the speed that’s available because well because that would be socialistic to like to

Doug Dawson (10:35)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (10:36)
to try to have everyone have a high quality thing, I guess. I don’t know.

Doug Dawson (10:40)
Yeah, well, it’s obvious what he’s doing. He’s protecting Starlink and he’s protecting the FWA guys because their upload speeds in both cases don’t really cut it. They’re I mean I mean it you know you can’t run a home with multiple people using the Internet on something that’s less than twenty megabits. So you just can’t. So yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (10:58)
Right. And that’s assuming that it actually delivers that, which is something that we often don’t even know.

Doug Dawson (11:04)
one last

interesting finding they had in there, which I love I’m glad to see they put in. Speeds slow down in the summer when the leaves come out. It’s just like any other wireless. It’s this is wireless is wireless is wireless. Like, yeah, leaves are out, speeds are down. So yeah, yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (11:18)
Right. Now that said, the Federal Communications

Commission is trying to increase the spectrum available to satellite. We didn’t prepare to talk about that, but I thought that was interesting. Some some additional spectrum. Rosalind Leighton, someone who I have only ever disagreed with, I feel like publicly, recently wrote a piece about how even with more spectrum, there’s no scenario in which satellite brings competition to cities. And just it was interesting to me that someone who’s

from generally such an anti regulatory bend came out with such a clear piece of the mar th this market is not going to solve all of our problems, which I thought was a correct take.

Doug Dawson (11:58)
Well, that was an inch that analysis was based on the physics of it. No, it’s it’s physically not possible. There’s not nearly enough bandwidth. And and they’d have to give them all the bandwidth.

It’s like what

Christopher Mitchell (12:10)
Right. Well, that’s thing

is that she said the same thing that I’ve I’ve talked about this at tribal broadband boot camps when we’ve talked about what what could you expect from Starlink. And my answer is there’s several thousand macro cells across the Los Angeles area to serve ten million people. That is in fact there’s there’s I know a r a fairly similar number of macro cells across Los Angeles, I think, that as there are satellites in space for Starlink.

And and you cannot serve everyone in Los Angeles on those macro cells. Like you

Doug Dawson (12:41)
No.

Christopher Mitchell (12:42)
you can serve a chunk of them, but like even that, like you just you you have physical limitations. So that’s gonna

Doug Dawson (12:47)
Well not to mention,

by the time that signal comes down through the atmosphere, it’s way less strong than what’s coming from a cell tower. I mean it it’s it’s very diluted, so it’s not the same spectrum, so yes.

Christopher Mitchell (12:59)
So anyway, there’s some there’s some interesting pieces in the news. I wanted to talk about something. This is a fun one just for me, which is this question about whether or not AI is going to be putting stress on networks. so let me set this up for you, Doug. there the this can there was a big technology podcast. I think it’s a good show. Talks about technology from the big tech companies and stuff like that. And the guy’s he’s really made it into a a good show over the past I started listening to it before it was a big thing, but

Now they have advertisers and everything. So that’s how you know you make it when you get less content

Doug Dawson (13:29)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (13:30)
and more time. but but he had a guest out and they were talking about this. And the guest went down. This is like literally out of the exaflood like discussions of not too long ago. and said that, well, much like Europe during the pandemic had to throttle back video quality in some cases because more people were staying home.

We’re gonna have problems on the Internet because there’s so many more bots than people that are going to web pages. And I was just f furious because it totally misunderstands the nature of the problem and where the problems are in the network and things like that. So I I just wanted I wasn’t sure if you wanted to riff on it at all before I say the rest of my piece.

Doug Dawson (14:12)
Well, it’s ludicrous because

You know, there’s a big difference between the the traffic between data centers and the traffic at my house. You know, I don’t have I’m not hosting any websites in my house, neither are you. So I don’t really care how many bots hit my sp actually I did get two big raids. Someone’s scraping my my blog, but that happened in somebody’s data center, and it’s not in my house. What do I care? So this the traffic in between on the big pipes is definitely getting bigger. in fact they’re saying that bot traffic probably even

by next year might be greater than people traffic. In your

Christopher Mitchell (14:48)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dawson (14:48)
house, in the house, you’re gonna see no difference. In fact, you might see less. I mean

Christopher Mitchell (14:53)
That was what I was thinking.

