Unbuffered Live! – Episode 6 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
Wow, that was the first time I’ve seen that. That was an animation. I like that, right? Yeah, I’m not gonna dwell on it. It did have shades of seventies adult content.

Doug Dawson (00:19)
That was not bad.

Christopher Mitchell (00:31)
the ⁓

Doug Dawson (00:33)
Wait

a minute, wait a minute, how would you know this?

Christopher Mitchell (00:37)
⁓ rigorous study. ⁓ The show is Unbuffered. I’m Chris Mitchell and I’m still getting used to my dumb face. I spent the last several months growing out a beard trying to rival Doug. I ended up traveling to Alaska and I was like, I can’t cut my beard before I go to Alaska and I came home and my wife said, now is the time. So I’m used to my dumb face again. I liked hiding it behind more hair.

I’m Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This is our first live show of Unbuffered. We’re excited to be back and having this format again. We’re gonna playing with some new ideas as we try this out. But today we’ve got a great panel to discuss the news of the day, the week, or the past four months, depending on how you wanna look at it. We’ve got Heather Mills, who is a principal consultant with ITG Communications. Welcome back, Heather.

Heather Mills (01:29)
Thank you.

Christopher Mitchell (01:30)
We’ve got Doug Dawson, who’s still at CCG. He hasn’t kicked himself out. So we’ll probably retire there at some point. Welcome back, Doug.

Doug Dawson (01:40)
My wife keeps threatening to fire me. But yes, it hasn’t happened yet.

Christopher Mitchell (01:44)
least

she doesn’t make you trim your beard.

Doug Dawson (01:47)
She does not, she actually hates when I turn my beard. I like that.

Christopher Mitchell (01:50)
All

right. And then I think making your Unbuffered debut, but also having not been on Connect This!, we’ve got Drew Garner, who is the Director of Policy Engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society. Welcome, Drew.

Drew Garner (02:06)
Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me. I was a long time listener to Connect This! ⁓ So it’s a pleasure to actually be on the show.

Christopher Mitchell (02:13)
Wonderful. Yes, it’s great to have you here. You know, we we had what we thought were the records of how many people watched the show and I feel like I’ve met them all individually. You know, we loved we loved all the people that tuned in trying to figure out if we can do some work to get that audience up a bit as we play around with Unbuffered. Today, we’re to be talking about sci fi. Just briefly, there’s a couple of topics we’re going to handle briefly and try not to get lost in so that we can get lost in BEAD later on in the show.

This show is going to be about 60 minutes. We’re going to try and keep them tight. That’s one of the new things we’re trying. We’re going to talk about Amazon LEO just a little bit, which is Amazon’s name for its LEO service. And we’re going to talk about efforts to preempt local government to encourage more investments in Internet access. Never tried that before. We’ll see how it goes. ⁓ Talk a little bit about mobile wireless because I’ve driven around the country a whole lot just recently and I have opinions.

But we’re gonna talk about permitting a little bit more in depth. There’s a lot that’s been going on with that. And that’ll lead us into BEAD because one of the issues with BEAD will be permitting. So ⁓ if there’s time, which I hope there will be, we will also be touching on affordability programs, something that Drew’s been focused on, and folks on my team have been doing as well. So jump into the chat and feel free to throw us a curveball, say hi, it’d be wonderful. ⁓

But let’s start with SiFi being sold. And I don’t know, let me just come out of the gate with a baseball bat and say, I think a lot of us were kind of expecting this. And I was interested to see that it was sold to the people that lent it money, which to me sounds a lot like bankruptcy. So I don’t know. Doug, I want to go to you first on this. What happened with SiFi?

Doug Dawson (04:05)
That’s my guess because they’re a company who builds open access networks. It’s not nearly as profitable as retail ISPs. And they already had backed out of four or five markets. I mean, there was one that they were supposed to start constructing like a month later, and then they just didn’t show up. And that city is one of my clients, and they’re still incredibly upset. They did build some markets, though. They just completed Farmington and Farmington Hills, Michigan.

probably backed out of what do you think had their half or two thirds of their commitments. So they needed money. They just didn’t have enough cash. So I think that this brings the cash infusion in. I’m gonna guess that they still own a minority share. I mean, they might have sold it out, right? Who knows? But that company didn’t have enough money to do what they wanted. And so now they probably will go into a lot of markets and we all love open access. I mean, it’s a really good thing to bring to a city. it’s…

It’s really interesting to see if they do better. So yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (05:05)
Heather, are they gonna snap their fingers and magically figure out how to operationalize this audacious goal that they have? I I love the goal, it just weren’t able to get it done.

Heather Mills (05:14)
Yeah, anything this it’s like a signal like the long term infrastructure investors actually do care about open access in some way, or they believe in it in some way. Good thing. It’s always harder to do it than to think it. That’s the problem. And so but and there’s a number of different I’m going to call them get them there. But I’m I’m buoyed by the fact that there are investors out there that are interested in an open access plan like that. So

Christopher Mitchell (05:44)
Drew, do you have any reaction to having watched SiFi over all these years?

Drew Garner (05:50)
Not too much. I would agree with Heather’s on it’s encouraging to see support for open access. ⁓ But beyond that, this isn’t one of those issues I’ve been super deep on. So I’ll leave it to Doug and Heather on this.

Christopher Mitchell (06:05)
What

are the things that I saw that I’ll say is that there are companies we talk about, ⁓ usually without mentioning their names. ⁓ Often I don’t even know their names, but there are companies that are out there that are just engaged in fraudulent activities to raise money, to pad themselves ridiculous salaries, and then to not deliver or to sell it to a chump. ⁓ That is not SiFi in my impression. They really wanted to see this happening. But from the beginning, they had lawsuits with subcontractors, lawsuits with cities. They just, it seemed like…

they couldn’t get out of their own way. And I don’t know enough about all of this stuff, but to comment on what exactly happened, but it just seemed like there was always something that was slowing them down, Doug, but they made announcement after announcement that drove me nuts while they weren’t actually breaking ground in as many. And I just, at one point, I just gave up on trying to figure out what they were doing.

Doug Dawson (06:52)
Yeah, they were really going to go gangbusters and they just failed. we’ll see. Now, operationally, that’s a whole other question. We’ll see how good they are at operating an open access network. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Christopher Mitchell (07:09)
And then the last thing is I’ve talked about this before and I feel like people don’t appreciate it, but I’ve always thought when you see a company building infrastructure in America with European money, there’s a long record of that not turning out super well. If you are into the railroading history of the United States of America or other big infrastructure challenges. So, ⁓ this wasn’t the biggest surprise to me that it ended here, I guess.

