BEAD Rule Changes for Permitting

NTIA issued new General Terms and Conditions dated November 2025 that include dozens of changes to the BEAD rules for recipients, but also changes that impact state Broadband Offices that have wider implications on States. I’m not listing all of the changes here, but there is a great summary of the changes done by the Benton Institute on January 14. This blog will look at the issues related to permitting that have repercussions far outside of the BEAD grant recipients.

In Section 13.D of the revised NTIA Terms and Conditions, State Broadband Offices (SBOs – which are described as Grantees by the NTIA) have a lot of major new obligations related to permitting.

SBOs must “establish procedures to ensure that broadband-related permit applications are promptly accepted, and requests are approved or denied within 90 days”.

In general, SBOs don’t hold a position of authority in State governments to impose rules on anybody other than recipients of grants. Permits for BEAD will mostly mean getting permits to build along existing roads. SBOs are going to have to agree to this requirement, but it’s hard to imagine how an SBO can impose rules for State roads, County roads, Township roads, Municipal roads, roads through Tribal lands, and the biggest challenge – roads passing through federal lands. The goal of getting permits completed within 90 days is great, but it’s hard to think that the small number of people working in SBOs even know the identity of the many permitting authorities in a state, let alone can have any influence, other than perhaps begging, to get BEAD permitting authorities to meet the 90-day deadline. An even bigger challenge is permitting on private land, since a lot of rural roads are privately owned. What can an SBO possibly do to influence private permits?

SBOs must assist “state and local authorities in establishing a single, dedicated point of contact, which has knowledge of the application and review processes, for broadband-related permits.

The key word in this requirement is ‘assist”. Assuming that States even want to go through this process, they vary widely in how this would be achieved. There are States where a Governor might be able to do this. There are States where a State Regulatory Commission might have the authority to tackle this. But in many States, this might require action for a Legislature. What happens in States that don’t undertake the formation of a single, dedicated point of contact?

SBOs must provide technical assistance to permitting agencies to ensure sufficient capacity (e.g., Master Agreement and Consultant Reimbursement Agreement templates, surge support for permit processing, etc.)

This recognizes that local governments often will not have enough staff to quickly process all of the permits required by a BEAD project. SBOs must develop template contracts that can assist a locality if it wants to get help to speed up permitting. But this doesn’t address the issue and time required by local governments when hiring outside vendors. It doesn’t address if a local government has a budget for additional help. Interestingly, this extra funding could come in some states from BED nondeployment funds, assuming there is enough such funding for the purpose.

SBOs must provide “deference to the construction techniques chosen by BEAD Subgrantees (without seeking to influence those decisions), absent any identified safety concerns.

I don’t know if anybody, except perhaps for big ISPs that might have suggested this language to NTIA, really knows what this means, other than allowing construction practices that would otherwise not be allowed by pole owners or by the governments who control the rights-of-way for buried construction. SBOs are being directed to turn their heads to what would normally be non-compliant construction techniques. I’m not sure how pole owners and rights-of-way owners will be expected to comply with this.

SBOs must maximize “streamlined processing through permitting by rule; batch processing of substantially similar permit requests; and waiving or expediting duplicative or burdensome broadband permitting requirements where possible.”

SBOs can certainly promote language that allows batch processing. But, related to the staffing issue addressed earlier, how might a County with little or no staffing be expected to comply with big batches of permits? Even more confounding, are SBOs expected to look at local rules for permitting across the state to identify the ones that are duplicative or burdensome – and what do they do when they identify such rules?

SBOs must follow “FCC rules regarding timelines, rates, terms, and conditions for access to municipally owned poles and conduit for broadband projects – including provisions in the FCC’s rules providing for “one-touch make-ready” and “self-help” – and requiring BEAD Subgrantees that own poles (including cooperatives) to comply with FCC rules across their footprint.”

Around 23 states and D.C. have decided to have their own pole attachment rules, something that has been allowed by federal legislation. While most of these rules are largely the same as the FCC rules, many differ in substantive ways. How can an SBO in a state with its own pole regulation somehow force the State to suddenly follow the FCC rules. The specific requirement cites self-help and one-touch make ready, which are some of rules where States have taken a decidedly different stance than the FCC.