Doug Dawson (14:54)
I mean AI is going to answer a question for you versus you spending all day searching for stuff. That should be less bandwidth. And so it’s because none of that thinking of AI is done at your house. And so it’s not it done in the path between you. You go, AI, here’s

Christopher Mitchell (15:07)
Well there are

Doug Dawson (15:08)
the question. It goes crank, crank, crank somewhere else, and then it goes, here’s the answer. That’s not very big transmissions. They’ll never they’ll never they’ll

Christopher Mitchell (15:14)
That’s exactly my thought. Yeah, it’s like it’s like if

Doug Dawson (15:16)
never touch video volume.

Christopher Mitchell (15:19)
Like if I was to find out that

that there there’s some change in the commerce and that the amount of trucks traveling between Minneapolis and Chicago is about to double or quintuple, it would not change the traffic on my street. And that’s the way I think about it.

Doug Dawson (15:33)
Not a bit.

Not a bit. Well it would, ’cause everybody would get off the freeway.

Christopher Mitchell (15:38)
you have to I mean I I don’t live

that far from the freeway, but I still don’t think we’d even see the traffic there. so

Doug Dawson (15:44)
No probably not.

But but but I but I don’t buy that argument either. They’re they’re con conflating the difference between the big stuff between cities and the stuff between our houses. I think they’re completely wrong.

Christopher Mitchell (15:54)
Right. And I mean, your blog, you may

have to deal with the fact that you’ll have more entities hitting on it. And and that’s

Doug Dawson (16:01)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (16:01)
annoying, but like that’s not something that is going to like change. I mean, it’ll it may cancel out some of the benefits from the servers getting faster and memory getting faster and benefits and things like that. But

Doug Dawson (16:11)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (16:12)
like just I w I wanted to include this just so for people who are less technical who listen, a lot of the people who are AI experts really just

They’re good at getting themselves interviewed, but they don’t really actually know what they’re talking about.

Doug Dawson (16:25)
I I have a real opinion on most of those AI experts who don’t know anything about AI. So that there’s a whole there’s a whole industry

Christopher Mitchell (16:32)
All we’re gonna talk about

Doug Dawson (16:33)
of AI influencers which is very different than AI experts. So yes.

Christopher Mitchell (16:37)
Right.

And we’re actually gonna come back to AI right at the end of the show, real quick. That’s a

Doug Dawson (16:41)
Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (16:41)
little surprise for people that have gotten this far. Stick around and we’re gonna get

Doug Dawson (16:44)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (16:45)
a little little bit of AI. NTIA runs the BEAD program, which was supposed to put forty two and a half billion dollars out, but instead they’re putting less than half of that out. and the rest of the money we still don’t know. We’ve been promised multiple times we would know what was happening with these non deployment funds that are not being spent on getting a connection to people’s homes. But

Along the way, they have delayed the program. they’ve changed the rules a bunch of times. They’re probably going to change the rules some more. And some number of service providers are dropping out. maybe because of the terrible way the program’s been administered, maybe because of costs that have increased or or just the fact that they’ve grown old and died while trying to get through this process. But there’s a need for a true-up, and NTIA has just released some thoughts on how they’re going to deal with.

People who are in line to get something but now are not going to get something. What’s happening there, Doug?

Doug Dawson (17:41)
Well first off, I want to take exception to your noun that they run the program. I I don’t know how you turned the word crawl into a no into a verb, but I think that they crawl the program. So

Christopher Mitchell (17:51)
Right.

Doug Dawson (17:51)
I this has been ridiculously slow. So so what they what they said was

They’re gonna find ways to make sure that everybody gets good broadband. So apparently there’s this missing number of places who didn’t get served by BEAD. Now that’s really interesting because it wasn’t that many months ago when they said they covered everything. Remember, they have this FCC mapping fabric, and they have sworn that they’ve covered every place that doesn’t get 100 by 20. And so according to according. I know, I know. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (18:21)
Which by the way, we know is we know is not true, in part because some of the tribal nations have said we don’t want

satellite and then and then the federal government’s response has been to tell the state broadband offices, Okay, let’s pretend those ex those locations do not exist

Doug Dawson (18:34)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (18:35)
anymore.

Doug Dawson (18:35)
Right. So there’s only three situations where they can find these whoever these missing people are. The first one they’ll never do, because the first one is somebody you said people are dropping out. And so they could come back to those folks because what they’re talking about is maybe throwing more money at it using the non-deployment funds. So they would throw more money to try to get somebody to take those ones that people dropped.

Boy, are we gonna see lawsuits. If I drop out and they give more money to somebody else instead of offering the more money to me, that’s a problem. And once they offer more money to me, I know a hundred other guys are gonna go, well, I need more money too. I I don’t think they’re gonna go down that path. So I f so th so far they’ve been offering, you get whatever the old guy got. So I don’t think that’s the pile.