Doug Dawson (07:37)
We also have a big cable company. It has not been a very sterling success here either with European money. Yeah, so I agree with that. What’s interesting is what their biggest backers, Germany, Germany doesn’t do up an access.

Drew Garner (07:55)
demo.

Doug Dawson (07:56)
Well, I was all Denmark. Well, that’s good to know.

Christopher Mitchell (07:59)
Mix but it a lot of Denmark. Okay

Heather Mills (08:00)
was a mix. You’re right, it was a mix.

Doug Dawson (08:02)
Okay, good. That’s good.

Christopher Mitchell (08:05)
That you know, that reminds me also, okay, so we’re moving into the next topic. This is a good point to note on our last show, which was not live. ⁓ But we had a little panel show with Jade Piros and and Sean, we talked about Switzerland. And I’m always nervous talking about Europe for the same sort of reason that I just said they they don’t always understand how investments are going to play out here. I don’t always understand what’s happening over there.

I would say that if you listen to that show, I was suspicious that Switzerland wasn’t as good as that article claimed. And I had multiple people reach out to me who know a lot more about this than I do. they were like, yeah, that’s not, that wasn’t, it’s not out of, it’s not ⁓ out of, ⁓ it’s not like totally bogus, but it wasn’t a good picture of all of Switzerland or even how they got there. So for people that want to dig in, there are resources you can find, I’m sure if you really want to know how Switzerland’s going.

And when you read something that says this country got it totally right, ⁓ odds are they’re just ignoring the contrary evidence in my experience. ⁓ Countries are mixed bags.

Doug Dawson (09:09)
I mean, Switzerland has some pockets of 25 gig home broadband, they also have lots of places that don’t have that. it’s not as good as they make it sound. But the fact that they have any is kind of awesome. So yes.

Christopher Mitchell (09:21)
Yeah. And I mean, the point that I feel like I can make is, ⁓ we have great connectivity in some places here in the United States and other places, not so great. And that’s true in many places in Europe. But when I talk to people that travel throughout France, for instance, rural France, if you’re more likely to end up with a pretty great connection, ⁓ you know, I don’t know that I would trade a random rural France connection for a great, ⁓ municipal or cooperative connection in the United States. ⁓ but, ⁓

but they’re doing pretty well and they have a pretty big focus on other countries like Belgium. Not, not so great. So there’s a mix. We’ve talked about this in the past. I’m going to move on to something. I’ll come to you first, Drew, because I feel like Benton really tracks this sort of thing pretty closely. That is this, this totally new, never been tried before idea of why don’t we just severely restrict local government authority.

And then magically, the private sector will want to invest tons more money into competitive networks and speedier networks. And all of our problems will be solved. is a bill that’s advancing, had been advancing, seems to have stalled in DC in the House. So what’s happening there with the American Broadband Deployment Act?

Drew Garner (10:36)
Yeah, so that’s correct. This would have been a… Speaking of whether Europe understands how to deploy in the States, it’s unclear if DC sometimes understand how to deploy in the States as evidenced by this bill that would have, I think, a lot of issues for… Would have preempted a lot of local government authority over broadband permitting across the board. Doug has written well about this, I think, where some of these issues make a lot of sense.

in rural areas, but this would have been rural, suburban, and urban preemption. It would put a shot clock on local government’s ability to approve or deny broadband permit applications. And then if the local government did not respond within time, it would have been deemed approved. So this is sort of, if you don’t act, then ⁓ the ISP can move forward, whatever your decision, if you miss the deadline. So this, as you said, Chris,

was delayed. It was on its way to the House Rules Committee, which is a step before it goes to the floor for a full vote. So it looked like congressional leadership thought that this might be able to get enough support, that they’re willing to arrange some time for it, but then before its actual hearing, it was pulled back. So my suspicion is that this, they’re not able to get full Republican support for this bill. It doesn’t mean just that it’s out of the woods yet. It very well could and…

Probably will, it’s still being worked on and may come back. ⁓ But it’s still hanging out there. And I’m sure it come as no surprise to people listening to this call. A lot of the local government associations, NACO, National League of Cities, ⁓ some of these associations have come out very strongly against this bill.

Christopher Mitchell (12:19)
Yeah,

NATOA has always been very active on this sort of thing as well. The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors almost ran out of time in the show to finish that off. ⁓ Doug, you’ve written about this? Yeah.

Doug Dawson (12:33)
This started out as a the concept behind this was let’s make it easier to build BEAD and other federal grant. So this was a rural idea. And the funny thing is, and I see if Heather backs me up on this, most of my clients building in rural areas don’t have a problem getting permits from counties, the counties are going like, you want to build fiber here, how can we help you? And so this is what it’s what it doesn’t fix is the one problem we do have in rural areas, which is bridges, you know, bridges and railroads doesn’t do help those at all. That’s where all the problem is.

And so, ⁓ and then there’s a whole nother set of laws that Drew could talk about. I don’t think we’ll get there today to talk about the federal lands. That’s a whole nother nightmare. But so all of a sudden this thing morphed into everywhere in the whole country. this basically goes to the big companies. Build anywhere you want, anytime you want. This would allow them to go and dead center of Manhattan on a corner, put a cell tower if they wanted to. I mean, it’s really unbelievable. It’s the wish list of what they’ve always, always wanted. This is a big company built now.

absolutely crazy. if you, you know, I’ve worked with people trying to get permits in downtowns of some of the major cities, they need to take a long time. It’s massively complicated underground system there. And usually, they don’t have good records, and they have to actually do a study just to find out if there’s a place to put the new guy. It’s crazy to give them right away. It’s just insane.

Christopher Mitchell (13:55)
Heather, I have a follow up for you after you launch your initial salvo.

Heather Mills (14:00)
No, think Doug and I are pretty well aligned here. think the ⁓

All bets are off when it comes to permitting at the local level. They’re going to do it in the time that they have available to do it with the staff that they have. And there’s all sorts of initiatives happening in the BEAD program in the background. People are talking about, well, how can we help those local permitting agencies? Is it through potentially use of non-deployment funds over here to help them staff up or some other mechanism? I’m worried about

volume. That’s what I’m worried about. I’m not worried about the process itself. I think that ⁓ all politics is local. And the reason that those localities have the rules they have in place, because that’s what they want in place in order to do their job well, in order to manage their community. And but I get the frustrations and the timing and everything that comes along with that in a number of places, especially when you’re going from

⁓ if you’re starting in a more metropolitan, dense area and moving to a more rural area, the people change, meaning why they’re where they are is different than they are. So what’s your follow-up question?