Overall impression of these requirements. SBOs will clearly try to follow these requirements since they must agree to them before they get BEAD funding. But these rules create huge problems for SBOs that don’t have the authority and muscle to impose these rules on the rest of the State and on the many entities that are involved in permitting. To some degree, the severity of these rules, when judged against the practical chance of an SBO accomplishing them, seems like a tool for NTIA to be able to say that any selected State has failed its obligations. I assume that if NTIA tries to withhold funding to a State based on these rules that it will be sued, but that means BEAD goes on hold in that State, to the detriment of the many rural residents relying on better broadband. Interestingly, none of these rules hinders satellite BEAD winners.

Rats Attack Fibre!

County Broadband in Norfolk, England, recently lost service to 442 customers over a weekend when rats chewed through fiber and caused an outage during a snowstorm. The ISP battled bad weather conditions, so it took a few days to replace almost 2,000 feet of damaged fiber cable. The ISP stayed in contact with customers by text and was apologetic that the snow had caused its call center to close on Sunday.

There was a great quote in the press, “Rats are also notoriously difficult vermin to stop, like mini tanks with teeth that often seem able to cut through almost anything . . . even concrete.”

I’ve never heard of a rat problem with fiber in the U.S., although it seems likely that it happens. Judging by the conversations I’ve had with ISPs, and the occasional news article, the primary animal damage to fiber in this country comes from squirrels and gophers.

Squirrels seem to be the primary culprit for animal damage to aerial fiber. Squirrels seem to mainly chew on cables as a way to sharpen their teeth. Squirrel teeth grow up to 8 inches per year, and if squirrels aren’t wearing their teeth down from their diet, they look for other things to chew. There has been speculation that squirrels prefer fiber to other types of cables due to some oil or compound used in the fiber manufacturing process that attracts them.

Years ago, Level 3, a major middle-mile fiber network owner, said that 17% of its aerial fiber outages nationwide were caused by squirrels, with the rest, I assume, from storm damage, auto accidents, and gunshot damage.

Companies use a wide variety of techniques to try to protect from squirrel damage, but anybody who has tried to protect a bird feeder from squirrels knows how persistent they can be. One deterrent is to use hardened cables that are a challenge for squirrels to chew through. However, there have been reported cases where squirrels partially chew through hardened cables, which then lets in water that can cause future damage.

A more common solution is adding a barrier to keep squirrels away from the cable. There are barrier devices that can be mounted on the pole to block squirrels from moving higher. There are also barriers that are mounted where cables meet a pole to keep the squirrels away from the fiber. A few companies have tried more exotic solutions, like deploying ultrasonic blasters to drive squirrels away from fiber.

The most common animal damage to buried fiber comes from gophers. Gophers also seem to like chewing on fiber to sharpen their teeth. There are thirteen species of pocket gophers in the country that range from 5 to 13 inches in length. The two parts of the country with the most pocket gophers are the Midwest plains and the Southwest. Gophers mostly live on roots or on plants they pull down through the soil.

Pocket gophers can cause considerable damage to fiber. These rodents will chew almost anything, and there have been reported outages from gophers that have chewed through buried gas, water, and electric lines. Gophers typically live 6 and 12 inches below the surface and are a particular threat to buried drops.

There are several ways to protect against gophers. The best protection is to bury fiber deep enough to be out of gopher range, but that can add a lot of cost to buried drops. I have a few clients who bore drops and install the fiber in conduit  rather than trench or vibrate the drops directly. Another strategy is to enclose the fiber in a sheath over 3 inches in diameter, which is supposedly too big for a gopher to bite. Another solution is to surround the buried fiber with 6 – 8 inches of gravel of at least 1-inch size – anything smaller gets pushed aside by gophers. These solutions are all expensive, and most ISPs just live with drop cuts.

Technology Shorts January 2026

Sensors That Beat Lidar and Radar

The Boston startup Tarador has developed a sensor that co-founder Matt Carey says beats the performance of radar and lidar. The sensors are solid-state, meaning no moving parts, and use the terahertz band of spectrum that sits between microwaves and infrared light.

The spectrum band allows the sensors to easily pierce rain and fog. The use of higher terahertz frequencies improves the resolution of images by twenty times compared to radar. The sensors have a range of 325 yards. One of the sales points for the new sensors is a target cost to be far less than lidar. This would make the sensors a great solution for driver-assisted and self-driving cars.

