The FCC will be moving forward with the $9 billion 5G Fund – a new use of the Universal Service Fund – that will be providing money to expand cellular coverage to the many remote places in the US where 4G cell coverage is still spotty or nonexistent. There is a bit of urgency to this effort since the big cellular companies all want to shut down 3G within a year or two. This money will be made available to cellular carriers, but the funding still opens up possible benefits for other carriers and ISPs.
Some of this funding is likely to go towards extending fiber into rural places to reach cell towers, and that opens up the idea of fiber sharing. There are still a lot of places in the country that don’t have adequate fiber backhaul – the data pipes that bring traffic to and from the big hubs for the Internet. In the last six months alone I’ve worked with three different rural projects where lack of backhaul was a major issue. Nobody can consider building broadband networks in rural communities if the new networks can’t be connected to the web.
By definition, the 5G Fund is going to extend into rural places. If the FCC was maximizing the use of federal grant funds, they would demand that any fiber built with this new fund would be available to others at reasonable rates. This was one of the major provisions of the middle mile networks built a decade ago with stimulus funding. I know of many examples where those middle mile routes are providing backhaul today for rural fixed wireless and fiber networks. Unfortunately, I don’t see any such provisions being discussed in the 5G Fund – which is not surprising. I’m sure the big cellular companies have told the FCC that making them share fiber with others would be an inconvenience, so this idea doesn’t seem to be included in the 5G Fund plan.
I think there is a window of opportunity to partner with wireless carriers to build new fiber jointly. The cellular carriers can get their portion of new fiber funded from the 5G Fund and a partner can pick up new fiber at a fraction of the cost of building the route alone. This could be the simplest form of partnership where each party owns some pairs in a joint fiber.
This is worth considering for anybody already thinking about building rural fiber. The new routes don’t have to be backhaul fiber and could instead be a rural route that is part of a county-wide build-out or fiber being built by an electric cooperative. If somebody is considering building fiber into an area that has poor cellular coverage, the chances are that there will be 5G Fund money coming to that same area.
It has always been challenging to create these kinds of partnerships with AT&T and Verizon, although I am aware of some such partnerships. Both Sprint and T-Mobile have less rural coverage than the other carriers and might be more amenable to considering partnerships – but they might be consumed by the possibility of their merger.
There are a lot of other cellular carriers. The CTIA, the trade association for the larger cellular carriers, has thirty members that are facility-based cellular providers. The Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) has over one hundred members.
Ideally, a deal can be made to share fiber before the reverse auction for the 5G Fund. Any carrier that has a partner for a given route will have a bidding advantage since cost-sharing with a partner will lower the cost of building new fiber. It might be possible to find partnerships after the auction, but there could be restrictions on the newly built assets as part of the grants – we don’t know yet.
My recommendation is that if you are already planning to build rural fiber that you look around to see if one of the cellular carriers might be interested in serving the same area. Both parties can benefit through a cost-sharing partnership – but the real winners are rural customers that gain access to better cellular service and better broadband.