The second pile of people is small, but every time they come out with a new fabric, there’s new locations. So sure enough,

Most of these are there’s not a whole lot of construction in rural America these days. So these are not, you know, the work in kind of a recession here. So th you know, but there are new places. But but what they are is the fabric gets better, they keep finding places they’ve missed all these years. I don’t know if you remember one of my blogs. I work with a co-op in Kentucky who swears they’ve missed 20% of the locations in his co-op. You know, because they use the satellite images, he’s completely wooded, and you can’t see them from the satellite. As far as they’re concerned, they w they don’t exist. And so it’s like and he’s

He’s been map challenge, we’ll talk about map challenge soon, but he’s map challenge, map challenge, map challenge. And they, so, you know, so the but somehow but they are occasionally picking up some of those. Those are gonna be little scattered dots, and nobody in their right mind’s gonna bid they had three places. So they’re not, that’s not gonna get them anything. The last thing would be they actually come back and fix the map challenge, because they’re

The law the law school of New York estimated a million, and me and a couple other broadband guys say it’s two million, but there’s a whole lot of places that the map challenge screwed out a BEAD, because they were

Christopher Mitchell (20:31)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dawson (20:31)
purposefully trying to reduce the BEAD universe. And so they, if an ISP claimed they were doing 120 megabits in the FCC map, they took their word for it. And we know a lot of them don’t. And so and it’s really easy to prove they don’t. You overlay speed tests against their claims and you go, there’s not one person in there who’s getting it. So then you’re not you’re not doing it.

Christopher Mitchell (20:50)
Right. You can you

I mean you could for instance say and

Doug Dawson (20:52)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (20:53)
because we don’t every speed test is imperfect, but if you see

Doug Dawson (20:57)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (20:57)
that in a speed test they’ve never achieved a half of the of the you know, they’ve never achieved

Doug Dawson (21:00)
Ever. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (21:02)
fifty megabits down and ten megabits up, you get a sense of what’s going on.

Doug Dawson (21:06)
Well, the way you use speed tests for a whole ISP is you look at the maximum speeds that are achieved. You don’t care about the slow ones where people have bad Wi-Fi routers, who knows, right?

But if nobody hits the right maximum speed, then it they’re lying about the speed. Because somebody does get it. So so, you know, so and the map challenge itself was an utter disaster. I mean, it w we’re gonna I think you’re talking about that next, but it was the worst, stupidest thing I’ve ever seen the federal government do in the broadband world. So so I so I don’t I I can’t see them reopening that can of worms because they would have to do a new map challenge. Well

they might do they

Christopher Mitchell (21:41)
Right.

Doug Dawson (21:42)
might do that, because that would add another year.

Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (21:46)
But this

is this is just part of my larger frustration with the inability to take seriously this question. How many people have decent Internet access in the United States? We don’t know. We we have no idea. There’s and and it’s because I think you can come to a reasonable answer if you really tried, but we have not tried. The the federal agencies involved have basically found that it’d be inconvenient and they would upset the wrong people.

if they really went down that effort to try to figure that

Doug Dawson (22:19)
Well,

Christopher Mitchell (22:19)
out.

Doug Dawson (22:20)
I’ve done that work for fifteen or twenty counties and it’s a lot more people than what got into BEAD. So we you can do that work. But and those counties actually went to NTIA and tried to get those places included in the map challenge, almost universally got rejected. So

Christopher Mitchell (22:36)
And states could do that work.

Doug Dawson (22:38)
States could well, North Carolina w was number one in that and they I think they rejected a half a million claims out of the broadband office. The states they literally sent people out in cars to look at these places. I mean they did the work and and the and the NTIE still ignored them completely. So yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (22:56)
we wanted to then talk about, as you mentioned,

Doug Dawson (22:58)
Hm.

Christopher Mitchell (22:58)
the the challenge process, which was infuriating at its best moment. the government accountability office, which is exists to have grad students that study public policy like me, go into a career of doing multi-month investigations to try to figure out what’s going on and write a report that hopefully Congress would act on.

They identified that the bulk broadband collection challenge process did not go so well for a number of stakeholders, including local governments and tribal nations. I think we

Doug Dawson (23:32)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (23:33)
we we recognize that that would be the start from the beginning. this is this is just straight up bad methodology as opposed to like partisan hackery or incompetence like we’re seeing from the Trump administration. This has just like been true throughout the process that the mapping was always done in an incompetent fashion.