Laser Cooling for Data Centers

Sandia Labs, the federally funded energy research lab, has found a way to use lasers to cool things. It’s anti-intuitive since lasers generally generate heat when they hit an object. Scientists at the lab have been working with Maxwell Labs from Minneapolis to develop the technology.

Lasers can create a cooling effect, and this has been used in the past to chill antimatter and to study quantum phenomena. How does this work? Lasers tuned to a specific frequency and targeted at a small area on the surface of a certain element can cool it instead of heating it. Small means an area in the order of hundreds of microns. The technology would utilize a photonic cold plate with components a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair that would channel the cooling lasers. The cold plate would be composed of a millimeter-thick plate of pure gallium arsenide. The scientists believe this can bring as much cooling as the current method of circulating water close to chips. This would be a huge breakthrough since 30% to 40% of the cost of operating a data center is used for cooling. This could also extend the life of chips, which tend to burn out in two years under data center loads.

A Chip that Can Stream Thoughts

A team from Columbia University, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania has collaborated to create a tiny brain implant that could significantly change how people interact with computers.

The brain implant is called a Biological Interface System to Cortex (BISC). The power of this technology is the small size, since the BISC is thinner than a human hair, along with the ability to transmit large amount of data. The implant is a big improvement over current technologies because it is controlled by a single small chip that can be easily implanted inside the skull.

One of the benefits of the BISC implant is the ability to treat conditions like epilepsy, spinal cord injuries, ALS, strokes, and blindness. The chip can hopefully create a communication pathway to the brain to help restore motor, speech, and visual abilities.

Like all new technologies, this could also power other uses, like creating an interface between humans and computers. This team was not focused on that goal, but this is another technology step forward in brain/computer interfaces, a goal of scientists over the last decade.

Ookla’s WISP Report Card

Ookla published a WISP Report Card in November that looks at the speed performance of eight large WISPs – Etheric Networks, GeoLinks, NextLink, Resound Networks, Rise Broadband, Starry, Unwired Broadband, and Wisper Internet. Since this article was published, Starry has been acquired by Verizon. Ookla trended speed test results for each WISP by quarter from Q1 2021 through Q2 2025.

The results of the speed tests for most WISPs were not spectacular. The best performing WISP was Starry, with 67% of customers achieving a speed that meets the FCC definition of broadband of 100/20 Mbps. Rise Broadband performed the worst, with only 6.7% of customers achieving 100/20 Mbps speeds. However, speed isn’t always a fair metric since some of the WISPs sell products with lower speed thresholds. For example, GeoLinks says its most popular product is 30/30 Mbps.

It’s also hard to compare the biggest WISPs because they have different business plans and use different spectrum. For example, Starry uses the 37.1, 37.3, and 37.5 GHz bands of millimeter wave spectrum, mostly serves apartment buildings, and places base stations within a mile of customers. Most of the other WISPs are more traditional rural WISPs using a mix of unlicensed and licensed spectrum. Following is a short summary of each of the eight WISPs.

Etheric Networks.  8.4% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 41/30 Mbps. The company used traditional unlicensed spectrum. The company markets speeds from up to 100 Mbps to up to 1 Gbps.

GeoLinks.  8.7% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 23/20 Mbps. The company uses a combination of LMDS, unlicensed 5 GHz, and millimeter wave spectrum. Marketed plans range from 10/10 to 100/25 Mbps.

NextLink.  24.4% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 68/18 Mbps. The company purchased 1,100 CBRS PALs licenses. The company markets speeds between 50 and 500 Mbps. The company is midway through network upgrades funded by RDOF, so speeds should increase significantly.

Resound Networks. 41.5% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 99/31 Mbps. The company uses unlicensed 5 GHz and 6 GHz spectrum. The company offers speed packages between 75 Mbps and 1 gigabit.

Rise Broadband. 6.7% of customers achieve speeds of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 43/18 Mbps. The company uses a combination of unlicensed spectrum and CBRS. Speed packages range from 50 to 400 Mbps. The company claims to be the largest WISP with 200,000 customers.

Starry. 66.9% of customers achieve 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 202/54 Mbps. Starry uses millimeter wave spectrum to reach apartment buildings in five major metropolitan markets. The company markets speeds between 200 Mbps and 1 Gbps. Speeds have nearly doubled since 2021.

Unwired Broadband  21.8% of customers achieve a speed of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 50/17 Mbps. The company uses a combination of licensed and unlicensed spectrum. Pricing plans start at 100 Mbps.