Christopher Mitchell (15:17)
Do you remember how if we gave the wireless folks broad preemption and really restricted the ability of local governments to stop their sighting that we would have ⁓ full blown wireless competition? mean, Verizon was going to build out all of Sacramento in 2018, I want to say, and have gigabit wireless to the home that was going to be very competitive with Comcast. ⁓ I don’t remember what happened, but the world looks a lot similar.

to the way it did before we gave massive deregulation of local ⁓ oversight for the wireless industry. Is that, I don’t know how you recall it.

Heather Mills (15:55)
don’t recall it necessarily that way. I know that in the before times, as I like to recall anything before 2020, it was a very different outlook on priorities and why we were doing the things that we were doing. And depending on the locality, how they were doing it, more dense areas like that, they were trying to do a wireless play because it makes sense in a number of ways to try to do that.

you know, all politics is local. So just different. Did I answer your question? ⁓ I tend to get a little lost sometimes.

Christopher Mitchell (16:32)
Yeah,

no, I do that to people. just I feel like the history of this preemption ⁓ is that it ends up just losing public dollars in that the private sector invests perhaps 10 % more than they would have otherwise. And the federal and the local folks lose a bunch of the fees and we start having towers that are 50 feet tall in the middle of residential areas. And people get really frustrated that they’re there and out of character for the neighborhood.

Heather Mills (16:58)
I mean, there’s a lot of ⁓ throughout every ⁓ jurisdiction that I’ve worked in there, there’s a lot of like aesthetics rules that have to go into play as well. Some jurisdictions are more advanced than others in doing that. Some haven’t had to deal with that before. Now they have the opportunity to expand access and they’ve got a 50 foot tower and they’re like, ick. But if they want the access, they’re going to have to figure that out and talk to themselves. It’s about the community figuring out how they do it.

And every community is going to do it differently. But it’s important that they have an ear and an eye for understanding ⁓ not only the public interest, but the business interest as well, because that drives the economy.

Christopher Mitchell (17:41)
Yeah,

Doug Dawson (17:42)
I

can address the Verizon question. They abandoned that business plan in Sacramento and other cities for two reasons. One is they were going to put a cell, a little mini cell tower site on every single block. So everyone was going to be within reach of it. It turned out that was incredibly expensive. On top of that, ⁓ right about that same time, they decided that they didn’t want to build the fiber and on the backhaul, they wanted to lease it.

And the people who were going to lease it to them like American Tower, they’re like, I can’t afford to pay that much of a lease. So it became economically unfeasible. They tried it in a piece of Sacramento, Detroit, and one other city, and it was a financial disaster. And they quickly abandoned it. It was never going to work. It wouldn’t work today either. You can’t put a small cell site still like $40,000. You can’t put one of them every block. That’s incredibly stupid electronics. ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (18:35)
So if you’re anywhere else

Heather Mills (18:36)
sorry, go ahead.

Even if they were able to ⁓ make that like a wireless site, not a cell site, it would have been just as expensive, right?

Doug Dawson (18:47)
If they would have truly made it wireless drops, would still have been close to that as expensive. But they ended up with all sorts of radio interference problems. aha, was just all sorts of problems out of this. Like, it doesn’t really work.

Christopher Mitchell (19:02)
I think I remember ⁓ the folks advantage point during a study and finding that you if you if you replace fiber to the home with that kind of going up to the that close to the house, you get 80 % of the cost and 20 % of the benefits. And it turns out that’s not a really great business proposition.

⁓ so one last piece, and I don’t know, Drew, I would welcome you to, to shoot me down. Let me, let me, the opposite. I I’m broadly sympathetic with ISPs, especially local ISPs dealing with stupid local rules in St. Paul. ⁓ I believe, ⁓ I was told I was, haven’t verified it, but that, ⁓ if you want to, work in the right of way close to the trees, you have to work around a, you have to have a GIS, layer of all of the trees root balls in order to protect the trees.

And ⁓ the city doesn’t give that to you. You got to make it yourself. So you got to pay for it, which is ridiculous. I think the city should be like, yeah, protect our trees, but also here’s the layer. ⁓ But they don’t do that, apparently. And the city had a max permit length of like 2000 feet or 1000 feet or something like that, which was unlike ⁓ comparable cities nearby. And I had worked with a certain someone that I knew well who builds networks in this general region. And I was like, look, I think I could put pressure on the city to

modernize these rules and improve them. And I was told, yeah, but like we kind of like the rules because we figured out how to navigate them and it’ll keep someone else from coming in after us. And so I don’t think the industry broadly actually wants to make it super easy for everyone to build because if cities are required to have robust connections, we actually kind of end up with the reality that we cannot support massive facilities based competition. It doesn’t work.

Doug Dawson (20:53)
This race is a SiFi story. I think it was one of the New York cities, they built a network and they just plowed straight through all the root balls and they killed a bunch of And they quickly changed the roles and they had to do it a different way, but they started right. They just went straight down the right away. It’s like, no, you really shouldn’t do that. So that was one of the early builds.

Christopher Mitchell (21:04)
That’s awesome.

Drew Garner (21:17)
Well, Chris, think I think you make a good point that like reducing some of these permitting barriers can be open the door to competition. ⁓ ISPs know that cities know that in a report I’ve worked on Mesa, Arizona, sort of sets a pretty good model of how they have attracted competition where they in their permitting process. A lot of the times it’s like the uncertainty about how long is this permitting going to take?

Just the lack of transparency into the permitting process and the lack of capacity at the city level to process all the permits needed to really have robust competition. What Mesa did, they have a consultant reimbursement agreement model where the ISP applicant can pay an additional amount so that the city itself can hire a consultant to improve and expedite the permitting process timeline, giving some consistency to the deployment, which then allows the ISP to plan everything else around these permits.

⁓ That’s worked really well for Mesa, but it was because it’s because Mesa found a way to address their capacity at the city level ⁓ I think one of the weaknesses with this federal permitting bill is that it doesn’t acknowledge that capacity limitation in some of these cities and especially some of these rural areas where you might have a part-time Staff who is partially responsible for this being in charge of what’s going to be this wave of BEAD permitting applications

So that’s, think one of the weaknesses with the bill we were just talking about earlier. And unfortunately this gets to the non-deployment conversation Heather mentioned. Like that is a potential use. Permitting capacity expansion is a potential use for BEAD non-deployment money. They’ve alluded to it many times before, almost every time they’ve talked about non-deployment, they mentioned permitting. But at this point, we’re going to be a year late when this money rolls out. So.

I don’t want to preempt the future conversation, Chris, but I think NTIA has the right idea with some of this using non-deployment to improve permitting capacity, but they need to get started two years ago.