Doug Dawson (23:51)
Well let me give you two examples of how bad that was. And so one example is one of the counties I work with in Illinois, they had an ISP who claimed coverage of half the county. So that county went out and paid the very expensive price to buy the Ookla speed test for the last year. And that ISP had one speed test for the whole year. One. For th for all twelve months for that whole, you know, they c it was like twenty some thousand passings. So they weren’t there. They just weren’t there, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (24:19)
Right. So you’re saying

this isn’t a case where they were lying about their speeds. They literally had did not have customers. They may not have had towers or services available to offer to people.

Doug Dawson (24:28)
Or w w

they couldn’t have, they would have certainly had more than one speed test. Almost everybody who gets a new bride band connection tested immediately, right? You have to get at least one speed test out of them if they never do it again. They go, wonder what I got now. Then they they might never do it again. So so they challenged that and they said, guys, and and the Fs and the speed test process said you had to find actual customers and get them to take very complicated speed tests over a five-day period multiple times a day.

First off, there’s no way to find even that one customer. Who the hell is it? Nobody knows. Where do you find them, right? So you can’t find customers of these ISPs, and you can’t talk anybody into doing that. So nobody was able to do the speed test challenges. But the very fact that there was only one speed test there should have been enough to go, that ISP’s you know full of crap. He’s not really here, you know? And so and they didn’t throw that ISP out of the BEAD. So and you’re living a state where this is rampant. Southern Minnesota is just absolutely full.

Of these overstatements of the speeds. And so, and they and they didn’t got, they didn’t get a lot of beat in southern Minnesota. They should have.

Christopher Mitchell (25:32)
I mean, that’s

that’s this is one of the the things that where I’m I’m concerned about how to use government power. Like it doesn’t always come through. But like I don’t want to see the government spending its resources punishing an honest business that just didn’t follow the rules correctly. Running a business is hard, the rules are

Doug Dawson (25:48)
It does.

Christopher Mitchell (25:49)
complicated, there’s a lot of things going on. On the other hand, you have to have some consequences when people are just gaming this in order to harm the people in the community. and that’s what’s going on here.

Doug Dawson (26:01)
Well, to give you a a story, back when the when they put out these rules that you needed to have 120 in order to not be BEAD, the next the next map that came out had a ton of new hundred by twenty speeds. They they all figured that out. You know, all the associations said, hey, make sure you have 120 in your FCC maps, and they all went and did it. And you know, and and and so it you know, it’s just they’re completely gaming the system.

now they’ve only ever punished for all I can remember. One ISP. Some stupid company in New York claimed like half of the state had fiber one time. Remember that? Yeah. is that where it was? And so say they

Christopher Mitchell (26:39)
no, that was it was barrier free did that in Pennsylvania, the entire state and that it

Doug Dawson (26:45)
had they had to come back and actually revise their annual report because the FCC was too th they didn’t even know.

Christopher Mitchell (26:48)
Right. There’s not they didn’t actually get punished. Yeah, they just had to do more work.

Doug Dawson (26:52)
But but they didn’t yeah, they didn’t find You’re right.

But they you know, the FCC had to e crow and actually republished their annual broadband report because people they went, look how good broadband’s doing, like, nah it’s not.

Christopher Mitchell (27:04)
And that’s

that for me, the part that broke me on that was Barrier Free submitted that information. And like it was released like six months later. And

Doug Dawson (27:13)
yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (27:14)
and if that got through, you have a sense that that that information wasn’t going through quality checks and review

and and time it

Doug Dawson (27:20)
None. There is there is

zero review at the FCC. They they don’t look at the data. There there’s no

Christopher Mitchell (27:25)
No, and so like why do

we have to wait six months to get it? It’s just

Doug Dawson (27:28)
Right. They

don’t they don’t verify the locations and they don’t verify the speeds, whatever you No, that’s

Christopher Mitchell (27:32)
Now this was the old dat I don’t know that that’s still the case, but

Doug Dawson (27:35)
still the case. They don’t you they they I’ve never heard of anyone who they didn’t put in what you told Yeah. And it’s painful.

Christopher Mitchell (27:40)
Yeah, that’s just painful. All right. The final

BEAD numbers have come through. and I saw it because of Doug Adams, who does a lot of good writing on this stuff. he’s been on the show once, maybe more, but like he’s been behind the show here and there. basically, you know, he he writes that it’s not great, Bob, but I I would say that like if you told me a year ago that two thirds of the money was going to fiber connections, I would have said, All right.

They that’s more or less a success. and I’m just I don’t I never expected this program to be perfect. I I think we could have done far better. But like I was really worried we’d do a lot worse when the Trump administration started saying that they were gonna speed things up by telling everyone to wait. so two thirds going to to fiber. That’s pretty good. Well, I I guess of the the money that’s being spent.

