A New Way To Invest In Local Broadband

I'm not crazy about the way that broadband deployment is driven in the US.

The typical process is logical, even if it eventually incentivizes continuing to build out over-served communities.

ROI-driven deployment strategies quickly scoop up the most densely populated communities, before moving on to the next-best region, and so on. Eventually, the deployment costs outweigh the number of customers that can be reached (think rural Wyoming, for example). When this happens, the only logical decision is to re-visit places that are already well served and try to compete with other service providers.

RDOF and BEAD funding attempt to remedy this issue by creating requirements for the communities served. This incentivizes broadband deployment to under-served communities by letting providers spend government dollars to go after those areas, instead of just their own money.

This is genius because it creates a natural new starting point for ROI-driven deployment. Scoop up the most densely-populated communities (that qualify for public dollars) before moving on to the next best option, and so on.

Unfortunately, it still suffers from two major broadband deployment issues:

1. The pole attachment process is full of unknown costs and delays that lead to wasted money and communities remaining underserved.
2. The most unserved Americans will continue to wait for reliable, high-speed internet because there's no ROI incentive for providers.

Working The System Backwards

There might be an incredibly simple way to complement the existing broadband process to address these issues.

Our Engineering Services team has started conducting free municipality-driven pole inventories to document all the poles in our communities and understand who the existing communications providers are.

Collecting and processing this data is fast incredibly simple, and it can be leveraged by our local communities to invite providers to build in our backyards. Check out our completed inventories below (make sure you're on desktop!):

Dillsburg

Franklintown

Dover

Wellsville

The Value Of Municipal Inventories

• The Ultimate Feasibility Study - up-to-date pole photos and attachment mapping can be sold to communication providers so they can perform competitor research and predict make ready/deployment costs.
• Business Development - sharing this data with ISPs creates a natural opportunity to provide OSP design and engineering services to providers. This means more work in your backyard and creates new partnerships that could move into other markets, too.
• Low Cost - your teams can quickly and easily document every pole in your local communities without waiting for someone else's go-ahead—and still make it home for dinner!
• Training - a light scope of work means that you can use these projects to train and develop staff who are learning OSP basics and working in Katapult Pro.
• Local Impact - map and photo data can be leveraged by municipalities for community improvement projects, and broadband projects generated by this transparent data lead to increased investment in and opportunity for your communities!

If you're in South Central PA and would like us to do a free inventory of your community, email us at [email protected] . If you'd like us to set up your Katapult Pro models to go out and start collecting these projects in your local footprint, contact us at [email protected] !