Christopher Mitchell (23:24)
Yeah, or or be very competent and I’m not sure that there’s a record of that in the past year ⁓ So I do want to move on to Amazon LEO, which is a LEO service that I’m just I’m not gonna stop talking about how absurd it is that they freaking named it LEO for ⁓ For their service ⁓ they ⁓ their blue origin, right? I’m not something had this big doubt and

Doug Dawson (23:48)
Well, actually, most of their launches are on other companies. leased capacity. They’ve only done like two Blue Origin launches.

Christopher Mitchell (23:56)
Right.

So they’re, they’re working on building a competitor to SpaceX. And depending on who I read, it seems like they’re doing pretty well. ⁓ I mean, they accidentally launched someone into the wrong orbit and they’ve had some challenges, but actually on the whole experts seem to feel like the blue origin whole thing is going pretty well. By the way, I’m looking forward to talking about Starship when that launches sometime before our next live show, probably, ⁓ seeing what happens there. ⁓ but they need an extension.

And, ⁓ this is what kills me is the idea of, of this service is it’s supposed to be fast. It’s supposed to be like available now. And we’re doing it so we don’t have to spend time building infrastructure and giving people jobs in rural areas. And, and here they are saying many next year, two years to build out.

Drew Garner (24:43)
They’re the second largest BEAD winner to 400,000 locations now what a two year delay. Right? That’s this like Starlinks currently available right there. I would just I just it’s I feel for the locations that were one promised fiber and BEAD to have it then swapped out for LEO and now they’re LEO is not even going to be there. Yes. In addition to all the other like when it does arrive, it’ll probably have a lot of similar issues to the LEO we know today.

or it may not even work. Are you going to have to build a 40-foot pole to get reception? So, yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (25:23)
Yeah, it’s really frustrating. I mean, all my frustration with Starlink is tripled for LEO, which is an unproven service. Doug, we talked about this before. You don’t have to rehash a lot of it, but any initial thoughts?

Doug Dawson (25:34)
That’s

really good. Yeah, they’re up to 300 satellites. And if we follow what happened to Starlink, they launched their beta test with 600 satellites and beta test meaning you would get it for five minutes and then it would go off for five minutes because it was not enough satellites to fill the sky. And Starlink finally got what we call 90 or 95 % coverage when they got to about 1600 satellites. And then of course, as they’ve done more and more satellites now most

people have two or three Starlinks in the sky at the same time above them. you go, but Amazon’s only launching 3,200 is their whole launch. you know, they’re not even gonna get to where Starlink went to commercial service till they get halfway through their constellation, which is 1,600. And that’s just physics. You just have to always have one above you.

Christopher Mitchell (26:21)
Well, they have, right, but they have bigger devices and higher, I think,

Doug Dawson (26:26)
just a barely higher, but it’s not gonna make that kind of difference. I mean, we’re talking, you know, 30 miles part, they’re not, it’s not a big difference. So it’s more, know, they’re gonna have to get halfway through before they can have an actual commercial service. And so that’s not gonna happen for the rate they’ve been gone. you know, they got their work cut out for them. So and then they’re supposed to be, you know, Starlinks new satellites are very fast, they’re gigabit capable.

know, LEO was supposed to launch with similar capacities, so they might be fairly fast. It’s like it’s two years to find out, I think.

Christopher Mitchell (27:02)
Yeah, I’ll just know I just had a chance to do a lot of Starlink in Alaska as I’m in Bristol Bay working with some of the Alaska native villages and it was very interesting and ⁓ I think there’s a love-hate relationship with Starlink. They’re thrilled to have it. There was also people building fiber to many of these villages so that’s very fortunate because when I tried to handle some of my sports photography business ⁓ on Starlink, it didn’t go so well trying to trying to get ⁓

you know, tens of gigs of photos out to clients. Starlink was kind of like, ⁓ no.

Doug Dawson (27:37)
Well, they’re not trying to cover the poles. I mean, they’re covering the contemporary areas. they’re going, they’re not covering the amputee yet.

Christopher Mitchell (27:43)
separate

as Lena’s photo, I’ll have you know, but I want to give Heather a chance to speak up about LEO.

Heather Mills (27:53)
So I just moved in the last 24 hours and I have a satellite ⁓ thing because I live in rural Washington state. resetting up that this morning took me an hour longer than it should have ⁓ because I had to walk around my yard with my phone in my hand trying to make things work. But I got it to work. It’s clearly working. ⁓ Other than that frustration, I would agree with you, Chris. I have a love hate relationship with the

The only reason I’m using it right now is because the provider that I signed up for for terrestrial based fiber ⁓ hadn’t delivered my equipment yet. So ⁓ I think we are going to see a real ⁓ interesting next five to 10 years, because right now a lot of people see LEO as a patch, if you will.

⁓ to get service that’s needed to places that are too costly, if you will, ⁓ based on many people’s opinions, ⁓ to get fiber out there. In my opinion, that doesn’t mean that we stop the work. There’s still work to be done. ⁓ If the economy is going to grow and those places are eventually going to become less rural, then they’re going to need fiber infrastructure in order to do well, period. But I think it’s an amazing tool.

⁓ especially for someone like me who likes to get in my Ford F-150 and go out into a remote field and have my lunch and do some work. So I’m able to do that and I love that.

Christopher Mitchell (29:34)
Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna argue against that. ⁓ In the interest of time, we’re gonna skip ahead to mobile wireless. So I will note that this has been a big month for me. We went on spring break and drove down from Minnesota down to Oklahoma City, where we got to have my first time in Oklahoma got to have the quintessential Oklahoma experience of tornadoes and ⁓ meeting other people in the hotel in the safe room in the hotel, ⁓ and then headed out west.

to the Guadalupe Mountains. We climbed to the highest point in Texas. It was brilliant. ⁓ Beautiful, beautiful area. Saw Carlsbad Caverns, drove back up north through Colorado to Great Sand Dunes, quite possibly the best of the national parks. It’s amazing. And then back home through Kansas and Nebraska off the beaten trail. And wireless sucked. I have now T-Mobile and Verizon of the postpaid of the, you know, I have… ⁓

I threw a double eSIM on and then I had GCI while I up in Alaska as well. So I had triple eSIMs rocking and the connection, I could never find a good connection from Verizon and T-Mobile it felt like. And that’s true in Oklahoma City. It was true in Amarillo. It was true like in any one of these places we went. When I was a rural area, usually I could get coverage from one of them, okay, but it wasn’t the same one. And it surprised me at times. And I feel like mobile wireless is just getting worse and worse, Doug.

And you keep talking about how we’re not going to be spending that $10 billion for the mobile wireless build out. ⁓ But is it getting worse?

Doug Dawson (31:07)
It is getting worse. Let me show you a map first. actually said you’re going to talk about this. How the heck do I share my screen on this platform? Share screen. All right.