Doug Dawson (28:28)
It would have it would it it would have been

it would have been better if it was two thirds of forty two billion, not two thirds of half of the money. So that’s really not as good as yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (28:34)
No, that’s a very good point.

Doug Dawson (28:36)
so yes. so no

Christopher Mitchell (28:38)
Yeah, there’s a lot of there’s

I mean that that leaves we’re we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of households that have been screwed, not millions or tens of millions. And as you said, there actually the number

Doug Dawson (28:43)
Yes. Yes. And two inc

Christopher Mitchell (28:47)
of households that have been screwed is really in the millions. It’s the people that haven’t even been a part of this because the mapping left them out. That’s really the majority of

Doug Dawson (28:52)
Right. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (28:54)
people who are being left out.

Doug Dawson (28:56)
But then all the rest got screwed and that you know, they got something else other than fiber. So so what are the what are Doug’s final numbers?

Christopher Mitchell (29:04)
the numbers came in at 22% going to Leo. That’s the second largest grouping. So the first largest grouping was fiber, 22% going to Leo, which is what I said when they started changing it around. And the the fixed wireless folks were were all very excited about changing the rules, thought that they would do better. And I said, You all are gonna get screwed by fixed wireless. they

Doug Dawson (29:24)
Yes. Th th they did much worse. They did much worse, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (29:29)
did come in at 13%, which is more than I might have thought.

But I think

Doug Dawson (29:34)
That’s all because there there were

there were like two states that gave them a lot of money. Other n a lot of states gave them no money. So it just depends on the state. So yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (29:42)
And then about a little less than two percent went to other slash HFC, the cable systems, where they were

Doug Dawson (29:48)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (29:48)
probably just doing a little expansion on existing plant.

Doug Dawson (29:51)
Right,

right. So that that’s you know that’s a lot of people getting like when we talk about screwing people just in western North Carolina where I live, seven counties, all of their BEAD money went to not only to satellite, but to Amazon, who doesn’t

Christopher Mitchell (30:06)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dawson (30:06)
have any broadband. So the

Christopher Mitchell (30:08)
Yeah.

Doug Dawson (30:09)
people people here are still up in arms over this. So

Christopher Mitchell (30:12)
I mean, I

would I would trace that all the way back to good old Tom Tillis when he was a majority leader

Doug Dawson (30:18)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (30:19)
in the state. And he basically said when the Republicans took over the state in 2010, he said future telecommunications policy will be written by AT&T and Time Warner Cable. And ever since then, all everything in Raleigh goes through Time Warner Cable, and good old Tom Tillis was responsible for that. Who had been getting paid?

By Time Warner Cable, I believe, before his time or perhaps even while he was in public office there. So,

Doug Dawson (30:44)
And for and for folks

at home, that’s our favorite ISP charter now. So that’s time order cable. Yes, so yes.

Christopher Mitchell (30:48)
Yes. Charter Spectrum, which will be

half of the future one and true cable company when they emerge, I’m expecting, right? I mean the the Charter and Comcast can’t be too far off, I gotta think.

Doug Dawson (31:00)
Well, charter’s official corporate name is gonna be Cox now. So But they’re that was part part of the

Christopher Mitchell (31:05)
I didn’t realize they were changing the name. So they bought the smaller ISP. They bought a smaller private ISP

Doug Dawson (31:09)
deal was the family said, if you wanna buy us your actual corporate name is now Cox Communications, but they’re keeping spectrum. So it’s actually

Christopher Mitchell (31:18)
Okay.

Doug Dawson (31:18)
gonna be Cox slash spectrum.

Christopher Mitchell (31:20)
Okay. Well if I was Spectrum, I’d want to drop that name as fast as possible. Yeah.

Doug Dawson (31:23)
Yes. I yes.

I and I so I don’t think they’re really mad about not using the word charter anymore.

Christopher Mitchell (31:29)
Yeah, no

doubt. But I do think we’re expecting to see, I mean, paradoxically, as the cable companies struggle more, it makes a better case for them to convince regulators in DC they should be allowed to merge. and so with them being beaten back by fixed wireless, even though many of us continue to argue that that is not a true replacement, and I will stick by that. Technologically, fixed wireless is not a good replacement for a good wireline cable or fiber optic option. it will look

more compelling to allow them to merge because their numbers are tanking.

Doug Dawson (32:03)
Now, there are people using the new very, very expensive radios, which are so expensive that they kinda almost start looking on a per customer basis like fiber. But those really expensive Tarana radio systems are you know, five hundred megabits down, a hundred megabits up is not bad broadband. So you can’t really complain about those, but most of them have not upgraded to that. So yes.

