U.S. Broadband Summit, Washington DC – Preparation. PON. Previous experience. Persistence. These are just some of the attributes states should be looking for when choosing ISPs to carry out builds for the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, Verizon executive Kevin Smith told attendees at Fierce’s U.S. Broadband Summit on Tuesday.
“The ISPs and the builders also have to have those people and those teams internally that are making sure that you’re delivering what you signed up for,” he said. “Whatever you agreed to in that bid, you need all that program management. It’s not just about hanging the fiber. That’s only one aspect of this entire thing.”
In addition to massive amounts of prep work and finishing the initial deployment, Smith said ISPs should be capable of executing on the “long-term care and feeding of that network over time.”
Smith, who is Verizon’s VP of Network Engineering and Operations, advised new and small ISPs to be thorough when preparing their bids to ensure they can actually deliver what is promised. That means taking their time and doing “a lot of socializing” within their organization to run the bid plans by different departments. He stressed it is especially important to vet the proposal with the ISP’s outside plant and engineering teams.
Why? “These are the folks that are on the ground. They’re local and they know what’s good and what’s bad in terms of ‘you’re never going to do that,’” Smith said. He recounted that Verizon submitted a bid in one area where it knew it would need to run buried cable but had assumed it would be digging in soil. Instead, it hit “ledge,” which is also known as bedrock.
“We kind of missed that,” he said. “That’s a big difference when you’re drilling or digging soil versus you’re doing ledge. So really socializing these within your teams is really a big deal here to make sure you get the cost directionally correct but also the build timelines.”
BEAD potential
Verizon has been pretty coy about its BEAD plans, stating only that it is looking at prospects to run more fiber within its ILEC footprint.
Smith didn’t drop any prospective passings numbers during his presentation, but according to a report issued by New Street Research in July there a little over 600,000 BEAD subsidy eligible locations within Verizon’s ILEC territory. That compares to nearly 1.2 million in AT&T’s ILEC range, 1 million in Brightspeed’s, 920,000 in Lumen’s and around 550,000 in Frontier’s.
The exec said he’s a “fiber guy through and through” but noted when it looks at some of the areas eligible for BEAD funding, “the cost goes up exponentially” when you get to passing the more remote 1-3% of population.
Asked whether it can’t just close the gap and win BEAD bids anyway using its fixed wireless access (FWA) service, Smith said “not necessarily.” That’s because FWA, like fiber, is subject to hurdles related to geography – in its case, things like mountains and foliage can block a signal’s path. In those cases, a new cell site is required.
But “going and building a cell site to provide fixed wireless access for three customers doesn’t work financially,” he said. So, while FWA “needs to be in the mix” alongside fiber, it still comes with its own challenges, he concluded.