Christopher Mitchell (31:14)
Plus the bottom center of your

And the way you do it actually is you send it to Ry ahead of time and he does all the work.

Doug Dawson (31:28)
I think I’m good.

Christopher Mitchell (31:30)
All right.

Doug Dawson (31:32)
How come it’s not sharing?

There we go. All right, can you see it?

Christopher Mitchell (31:40)
Yes. Well, there you go.

Doug Dawson (31:41)
And

I have to minimize this. So here are two maps. This happens to be someone I’m working for right now. This is Logan County, Illinois. And their first question is, is 4G the same as 5G? No.

Christopher Mitchell (31:56)
Yeah, I was gonna

Doug Dawson (31:59)
4G coverage on the left, there’s the 5G coverage. These are the same towers, but 5G doesn’t go as far because it’s using higher frequencies and they just don’t go as far. Now on these maps, what you see is the dark colors are where the coverage is best and the light covers is where it’s even worse. So not only is 5G not go as far, look how small the good coverage areas are. They’re really tiny. And so by the time you even get to the fringe of these pink areas, it’s

getting very sketchy even for making a voice call. So doesn’t mean all of this works for voice, but this is way better.

Christopher Mitchell (32:35)
Doug, is it a conspiracy theory to think though that I might be on that 4G coverage and they might have the 5G lit up on my phone?

Doug Dawson (32:43)
Nah, whatever, whichever your phone says is usually right, but you can’t, but it’s no guarantee. mean, carriers are carriers and we don’t trust them like any of

Heather Mills (32:52)
Are you calling back to when AT&T did that when they originally like were trying to sell the 5G stuff? Like that was 2016, wasn’t it?

Christopher Mitchell (33:00)
Well, but also I feel like there are claims in the, I thought there were claims that one could get 5g from T-Mobile in many more areas. And they’re talking about it being like two megabits a second. ⁓ And ⁓ when they started doing some of that, to me, that seems like they are claiming 5g. So like, yes, if you’re using the millimeter waves on 5g, but can’t you use 5g with

the other spectrum that has better propagation over greater distances as well.

Doug Dawson (33:32)
millimeter wave only covers like 1 % of the whole US market. That’s not real stuff. It’s only in downtown. So you’re not getting that anywhere else. So ⁓ that’s the stuff that they did back in old days when they had remember the commercials where they said look at my gigabit cell phone. They put that up and they’ve never taken it down. Yeah, it’s very fine.

Christopher Mitchell (33:49)
All right. Well, I’m going to I’m going to save this for a future show because I don’t have Mike Dano back on who’s now at Ookla. We had him on before and ⁓ real mobile wireless expert about some of this. ⁓

Doug Dawson (34:00)
Bottom line is it’s not it’s getting worse. Cell suck coverage speeds are getting better coverage is getting worse

Christopher Mitchell (34:07)
All right. Any comments on that, Drew or Heather?

Drew Garner (34:11)
⁓ For not wireless, for I or not mobile, but for my fixed wireless service at my house, I noticed just recently when spring started that service got much worse. Yeah, because of the trees as the foliage comes out every summer, I noticed this. And then to your point about the wire, mobile wireless, I took a train recently from Chicago to LA Southwest Chief ⁓ PSA.

they don’t offer Internet service on those trains. So I didn’t even think to check, but I learned that the hard way. So I used my phone as a hotspot to work the whole trip ⁓ and coverage is also spotty on that route. that was a very, that was a tricky experience.

Christopher Mitchell (34:56)
You got to be careful because some of the operating systems detect if they’re on a hotspot and then they tried to download 10 gigabyte patches to really hurt your bill. ⁓ Another conspiracy theory. I guess I’m just going to launch into those today.

Heather Mills (35:08)
That doesn’t seem right.

Doug Dawson (35:10)
same right.

Christopher Mitchell (35:11)
That’s

just the classic ⁓ bad luck. ⁓ So permitting, ⁓ we talked briefly about this, but there’s been some proposals that seem not unreasonable to me to scale back some of the larger scale permitting. Doug, you mentioned earlier in rural areas, the rural, the counties, they’re totally willing to work with you to figure out how to make it work. In most cases, that’s been my experience as well. The challenge people get hung up on is, ⁓ is federal agencies. And I’ll just note that like the senators in DC,

particularly Western senators who are Republican in my experience love to talk about how the federal government sucks at this. And then those departments say, well, you know what we need is we need people and here’s a budget where we can hire people to turn the permits around faster. And the Republican senators are like, that’s funny. There’s no way you’re getting more money. So we’re in this standoff, but there’s now suggestions both nationally and in California that, hey, if you’re deploying a wire alongside a road that’s already been disturbed,

Maybe we need something called a categorical exception. And to me, seems great. And so Heather, let me go to you first and ask you, because you work both sides of this, ⁓ depending on which hat you’re wearing, ⁓ are these things, are these no brainers? Are these things that should be moving forward? Or should I be concerned that we’re about to pave over the Redwoods or something?

Drew Garner (36:30)
⁓

Heather Mills (36:32)
So what I find interesting, so the CEQ issued something earlier in April, NTIA for BEAD purposes is already doing most of that. And I’m excited to see, I think it’s going to be a great test case, if you will, to see how those, they call categorical exclusions or CXs ⁓ are able to get through that system. in the small test cases that we’ve seen so far, it’s categorical exclusions are being approved within a few weeks.

⁓ And so the BEAD program is really going to test out. It’s called the ESAPTT system, E-S-A-P-T-T. ⁓ It starts with an environmental and ends with tool. And then there’s other words in there. DC really likes their acronyms. So ⁓ it’s going to be interesting to see how this comes together. I’m very excited about it. It’s also going to allow that the way the ESAPTT systems work is ⁓ in order to process things the way that you’re

you have to in order to get them in there, you’re going to know going into it as a BEAD participant what areas are going to be pretty well categorically excluded. You’ll have a really good sense of that. And you’ll know what areas won’t be because you’re doing that work beforehand and you’ll understand what path you’re going on. What I like about the way that it’s been set up for BEAD is that depending on the state that you’re in ⁓ and how they’re processing it,

you can set up NEPA subproject areas to help find efficiencies going through. there’s rules around how you do in certain ways, but it’s going to help get, I’m going to say, shovels in the ground a lot faster than what we’re used to in the past.

Christopher Mitchell (38:21)
Drew, do you react with a foreboding ⁓ whenever you hear any sort of ⁓ streamlining out of the people who are currently in power?