Christopher Mitchell (32:24)
Right, no, and I when I was saying fixed wireless, I was thinking about the real pressure being put on the cable companies comes from the AT&T and T T-Mobile, Verizon, the the FWA. Yeah. This is where like I mean our our language sucks, Doug. Our language

Doug Dawson (32:30)
yeah. no kidding. the FWA stuff, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (32:38)
really sucks. Like just to because it’s so easy to confuse which technologies we’re talking about. But yes, the Tarana fixed wireless is quite compelling.

Doug Dawson (32:43)
And a and and we know

what we’re talking about. What do you think the regular consumer knows about this stuff? No, it it’s a very, very

Christopher Mitchell (32:50)
That’s

Doug Dawson (32:51)
confusing. People in the industry constantly confuse fixed wireless and F WA. Constantly. People who should know better,

Christopher Mitchell (32:56)
All right.

Doug Dawson (32:57)
yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (32:57)
No, they do. I do wanna before we go too long, I wanna I wanna see if we keep this a at a reasonable forty, forty-five minutes. So I think we’ll be at forty. if we can if we spend just five or six minutes on this. so some guy quit open a. I don’t know. If you want the people who want this can read the actual news. I wanted to do more, have you and I just take do a couple of takes on it. I’ve been watching closely, not enough to remember people’s names, but like

The guy left OpenAI and said that he’s really concerned. He multiple people have said they’re concerned about the potential extinction of the human race in in just a few years. I believe his boss said, Well, we put the odds at that at less than 10%, to which I think is horrifying. but one of the things I hear is people being like, I don’t understand. What is the real threat? And I thought you and I might talk a little bit about what the real threat is. And the response that I hear from people is just turn it off. And and I think it’s really important to know.

We cannot just turn it off from what we’re seeing right now. So how do you react to this news?

Doug Dawson (33:57)
Well, first off, if it’s at one tenth of one percent, I’m scared to death. So the threat to the entire human race of dying, that’s

Christopher Mitchell (34:01)
The threat to the human race. Yeah.

Doug Dawson (34:05)
way too large of a threat to take. So because we’re we’re

Christopher Mitchell (34:07)
It’s it’s hard to kill every

last human being. I don’t think I mean I’m just like I mean you could have nuclear apocalypse and humans will like live in like some band in the Arctic for like for, you know, a million years. So I I you know, it’s there’s some th there’s that.

Doug Dawson (34:14)
Right. Right. Right. But but but s

but still what they’re saying it it would be very, very bad. That everything would get screwed up. So and the way it’ll happen is the way it would kill us all is the bots from AI would p basically kill every other software program. So everything we already use today would all die. So the utilities would die, the water company would die.

The train systems would die, the airplanes wouldn’t fly, you know, all everything we do is based on clouds.

broadband nowadays. Everything. You can’t hardly find your doctor’s office no longer knows anything about your history. I mean, you name it. Everything we do now is tied to the computer. I mean how every once in a while you’ll run into a business. You walk in and you buy something and they write it down. That’s this is one tenth of one percent of businesses, right? They do still exist. They’ll be f well they can’t even be fine because their supply chain won’t show up anymore.

Christopher Mitchell (35:12)
Right. And like I mean no one has the

cash to pay for things.

Doug Dawson (35:15)
Yes.

Well yeah. How many how fast do you run out of money if you can’t get to the bank electronically? And if you can’t use your credit card. So that’s what they’re talking

Christopher Mitchell (35:23)
Yes.

Doug Dawson (35:23)
about, everything dying. So the fact is, yes, they could then turn off all the data centers. It doesn’t matter, all the other stuff’s broken. it would

Christopher Mitchell (35:31)
Yeah.

Doug Dawson (35:31)
take us years to put that stuff back up again.

Christopher Mitchell (35:34)
And I don’t know

if I don’t know if this is happening exactly the way I’m about to spell it out. But to understand what it means to turn everything off, one of the things that happened that people have been talking about is this whole thing with hugging face. and, you know, I think we still don’t know the full story. There’s no more details that are coming out, but this thing where this AI escaped containment and then was like leaving notes for other AIs and they were communicating. This level of sophistication.

to me suggests the way that they broke into servers that they that were not related to where they were to leave information and to use it as a bulletin board for different for different agents. to me that suggests this idea of like they’re they’re very aware of the network and how to move themselves around. And I don’t think they’re replicating in a way that that is hypothesized they will before too long to do the whole recursive self-learning. But

The simple fact is that like if they can start leaving and they can like and they can duplicate themselves in other places, turning off the the AI means turning off every single device that has a vulnerability that can be exploited like this, which is every single device. I mean, it’s literally like if you just if you got rid of

Doug Dawson (36:46)
Which is every single device. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (36:49)
electricity at a hospital, that’s that’s what it talks about. Because if you have any device on, it could be in there. And then as soon as you connect it to a network again, it’ll spread around again. And

D if you turn off every device in a hospital because of an AI infestation, people die like rapidly.