Wisper Internet. 26.0% of customers achieve a speed of 100/20 Mbps. Median speeds are 53/12 Mbps. The company uses unlicensed 5 GHz and a mix of licensed and unlicensed 2.5 GHz and CBRS spectrum. Speed plans range from 25 to 400 Mbps.

A few things to observe about the group. The article points out that rural WISPs are seeing serious speed competition from Starlink, which will intensify when Starlink starts launching its next generation of satellites in 2026. Some of the WISPs have improved speeds significantly since 2021, although a few have not. Some of the WISPs are doing upgrades to much faster radios and it will be interesting to see a future article showing speed trends in a few years. Like with satellite broadband, the overall weakness of most of the WISPs today is the upload speeds.

Starlink Update

Starlink did something new and recently issued an update discussing the recent history and the outlook for the company. Perhaps the company will update this kind of report periodically.

Coverage and Customers. Starlink says it became available in 42 new countries around the world during 2025. The company says it has over 6 million customers, which includes over 2 million customers in the U.S. The most impressive statistic is that the company added 2.7 million customers worldwide over the past year, an annual growth rate of 82%.

Constellation. SpaceX had more than 100 missions during the year to add 2,300 Starlink satellites to the constellation. At the end of the year, there were more than 9,400 satellites in orbit, including about 100 satellites that are inactive and in the process of deorbiting. Starlink’s target for the first constellation is 12,000 satellites, and the company should be getting close to that goal by the end of 2026.

The company has begun to launch a series of satellites with a polar orbit that will provide coverage to Alaska and other northern areas. The goal was to have 400 satellites in a polar orbit by the end of 2025.

Starlink says that it has over 100 ground station gateway sites in the U.S. that are comprised of over 1,500 antennas for communicating with satellites, with all of the gateway antennas manufactured in Redmond, Washington.

The company says that new satellites are all equipped with lasers that can be used to communicate between satellites.

Speeds and Latency. The report includes a chart of the average speed and latency since early 2022. Starlink measures the performance of the constellation every 15 seconds. The chart shows the average download speed in 2022 was around 23 Mbps, and has grown to over 170 Mbps by late 2025. Latency has improved significantly, starting at 44 milliseconds in 2022, down to around 24 milliseconds in late 2025. Starlink says it is approaching its goal of a stable 20 millisecond latency.

Network Capacity. Probably the major reason for the improved speeds and latency is the constant increase in the overall capacity of the constellation coming from new and better satellites. The report includes a graph showing the overall capacity of the network. At the end of 2022, the constellation had about 40 terabytes of capacity. Near the end of 2025, capacity grew to around 445 terabytes, with a growth curve that is still on a steep climb. The company says it is adding about 5 terabytes of capacity to the network per week with new launches.

Network capacity is going to get a big boost when the new third-generation satellites are launched, sometime in the first half of this year. Each new satellite will have over 1 terabit of download speed capacity and 200 gigabits of upload.

State Broadband Regulation

The industry spends a lot of time focusing on potential federal broadband regulation, and bills introduced in Congress get a lot of press. It’s easy to forget that a lot of broadband legislation happens at the State level,

NCSL (the National Conference of State Legislators) tracks state legislation across the country and wrote an article summarizing state legislation related to broadband issues. 2025 was a busy year for broadband legislation, and there were over 600 broadband bills introduced in state legislatures, with 139 bills enacted into law. The article is a great resource for anybody who wants to dig deeper since it links to the enacted bills that are mentioned in the story.

Poles and Permitting

Seventy of the enacted laws established new state rules related to pole attachments and permitting. We’re likely to see a flurry of more laws in this area in 2026 since BEAD grant rules require states to approve or deny applications for permits on State highways and land be approved or denied within 90 days. The bills highlighted in the article include:

  • Idaho HB 180 requires public utilities to allow space on poles for broadband, cable and telecommunications equipment and allows the Idaho Public Utilities Commission to mediate if parties cannot agree on rates, conditions, and timing. The legislature thought this law was needed since municipal pole owners are excluded from federal pole attachment rules.
  • Indiana SB 502 adopts the timelines required by BEAD and also establishes a timeline for quick mediation of disputes.
  • Maine HB 559 gives more authority to towns over approving the building of new poles. The law allows smaller towns than previously to deny applications to build new poles as long as the reason for the rejection is related to public safety or welfare.
  • Colorado HB 1056 and West Virginia HB 3144 allows for automatic approval of specific kinds of applications for rights-of-way and permits for wireless infrastructure.