Drew Garner (38:29)
⁓

I mean, ⁓ yes, but what Heather says, I think makes a lot of sense ⁓ for these areas. like, actually, no, I like I permitting across the country, it’s you really have to look at the location to figure out like, is it actually a permitting issue? Or is it an issue with something else? ⁓ So whenever I hear for the federal government talking about streamlining local permitting, I get a little bit queasy just because like,

We kind of know what it means as we talk about the talk of the call. But this particular issue less so. I think it can make sense in some areas. I don’t like, as long as we’re not running down the redwoods, I think that’s not what this will do. It will protect some of those areas while still allowing it in areas where we’ve already done the analysis.

Doug Dawson (39:22)
I’m stuck with the picture of paving over the red ones. I try to picture that. That’s a lot.

Christopher Mitchell (39:27)
lot

of pain. a lumpy road.

Heather Mills (39:30)
that

Doug Dawson (39:30)
But I have two comments on this. One is, this is the common sense we’ve already wanted, always wanted, because it’s like, hey, I’m burying fiber along the side of a road that’s been dug up six times. There’s other utilities in there. I’m not going into the woods, marshes. And so there’s three category exceptions. One of them would allow an agent to do that.

But the other issue where I get a little queasy is every agency is going to interpret it. We may get three different interpretations from the FCC, NTIA, and USDA. They each have to make up their own mind of how to apply it. Because the first rule says, if there’s ever been an exception in the past, you can follow it. But most of them are just going to be rule two and three, which says use your common sense. And they may not apply common sense the same way. But it’s still a big improvement. Because there used to be no exceptions for common sense.

That’s we like this. Now, if you have a project that goes through marshland or Indian burial grounds, it’s still going to be two years. This does not get you out of those. So if you have your BEAD project through those kind of places, you still got a big problem. But that’s always been there. You should have known that before you applied for it, to be honest.

Christopher Mitchell (40:44)
Heather?

Heather Mills (40:45)
Yeah, it’s important that people do their homework too. We spent what, the last 20, 30 years recognizing that installing something in a previously-desert right-of-way is really not going to have a lot of impact. But depending on whose land you’re on and what they value as important or not important, that also adds to the level of complications there. ⁓ I’ve been working on some complex federal-level permitting that involves BLM, BIA, Forest Service,

Bureau of Reclamation and NTIA in one sitting. That’s going to take a good effort to get through. It has taken a good effort to get through. And it’s herding cats on a new level. It’s herding cats on a federal level, ⁓ along with locals as well. And so believe it or not, the local permitting, once they get the sign off from the federal agencies, they can get things done like that. But it’s the coordination between the agencies.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that there’s a good amount of concern in the federal agencies for the flow that comes through. They have shot clocks internally that if they don’t get something done a certain way within a certain time, it reflects badly on them, not on the applicant. That’s something to consider. That’s why relationships are so important in those settings. I could talk for hours. So best.

Best ask the next question.

Doug Dawson (42:14)
Yeah, we all have a yard long list of problems where it didn’t work well. Yes, there’s nightmares. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (42:21)
one of the things that I did hear was the frustration from ⁓ one of the older time folks who is like basically like back on the day we could build this, know, I put in a, you know, I get the money and I’d start building and three days later we’d have something and now it’s years. And I pushed him a little bit on it. And he was basically saying it’s frustrating when he has to go through three different processes for like the same land crossing for three different agencies and just repetition and just waiting for a response in that. So I definitely I hear that and I feel like

This is something that will continue to be an issue that we deal with on my shows and the program within ILSR because I feel like a fundamental issue of our time is dealing with processes that we have put up with for too long that don’t work. We need processes that protect the environment and encourage investment and that work. so execution is going to be something that ⁓ we focus on over and over again.

Doug Dawson (43:15)
I would venture to say years ago, he built in those places without asking anybody. That’s how he did it fast. I believe the rules were still there then too.

Christopher Mitchell (43:24)
possible.

⁓

Heather Mills (43:27)
forgiveness in other words

Doug Dawson (43:28)
Yes,

I believe he’s one of those guys in the old days at least.

Christopher Mitchell (43:32)
And

up there, there’s definitely a sense that there’s a different set of rules, right? And so people have different takes on how to interpret them. And I’m, I’m always recollecting a story that I heard of someone who could not get a permit in West Texas. And ⁓ the sheriff really wanted to see the project get done. He said, Come out here, meet me at 2am. So you got four hours, get it done and get out. ⁓ Okay, BEAD, we’re gonna talk about BEAD. And I’m, I’m

So I haven’t been paying close attention, but I don’t get the sense that there’s a whole lot of people that have been connected with BEAD dollars. And I was told by credible sources within the federal government that they were going to make it go faster. So I want to start with you, ⁓ Drew. ⁓ What’s the latest on BEAD? What’s happened recently that we should be focused on?

Drew Garner (44:22)
Yeah, I guess that maybe the two big items of news is that the vast majority of states and territories right now have actually signed their award agreement. So we are finally, my, sick of myself even saying this, but we are finally getting closer to the part where we can start construction. Indeed, some states have already signed contracts with ISPs, which is, that’s the final line.

⁓ I think one of the things that have been very confusing and made this process seem interminable is that there are so many seeming final lines. We have NTIA’s approval, we have NIST’s approval, we have them signing the award agreement, then accepting the terms and conditions, and then signing the agreement with the ISP. But we are getting to that final step. ⁓ I will say though, we behind. We’re reminded of it. Go ahead, Chris.

Christopher Mitchell (45:14)
We did a, ⁓ hiked to the top of Guadalupe Peak, which is 4.1 miles, 25 % grade, I think roughly 20%, 25 on average, and ⁓ at 8,700 feet. And my 10 year old is with us. And ⁓ I felt like you’re on every corner. You’re like, are we there yet? Where’s the peak? Like it’s so close. And you get up there you’re like, we gotta go down? There’s no, there’s no like tram, you know? I gotta walk all the way back.

And I feel like that’s sort of where we were. like, we’re at the fine. We’re at the end. It’s like, so much more. Yeah.

Drew Garner (45:44)
facts.

I want to make sure though, like we’re behind where we would have been had they not. They should hands off the wheel when they came to office and done nothing. I think they would have gotten better results faster. And we might already see people connected. ⁓ We also wouldn’t have the way they did it under the former administration was staggered where they would be approving people and people will be starting instruction ⁓ at different times. It still is to a certain extent, but it’s much more clustered. So there’s going to be.

Christopher Mitchell (45:54)
Right, if they just…

Drew Garner (46:17)
ISP sort of fighting for the same workforce and permits ⁓ because a lot of this work is going to be started at once. ⁓ And the delays, I think, advantage Starlink. Like this has been another sort of benefit to the Starlink program is just the fact that the beat process has slowed down. The one other, and we can talk about this later, but the non-deployment news.