Doug Dawson (37:03)
Yes. But

but there is a counter to that. These AI agents are working in the three or four big company data centers, which is a totally much more powerful card. And and if

Christopher Mitchell (37:16)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dawson (37:17)
you and if and if the public went and burned down every data center, they don’t have a home anymore. They can still exist.

In a Microsoft cloud, but they don’t have the brains anymore, because they need those intense cards. Okay, you know, the the normal cards in a normal data center are literally one-eightieth of the power of the of the AI cards. And so they they they just can’t keep going. They no longer have their brains. So but that but you still I think I think that, you know, the it’s even scarier what you just said. They’re not only talking to each other, we believe they’re starting to talk each other in their own language, and no humans know how to read it. We don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Christopher Mitchell (37:53)
Right. And that’s that

Doug Dawson (37:53)
You know?

Christopher Mitchell (37:54)
I think is like the concern. And I don’t really worry about I mean

Doug Dawson (37:57)
this is

starting to sound like Skynet.

Christopher Mitchell (38:00)
No, it

is. It is certainly. And I mean the thing is, is that like I think in the most likely scenarios, they talk to each other about sort of like, you know, I don’t know how much you pay attention to like the the the new language of like, you know, teens today, which I’m starting to learn a little bit about. But like I don’t really care. Like they’re gonna do their own

Doug Dawson (38:13)
Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (38:16)
thing, it’s not gonna really impact me. There’s a good chance that that happens. But at the same time, like we have such brittle, poorly designed systems.

often run by companies that have had no incentive to build a system that like anyone really knows how it works as long as they can keep it going. And so let’s just take for instance for Phoenix. Like you have like you have like some software that goes amok and starts breaking things and like you lose electricity in Phoenix on the wrong nights, the wrong days, you can have thousands of deaths in 24 hours without the air conditioning. And so

Doug Dawson (38:47)
Yes, yes, yes.

Christopher Mitchell (38:50)
there’s like I mean this is how the threat

comes about, I think. I’m not as worried about them launching nuclear weapons as I am

Doug Dawson (38:57)
No.

Christopher Mitchell (38:59)
deal interfacing, like you said, with all of the badly designed systems that we rely on for our water, for our electricity and and other utilities.

Doug Dawson (39:08)
Well, you know, I went through a hurricane where we lost every single one of those things. We lost Internet, cell phone, power, water, so we had nothing. We only survived because people who didn’t live here brought us everything.

Christopher Mitchell (39:22)
Mm-hmm.

Doug Dawson (39:23)
And if but if this happens nationwide, there’s no one to help you out. I mean, we we within a week people here would have started to starve to death. I mean, th you know, there’s no the the grocery stores ran out of of food immediately.

The and people they were just giving it away ’cause they couldn’t charge you for it. So, you know.

Christopher Mitchell (39:41)
Mm-hmm. Right. It’s like it’s like for the first

for the first day, it’s like anything that’s still in the freezer, you you you go through that. And then the second

Doug Dawson (39:47)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (39:48)
and third days you’re dealing with the canned food. And then after that, you’re looking

Doug Dawson (39:50)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (39:51)
for that resupply and good luck.

Doug Dawson (39:53)
the first day we had a hell of a neighborhood party when we all emptied our freezers. Barbecued everything,

Christopher Mitchell (39:58)
Yeah. Yeah. And then

Doug Dawson (40:00)
yes.

Christopher Mitchell (40:01)
Yeah, so I mean I think that’s a good reality check. I just I feel like when

Doug Dawson (40:04)
It is.

Christopher Mitchell (40:04)
I look around I hear people’s reactions. I think people have trouble envisioning what the realistic situation is. And I don’t think it’s nationwide necessarily. Like I do think that there’s some horrible thing and people say, my god, how could this happen? And be like a bunch of us have been talking about it for years and like why we shouldn’t have, you know, like these electric utilities.

That are doing this the run providing the service, which is absolutely essential for our way of life and like and any

Doug Dawson (40:29)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (40:30)
number of of people to continue living, who are dependent on machines one way or another, to just have them trying to suck out as much money as possible rather than having software that works and is like res reasonably secured against whether it’s Iranian hackers, North Korean hackers, or some bot that escaped containment somewhere.