Critical Infrastructure Protections

There has been a major uptick in damage and vandalism to communications infrastructure in recent years that has resulted in serious network outages. State legislatures reacted to passing legislation that establishes or creates penalties for those who damage networks. I discussed this topic in several blogs this year, one that asks when network damage might be considered to be terrorism, and one that looks at the trend of declaring broadband networks to be critical infrastructure.

The article provides links to the text of approved legislation that have increased penalties for those who damage communication infrastructure, enacted by Alabama SB 54, Iowa HB 879, Kansas HB 2061, Kentucky SB 64, Louisiana SB 22, Montana HB 257, and West Virginia HB 3504. A few states went even further, and Oklahoma HB 2104 and Texas SB 1646 categorized damage to communications infrastructure as felonies.

Looking Ahead to 2026

It’s likely that there will also be a lot of new legislation in 2026. As mentioned above, States likely will tighten approval times for rights-of-way and permitting on state lands and highways to comply with BEAD. An area that is seeing a lot of discussion is data centers, and it seems likely that states will pass legislation that establishes rules related to the placement, energy use, and environmental issues related to new data centers. While not directly related to broadband, it seems likely that there will be a lot of new State regulations related to AI.

Is There a Fiber Crunch?

There have been a number of articles in the industry press predicting a major shortage of fiber in 2026. Fiber manufacturers have already been working at full capacity due to the large amounts of fiber networks being built. Telcos like AT&T, Frontier, Brightspeed, Windstream, Consolidated, and many others have been busy building fiber. The big cable companies like Comcast, Charter, and Cox have been building fiber. There are numerous fiber overbuilders like Lumos and Metronet, which were purchased by T-Mobile and numerous other companies funded by venture capital. By my math, there was also over $13 billion spent in 2025 to build fiber, funded by grants and subsidies like ARPA, Capital Project Funds, RDOF, ReConnect, EA-CAM, etc.

2026 should also be a busy year for fiber construction. The telcos, cable companies, and fiber overbuilders are all planning a lot of fiber construction. There is still a little over $10 billion in planned fiber construction funded by the same existing subsidy and grant programs, plus there will start to be orders for fiber from BEAD grants as the year goes by.

Fierce Network talked to the major fiber manufacturers like CommScope, Clearfield, Corning, and STL, and was told that the companies are seeing unprecedented demand to provide fiber for AI data centers. This demand comes from both inside new data centers and also for the networks that tie data centers together.

I think people will be surprised to hear the amount of fiber wiring needed inside an AI data center. The Fierce Network article quoted Rahul Puri, the CEO of the Optical Networking Business STL, as saying that an AI data center needs 36 times as much fiber wiring as a normal data center. Anybody who’s ever been in a traditional data center will be floored by that assertion since there are typically large amounts of fiber wiring either under the floors or overhead of racks in a traditional data center. A Fierce Network article in December said that the giant 1 million processor data center being built in Louisiana by Meta will require 8 million miles of individual strands of fiber. Most of these strands will be part of fiber bundles of hundreds to a thousand fibers. The data needed to connect processors is gigantic.

Corning and other vendors are working on new technologies that will provide the needed connectivity within a data center, such as co-packaged optics that place optics and electronics closer together. Other vendors like STL are investigating hollow-core fiber to increase density and decrease latency.

There is also a huge demand for middle-mile fiber to connect AI data centers. Research firm RVA LLC predicts that 92,000 new route miles of fiber will be needed to connect data centers over the next five years. These are also big fiber bundles. My firm worked on a data center proposal last year that didn’t come to fruition, where the data center builder wanted a 512-fiber backhaul network.

One of the biggest challenges for the vendors is that there are different kinds of fiber for different uses, like inside a data center, in middle-mile networks, in last-mile networks, for drops, and inside buildings. The challenge for vendors will be to match manufacturing output with demand.

Vendors and industry experts are predicting that some kinds of fiber could experience ordering backlogs as long as a year. Vendors are likely going to satisfy their largest customers first, so smaller projects might find themselves in a bind.