Christopher Mitchell (46:42)
Yeah, we’ll come back to that in a couple minutes.

Drew Garner (46:44)
Okay, yeah, so I’ll stop there.

Christopher Mitchell (46:46)
All right, Heather, you and I talked about this. are, ⁓ depending on the day, working with state broadband offices or with entities who are ⁓ recipients of those funds. in our discussion about it, you suggested to me that there are a number of challenges that remain to be ⁓ overcome.

Heather Mills (47:09)
Certainly. ⁓

⁓ Operationalizing things is some of the hardest work that I think any state broadband office does. We spent a lot of time thinking about getting here and now we’re here. And so just, for example, getting things ready to put in your ESA into the ESAPTT system, ⁓ whether an ISP or a state requires a lot of herding of cats, requires that you have the right team on both the ISP side and the state side to look over the materials.

is what the state is doing in ESAPTT to get to that CADEX or whatever determination is filtering through all of the project information, working with the sub recipient to make sure that it makes sense, meaning what the NEPA sub project areas might be. ⁓ And it becomes something of a very large chessboard. What can we move? When can we move it? How is it going to fit in overall? Explaining to everybody as well how

how timing overlaps. Like we’re starting EHP permitting processes now. We haven’t gotten the contract yet in a number of places. And that’s very much on purpose because by the time we get to contract, we want to have a really good idea of what their NEPA sub project areas look like and how it all is going to come together. So that after they’ve signed the contract, ⁓ that permitting process should be fairly quick depending on what we’re doing. ⁓

That’s just part of that’s just the the HP piece of it. That’s the environmental, the local permitting matters. The Department of Transportation stuff matters. ⁓ Satisfying all of the requirements prior to putting a shovel in the ground. All of that is is a lot for anybody to handle. Now we’re going to do it 150 times per state, sometimes more depending on how many sub projects they have together. ⁓ And.

I would say the timeline wise, ⁓ the way that some of the approvals have happened has sort of created a natural sort of role, if you will. But what there’s only three states that don’t have approval for their final proposal yet. I think that the thing that we’re going to run up against right now as far as timelines are concerned is ⁓ when we actually have to have those contracts signed because

In every contracting situation I’ve been in when it’s multiple organizations, unless the state of emergency has been declared and we can get by a whole bunch of things, it takes time to get through even a standard contract where there are no changes because the discussions have to happen about why they’re not changing this sort of thing. So it’s going to be very interesting to see how it all sort of comes together as well.

Christopher Mitchell (50:04)
Doug, what’s happening on BEAD?

Doug Dawson (50:08)
I think we’re going to see a lot of defaults that people are not going to up signing the contracts. So they’re getting the whole way to that endpoint. First off, I know of folks who turns out they didn’t really have the financing lined up. And you have to have the financing locked to get you contracts. You can’t have a like, ⁓ yeah, we’re going to borrow the money. That’s not good enough. have to have your it’s like what turns out they didn’t have that done. You know, so it turns out they can’t get their letter of credit or whatever. So we’re going to see folks fall off the map for that. ⁓

There are people who are just buy, believe it or not, this process where they, and the benefit of bargain, sometimes gave, broadband offices said, you have to take this lower price and they gave you like five to 10 days to make up your mind. So everybody’s, most of them said yes. And now they’re doing their math and they’re going, I can’t afford to build this project anymore. So I know several folks who are going to just bail because it no longer makes any sense. They cut the grant down too far. And it was really,

Christopher Mitchell (51:05)
There

might have been a mark

Doug Dawson (51:06)
After

all these years of crawling along, they made you make big financial decisions in like five working days. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Christopher Mitchell (51:15)
That was before the price of oil jumped up significantly. Yes. that changes everything. If we remember.

Doug Dawson (51:22)
But even without that, I mean, when you went from 9,000 a passing to 6,000 a passing, as an example, that’s a really big difference of grants.

Christopher Mitchell (51:30)
It is. you would, you lost all of the margin, right? Where if you’re giving the 9,000, that’s not because your costs were necessarily all that, but because you had a contingency, I’m guessing. And that got destroyed.

Doug Dawson (51:43)
So then, then Heather referred to it, the contracting process has taken a whole lot longer than folks thought. you said it earlier, Heather, you need to do all your homework. An amazing number of BEAD applicants didn’t do any of their homework. They didn’t look at environmental, they didn’t really get their financing lined up, they didn’t really have a solid business plan. So now before they signed the contract, they’re doing all that. And they never really looked at the contract hard before. And those contracts are complex.

And so I just think we’re going to see a lot of defaults or my understanding Heather is you have six months to get the contract signed right.

Christopher Mitchell (52:22)
So.

Heather Mills (52:23)
It’s a great question because six months from when, when the letter was received or when it was drafted or when it was signed.

Christopher Mitchell (52:31)
I think Heather’s saying no one knows for sure.

Doug Dawson (52:33)
Right, well no one knows for sure, but there’s six months of something before all the state contracts have to be signed. A lot of people are just not going be ready to sign them. I don’t think they’re, I believe they’ll probably let that date slip, but maybe not, who knows.

Christopher Mitchell (52:46)
One of the most important…

Doug Dawson (52:49)
Last question is what happens to all the

Christopher Mitchell (52:52)
Yeah. I’ve got another round. We’ll see. think it’ll differ based on the states. ⁓ We’ll see. I think the federal government is prepared to just declare victory no matter what. ⁓ mean, enough people have already been left behind a few more. Doug, you made the point that a lot of people didn’t do their homework. I do feel like for younger people who are watching the show, I had in grad school, ⁓ my advisor actually, she was brilliant. And she required an unattainable amount of reading.

before each class. And we had to learn how to get by when one could not humanly achieve that. And one of the things that I think that set me up for is understanding that in life, a lot of people haven’t done the homework. And first of all, if you do the homework, Heather’s a person that does the homework, from what I can tell, always. ⁓ You have an advantage. And also, you got to learn how to get by even if you don’t do it. And there’s a lot of people who get used to that. And sometimes you get caught.

You get caught with your pants down is the phrase and you get in trouble. So, ⁓ there’s some of that happening too. Now I want to move on before we break up with the, the non-deployment funds. we were going to know by now what was happening with them, but as Doug Adams has reminded us, the Trump administration continues to call them savings as in they’re saving the federal taxpayer dollars and they’re not savings if they then get used for permitting, as Drew mentioned earlier today, which would be a pretty good use of them as far as things go.

⁓ or for digital equity to make sure that our veterans and other like older adults and everyone else can actually use the networks that are being built. ⁓ But do we have any predictions as to when we will find out and what will happen on that day?