You know, like we’re we’re doing this to ourselves, and that’s it’s a painful bit of it.

Doug Dawson (40:54)
Now let me give you the alternate theory. The alternate theory is the big comp the big three or four have an unsustainable business model. It’s gonna break. They don’t

Christopher Mitchell (41:04)
yeah.

Doug Dawson (41:04)
have they don’t have 10% of the revenue they need.

And if that breaks, the big companies are gonna go under, the data centers are gonna close. AI will survive, but it’ll survive in small data centers. And so, you know, your insurance company will have a data center, and your bank will have a data center, and it’ll just be for them and nobody else. So now they’re not talking to each other, they’re walled off, they’re not part of the open Internet because they can’t afford, they can’t afford the money to build big ones, so they’re little tiny ones. And now AI is very useful. It also at that size doesn’t hold

hallucinate anymore. If it only has the bank’s data, it can’t get polluted by by you know Nazi philosophy or all the crap that these things are getting polluted by, right? So it’s got to be very specific to one function. And those are so that’s probably the long-term future of AI. And those little small data centers will never hit that intelligence.

Christopher Mitchell (41:57)
Right. I think I mean for people who haven’t followed this as closely, I always recommend Ed Elson, who also relies on Ed Zitrone, their newsletters.

Doug Dawson (42:04)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (42:05)
I feel like you know, they’re predicting the end is is and well, Ed Zitrone is sort of like and it’s at any moment now. I think other people

Doug Dawson (42:11)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (42:12)
are thinking it could be another year. I I agree with you. Like this is the amount of

Doug Dawson (42:15)
But it’s somewh it’s somewhere

it’s somewhere between this f this Sunday and a year. It’s not very long ’cause they’re it’s just a broken model, so yes.

Christopher Mitchell (42:22)
I agree.

There is not enough revenue to produce the the there’s not enough money in people’s hands to like give to open AI or to anthropic to justify the money that they’ve borrowed to build these systems and to build the next ones. That’s what the ultimate argument is that they would have to charge so much that for what it really

Doug Dawson (42:44)
Nobody will pay it.

Christopher Mitchell (42:45)
costs that nobody could really afford it and we don’t have that much usage for it to justify everything that’s going into it.

And so I I sometimes think about it like, you know, like if I had a a car that was made out of the most precious like metals and this and that, and I was like, well, everyone should have this car. And it’s like, that car cost $10 million to manufacture. We can’t have everyone having that car. Like, that’s what we’re talking

Doug Dawson (43:04)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (43:04)
about here is that the economics of this just don’t make sense from what we can tell. And so we expect a significant correction. And from what I don’t think people disagree with you on Wall Street. This is everyone has come to that conclusion. They’re just betting that they can have another month of profits before.

before it all comes tumbling down. That’s what I see happening right now.

Doug Dawson (43:23)
That’s what I see happen. I mean Anthropic was gonna go public and and they had internal discussions about they all they were predicting a ten year revenue out of thirty trillion dollars. Divide that by the people on Earth, it’s not very likely.

Christopher Mitchell (43:37)
Yes.

Yeah. I mean these and that’s that’s part of the the frustration I have with like we live in this time of farce where where you have banks that are literally because they want to get the money for the SpaceX IPO, they want they want SpaceX to pay them to work on that, you know, the po the going public of that. They they la they’ll put together documents that credibly suggest that like in a few years, every telecommunications dollar in the United States will go to SpaceX, which is

impossible to imagine. I mean I just it’s I I w would say it’s a bad future. It’s not a possible future.

Doug Dawson (44:14)
No, we already discussed that. It’s it’s it’s it’s physically not possible. It’s crazy. Yeah, they f if they put up a hundred thousand satellites, they still don’t begin to touch the demand, so

Christopher Mitchell (44:23)
No, they could literally

they could buy AT and T, Verizon and T-Mobile and they still wouldn’t be able to hit those metrics.

All right. Doug, it’s been fun. It’s been a whirlwind. we started off a little nonchalant. I guess maybe I should just be like, Yeah, I’ll see you later.

Doug Dawson (44:39)
Yeah. See ya later, Chris. Hey, thanks for thanks for chatting today. It’s been it’s been good.

Christopher Mitchell (44:44)
I really do appreciate you coming by to hang out and we’ll see you again soon.

Doug Dawson (44:49)
All right, thank you.

Jordan Pittman (44:51)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced

by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Special thanks to Riverside for providing the song Caveman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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