By the end of 2029, fiber operators will own about 33% of the North American broadband market, with cable's share slipping from roughly 62% today to about 53%, according to Jeff Heynen, Dell’Oro Group vice president-broadband access and home networking. In a Fiber Broadband Association webinar Wednesday, Heynen said fixed wireless access's market share will likely peak at around 13%. He said fixed wireless subscriber growth will probably top off in 2026 and then start to moderate. Low earth orbit broadband will ultimately capture 2%-4% of subscribers, Heynen said, and cable DOCSIS 4.0 upgrades have slowed somewhat, in part because of component availability issues. Last year was tough for network equipment vendors, as operators were still working off overly large inventories from 2022 and 2023, perhaps due to too-aggressive purchasing. Heynen said broadband providers were largely working off excess inventory in 2024, and purchasing is returning to normal. Purchases of passive optical networks' optical line termination ports were down 40% in 2024, while cable providers' buys of DOCSIS customer premises equipment were down 23%.

Gigabit Fiber, a Dallas-based ISP, appeared to call on the FCC to scrap the USF in response to the commission’s “Delete Delete Delete” notice (see 2503140049). “The current USF system is outdated, economically burdensome, and unconstitutional,” the company said in a filing posted Wednesday in docket 25-133. “It has a storied history of waste, fraud and abuse and is a tax and spend fix to a problem that no longer exists. Some of this legal framework dates to the era of the Pony Express, telegraph lines and subsidized railroads.” Gigabit Fiber said it imposes USF fees on some of its services and then doesn’t know what happens to the money. “We assume the money finds its way to the US Treasury and then in turn some is used to fund dubious programs with the balance lost to waste, fraud and abuse.”

DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi called Zayo’s acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business “a milestone acquisition” for the company. Ganzi confirmed on LinkedIn last week that the sale price was $4.25 billion. Combining the fiber sale with that of its small-cell business to EQT, Crown Castle announced a total price of $8.5 billion (see 2503140021). “This incredible network adds 90,000 route miles in key metro areas,” Ganzi said, including New York City, Los Angeles and Miami, “the places where high speed, low latency routes are needed and growing.” DigitalBridge is a part owner of Zayo.

Totah Communications asked the FCC for a waiver after the Oklahoma-based company missed a Connect America Fund filing deadline because of “technical difficulties.” Those “difficulties prevented the proper certification of performance testing, in which the data had been uploaded and was in full compliance with the testing requirements,” said a filing Friday in docket 10-90. “The subsequent missed certification, which is procedural rather than substantive, has no impact on the Commission’s or [the Universal Service Administrative Co.’s] ability to assess Totah’s compliance with broadband deployment requirement,” it said. “Totah’s penalty was assessed as a pro-rata amount of its universal support allocation for each day beyond the compliance deadline,” which amounts to an estimated $186,278, “an extremely severe penalty given that Totah fulfilled all other testing requirements and one that will impose a financial hardship on the company as it seeks to provide voice and broadband to its Southeastern Kansas and Northeastern Oklahoma customers.”

The FCC Wireline Bureau granted in part Broadband VI’s (BBVI) petition for waiver of its 40% deployment milestone deadline under the Connect USVI Fund, but only until June 30. The original deadline was Dec. 31, 2024. The company sought a waiver through the end of this year. “We find that the public interest is served by granting an additional brief waiver to allow BBVI to come into compliance as quickly as possible with commitments it made as a recipient” of USF support “for the benefit of all residents in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” said an order in Monday’s Daily Digest.

Facing a withholding of some USF high-cost support due to an untimely certification, RiverStreet Communications of North Carolina is asking the FCC Wireline Bureau for a waiver of agency rules concerning submitting annual reporting information. In a docket 10-90 request posted Friday, RiverStreet said that initially it inadvertently failed to certify its Q3 2023 data, though that filing was certified weeks later. It said the Universal Service Administrative Co. notified it last month that a portion of RiverStreet's high-cost support payment would be withheld. RiverStreet said the lost money will delay its planned broadband deployment to the unserved and underserved in rural North Carolina. The shutdown of the performance measures module for much of last fall prevented it from certifying when it was supposed to, it said, subjecting it to notably higher penalties.

The FCC Wireline Bureau on Friday set forth procedures for protecting access to proprietary or confidential information filed in a proceeding on the Alternative Connect America Cost Model program (see 2306260044). “Under the Enhanced A-CAM mechanism, electing carriers receive high-cost support calculated based on model-estimated costs in exchange for deploying 100/20 Mbps or faster broadband to locations without such service at the time of the offer and maintaining or improving such service to locations to which the electing carriers already provided at least that level of service,” the bureau said. “While we are mindful of the sensitive nature of some of the information involved, we are also mindful of the general right of the public, and our desire for the public, to participate in this proceeding in a meaningful way.”

The FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau sought comment Friday on a petition by Sorenson Communications and CaptionCall on allowable costs for providing telecommunications relay services (TRS). Comments are due April 14, replies April 28, in dockets 03-123 and 10-51. The redacted petition asks that allowable TRS costs include funds associated with “responding to and defending against FCC enforcement proceedings related to a provider’s compliance with the TRS rules” and "educating members of the U.S. Congress and other policymakers on the TRS program generally and a TRS provider’s operations specifically,” the bureau said. It noted that Sorenson filed a similar petition in 2023.

Comments are due April 14 on FCC-proposed changes to its submarine cable rules, said a notice for Thursday's Federal Register. Replies in the docket 24-523 proceeding are due May 12. The subsea cable NPRM was adopted unanimously by the FCC commissioners in November (see 2411210006) and proposes rules changes that address national security and law enforcement threats to cables, including a three-year periodic reporting requirement for submarine cable landing licenses.

The FCC’s notice of apparent liability against Telnyx is an abuse of power and should be rescinded, said Free State Foundation’s Seth Cooper in a blog post Wednesday. The Feb. 4 Telnyx NAL (see 2503050026) amounts to “regulation by enforcement,” where an agency imposes new requirements on regulatees in enforcement proceedings instead of through a rulemaking, Cooper wrote. Regulation by enforcement “deprives regulated entities of the ability to know and follow the law, so it is contrary to the requirement of fair notice and the prohibition of unfair surprise that are recognized in Supreme Court's Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause jurisprudence.”