Drew Garner (54:36)
Well, ⁓ what we know most recently is that last week, Secretary Lutnick was before the committee, before Congress last week, and he said under pressure that guidance may come out in two months, which would be late June. They have missed deadlines in the past. So who knows? This is also tied up in the whole, ⁓ the BEAD non-deployment money is kind of being held hostage.

as part of the AI executive order, the administration’s goal to like prevent states from regulating AI. If you do that, you may jeopardize your BEAD money. And to just highlight how big of issue this is, the median amount states are going to can expect from non-deployment is almost $350 million. That’s the median amount for states. This whole pot, $22 billion, most of the BEAD program. ⁓ But Chris, to your point, at this, at present, we don’t really know

how states can use their money, when they’re gonna get access to it, or even if they’ll be able to use it due to some AI regulation that they have. So a lot of questions remain. I’ve noted like every single statement NTIA puts out about non-deployment, they seem to mention permitting as a potential use, public safety like E911. They’re starting to mention filling in infrastructure holes, so maybe those be defaults, but how do you do that if you consider satellite good enough service?

And then recently they started talking about workforce too. And I have to mention too, they keep continually ignoring that the law says broadband adoption and broadband affordability are also eligible uses. that’s the best that I know to date.

Except there’s the victory too. They have, they keep referring to it as savings, but it does seem they’re going to make it available to the states. And for the longest time, that was not a sure thing. We did not know that states were going to get this money. They really seem to be working as hard as possible to take this money from the states, put it back into treasury, use it to pay for their war or whatever.

Christopher Mitchell (56:44)
be very clear that would be an illegal action. is money that Congress has appropriated. And so we are talking about whether or not we are surprised that the Trump administration may follow the law in allowing states to use money that Congress deliberately gave them.

Drew Garner (56:59)
Right? And they wrote into that law, if you don’t use all the money, here’s what you’re supposed to do with it. You redistribute it to other states. So Congress explicitly contemplated this potentiality and addressed it. And yet there’s still major doubt as if the administration will sort of abide by that law.

Christopher Mitchell (57:16)
Yeah. Doug.

Doug Dawson (57:19)
My guess is in two months, we’re going to get another delay. So they’re either going to delay it forever to just kind of hope it dies off because it’ll be too late. But if they finally do come out, my expectation would be a very narrow list of things you can use it for, meaning most states won’t be able to use most of their money. And that’s why it’s still savings. You keep talking about permitting. As soon as you sign your contract, you do your NEPA and you do your permitting. They’re all going to be done by the time they figure out they need this money for this.

Permitting, all those signed contracts this year will get their permitting done this year. That’s what you do before you get the plows going. So it’s too late for that in most cases. because that using it for permitting is very complicated. You got to go to the county and go, let me help you hire two more people and all that. That’s not a real like instant snap thing to do. So I think the list will be so narrow that it’s not going to make much benefit. Remember the big use in there that we thought it was going to go for.

was to do MDUs in urban areas that don’t have any good broadband. That was gonna use all the money in a lot of states because there’s a huge need there. That’s gone. That’s not on anybody’s list, so yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (58:24)
Other closing comments?

Heather Mills (58:27)
Yeah, you know, ⁓ in the Senate hearing, he said it will be about two months. And then the next day in the House hearing, he did not say two months. He said we’re going to do new and exciting things with it. ⁓ Doug, I co-sign with you in saying, I think, yes, the money will come. I think the money will come in as hard a chance to get it as possible. It will be very, very, very challenging for any state to get that money. The problem that I have with

the way that the administration talks about the funding and the savings and the benefit of the bargain is that they’ve removed the words quality and value from that. And that means to me down the road, we’re going to have to do is run another program to get past this hump where we’re at. Like we said earlier, LEO satellite, it works. It’s certainly a thing that can be used, but

I’m going to say the word affordability here. It’s not affordable. Even with the programs that they offer now, it’s not affordable. In the remote project, the remote thing that I have, I’ve had to pay 200 plus dollars for the device that I had. And I know with BEAD, they’re going to give you the device ⁓ in that regard, but it’s still ⁓ not something that a lot of people have an appetite for. And I worry about that. How are they going to change the perception of LEO?

so that it is an acceptable alternative to fiber based. it really is that good, it should pick up. ⁓ But I think quality and value are the things that we should be talking about when it comes to what kind of services our tax dollars are installing for people to use. And we keep hearing that some people will just have to do with not

⁓ not fiber. And I think that that’s a bit of a disservice to those people. And I also think it means that we’ve inadvertently, or maybe they did it inadvertently, but probably inadvertently created a class system of who gets what ⁓ overall. The other thing I’ll say too is that that sort of runs through everything when we were talking about permitting earlier today. ⁓ People need to realize

Christopher Mitchell (1:00:39)
Yep.

Heather Mills (1:00:49)
people in the administration need to realize. There are some localities that run their entire ⁓ organization publicly through Facebook. They have a Facebook page, that’s where they do all of their communications and everything. And that’s fine for them because it works. You try to run a hundred permits in a week through that organization, it will stop in its tracks. So those are the kinds of things that people need to understand when we’re talking about.

updates to permitting processes like that. Not everybody’s bootstraps are the same and pulling them up is fine, but if they break on the way, it means we’ve got to replace the bootstraps.

Christopher Mitchell (1:01:27)
That’s a good place to cut it off. There’s there’s much more to say I wish we had the time to go into affordability programs. ⁓ It was discussed on the recent Building for Digital Equity episode that ran without me two weeks ago. ⁓ You can find that on the National Digital Inclusion Alliance YouTube page or I think on ours too, at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And then there was a question in the chat.

which was whether or not mobile networks were getting worse, why that was the case. And Doug, ⁓ just very briefly, there was a response from Cassie that I really appreciated. ⁓ But one thing I would say is that think part of it is also just running hotter. Like they used to have more slack capacity. Now there is much less they’re doing more with what they have. And so it’s not able to get out to the fringes as much but also

Doug Dawson (1:02:17)
There’s a lot of the capacity for FWA that doesn’t leave much for cell phones. Yeah, that’s a part of it for sure. So yes.

Christopher Mitchell (1:02:25)
All right. So I want to thank everyone for tuning in. We’re going to try and do these around once a month. And then more often, if there’s some sort of major thing where we need to have some immediate, um, uneditable commentary from, uh, from folks that can jump into an Unbuffered. Um, we are very thankful for, um, our guests, Doug, Drew and Heather today, as well as, uh, Travis and Kim for getting us to this point after all those years of Connect This! Uh, so.

Thank you once again for joining us. We’ll see you in the next Unbuffered Live.

Jordan Pittman (1:03:01)
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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