It will be ironic after all of the hurry up and wait for BEAD if grant projects are badly delayed due to a fiber supply chain problem. But all of the industry predictions are based upon demand staying firm. There  are a number of credible predictions that there will be an AI market contraction in the coming year since data center supply seems to have outstripped the ability to generate the revenues needed to make the industry viable.

The Fiber Broadband Association says it is not expecting big backlogs in the fiber needed to build last-mile networks. I guess none of us will know for sure until we start seeing smaller ISPs place orders for fiber later this year.

Charter to Offer Wireless Backup

Charter plans to leverage one of its competitive advantages and offer wireless backup to residential broadband customers. This service would mean an automatic rollover to cellular data any time Charter’s normal broadband connection goes down.

Charter started to offer this service to businesses during the pandemic in 2020. Charter charges businesses $20 per month for the service. Charter provides business customers using the service with a cellular modem that includes a SIM card. The modem includes up to eight hours of battery backup, meaning that it will kick in when customers lose power – and benefits customers who have backup power for their computers. Customers get unlimited usage while using the cellular network.

The cellular backup doesn’t provide a full-replacement backup. Speeds are going to be a lot slower than the broadband provided by Charter’s HFC network. Functions like static IP will likely not be connected through the wireless connection. The service will only work for customers who can receive a good cell signal from Charter. Charter has begun using some of its own cellular frequencies in parts of some markets, but Charter’s cell service is mostly provided using the Verizon network. I happen to be a Charter broadband customer, but I also live in a total dead zone for Verizon cellular, so this backup service wouldn’t work for me.

Charter’s announcement said that Charter would be offering this to residential customers on similar terms as for businesses. We don’t know yet if this also means $20 per month. This service will be of interest to those who are badly disadvantaged by broadband outages. This makes great sense for a retail store, for example, which might lose the ability to accept credit cards during a broadband outage. It seems likely that a business might benefit from the service even for one or two Charter outages per year.

I have to wonder who this will benefit in the residential market? I lose Charter broadband from time to time, and I always switch my computer to use data from my cellphone. The change takes a few minutes to restore broadband. What goes dark during a Charter outage is the TV and any other devices in our house that rely on broadband. While we have a ton of WiFi devices in the house, none of them are critical. For example, we don’t have smoke detectors or doorbell cameras that rely on WiFi. I imagine folks who rely on WiFi for such devices might be interested in the wireless backup service. Like most homes, I don’t have a backup generator for power outages, so this service wouldn’t give me any real benefit during a power outage.

The product does raise an interesting question. I live in a city where the vast majority of homes use either Charter or AT&T for home broadband. I have to think that any time that one of these ISPs has a broadband network crash, a lot of people switch to a cellular network. It’s hard to think that those networks don’t get super busy and slow down during broadband outages. The Charter service will drive even more people to the Verizon cellular network. Perhaps the cellular networks are more robust than I imagine, but it has to be burden when the cellular networks are suddenly inundated by a lot of normal home and business broadband customers using cellular data.

Falling FWA Speeds

Ookla recently published a report looking at broadband speeds being delivered with FWA cellular broadband offered by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.

The report includes the chart shown below that tracks the median download speeds of each carrier, by quarter, since the third quarter of 2023.

There are some interesting stories in the chart:

  • At the end of the third quarter of 2023, the median download speed was nearly the same for all three carriers, between 140 and 150 Mbps.
  • Since then, T-Mobile speeds have increased significantly, peaking at 221.7 Mbps at the end of the first quarter of 2025. T-Mobile’s median speeds are now twice the speeds of AT&T.
  • The Ookla blog talks about the fact that speed for all three carriers dropped from the second quarter of this year to the end of the third quarter. AT&T dropped from 114.3 Mbps to 104.6 Mbps. T-Mobile dropped from 221.7 Mbps to 209.1 Mbps. Verizon has the largest drop from 167.3 Mbps to 137.8 Mbps.

Ookla asks the question of why speeds dropped during those two quarters. They expect that some of the drop is due to foliage that slows down cellular signals from late fall until autumn. Foliage is clearly an issue in many parts of the country.

Ookla also asks the question if the networks are experiencing problems due to oversubscription. The three carriers have seen extraordinary growth. At the end of the third quarter of 2023 there were just under 7 million FWA customers. By the end of the third quarter of this year, the companies had just under 14.5 million customers, having added over 7.5 million FWA customers in two years.

It’s clear that FWA customers put a lot of stress on a cellular network. Assuming that FWA customers are the same as other broadband customers, the average U.S. broadband customer used over 640 gigabytes of broadband per month at the end of the third quarter, compared to 17 gigabytes for the average cellphone customer. From a bandwidth perspective, an FWA customer uses 38 times more cell site resources than a cellular customer.

The questions that Ookla is asking are not easily answered because FWA is not a homogeneous broadband product. Customers must be located near a tower to get the fastest speeds, and speeds drop off as the distance between customers and a tower increases. Consider AT&T, which has been using FWA as a replacement for DSL. This likely means AT&T is offering FWA to customers at a greater distance from towers than the other two carriers, in order to provide that copper alternative. That alone could contribute to AT&T’s lower median speeds.

The FWA market isn’t going to remain static. AT&T recently upgraded 23,000 cell sites with the 3.45 MHz spectrum the company acquired from EchoStar. That should cause a big upward spike in AT&T FWA speeds this quarter.

The Ookla report is fascinating. It will be interesting to watch the FWA speeds over time to better understand seasonality, foliage, and the impact of rapid customer growth.

World Internet Statistics December 2025

At the start of a new year, I thought it would be interesting to take a fresh look at the state of the Internet around the world. The following statistics come from the DataReportal Digital 2026 Global Overview Report.

Population. There are 8.25 billion people on the planet, up 69 million over the last year, an increase of 0.8%. 58.4% of people now live in an urban center. The overall literacy rate in the world is 87.4%.

Internet. The number of people using the Internet has grown to 6.04 billion, or 73.2% of the people on Earth. That number grew by 294 million in the last year, a growth rate of 5.1%. This means that 2.2 billion people still don’t have access to the Internet.

86.5% of urban residents around the world have access to the Internet, while only 54.5% of rural residents have access.

The countries with the lowest levels of Internet adoption are North Korea (<1%), Burundi (11.1%), Central African Republic (12.0%), South Sudan (13.2%), and Chad (13.2%).

The highest rate of Internet adoption is in northern Europe (97.7%), followed by western Europe (95.1%). The lowest adoption is in eastern Africa (26.0%) and central Africa (33.5%). North America is at 93.3%. 75.7% of men around the world have access to the Internet compared to 70.7% of women.

Worldwide median download broadband speeds have grown from 82.8 Mbps in August 2023 to 104.4 Mbps in August 2025.

The fastest median download speeds in the world are in Singapore (394.3 Mbps), Chile (347.4 Mbps), Hong Kong (332.7 Mbps), the United Arab Emirates (327.6 Mbps), and France (308.0 Mbps). The slowest median download speeds are in Syria (3.4 Mbps), Cuba (3.5 Mbps), Afghanistan (4.5 Mbps), Ethiopia (9.4 Mbps), and Libya (11.0 Mbps).

The average weekly time spent using broadband online per Internet user worldwide was 33 hours, 27 minutes.

Cell Coverage. There are 5.78 billion unique cellular users in the world, meaning that 70.1% of people have a cellphone. That number increased by 108 million during the last year, an annual growth rate of 1.9%. Ericsson says that 86.9% of phones in use are smartphones.

Worldwide median download cellular speeds have more than doubled in the last two years, from 43.2 Mbps in August 2023 to 90.7 Mbps in August 2025.

The fastest median download speeds in the world are in the United Arab Emirates (614.4 Mbps), Qatar (511.4 Mbps), Kuwait (414.6 Mbps), Brazil (289.4 Mbps), and South Korea (224.5 Mbps). The slowest median download cellular speeds are in Bolivia (14.7 Mbps), Belarus (18.6 Mbps), Eswatini (19.7 Mbps), Pakistan (24.3 Mbps), and Syria (24.7 Mbps).

Social Media. There are 5.66 billion users of social media, an increase of 259 million users and a growth rate of 4.8%.

The worldwide average time spent using social media is 18 hours 36 minutes per week.

The ten most widely used social media apps, in order, are YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Messenger, SnapChat, Telegram, Pinterest, and Threads.

Devices. The devices used to access the Internet (as a percentage of total world users) are smartphones (93.7%), laptops or desktops (59.6%), connected televisions (31.6%), and tablets (28.0%).

The percentage of worldwide broadband traffic, by device used: cellphones (59.1%), laptops or computers (39.3%), tablets (1.6%), other devices (0.03%)

33% of adults now own some form of smart wrist device.