Adelstein Warns of Continuing White House Bias in Favor of Fiber

Getting Congress to approve rules that include wireless as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was one of the “greatest moments” in his long career in Washington, Jonathan Adelstein, president of the Wireless Infrastructure Association, said at the South Wireless Summit, streamed from Nashville Tuesday. Wireless came very close to being left out of the broadband spending in the act, he said. Adelstein sees a continuing bias in the White House in favor of fiber over wireless, he warned.

The Commerce Department “gets it” that wireless has to play a big role in the buildout, said Adelstein, a Democrat. Some people in the White House “don’t know what they’re doing, frankly, and they are pushing really hard for fiber,” he said. Little spending is likely to start before next year, he said. Adelstein expects broadband maps to be unavailable until late summer, he said. He leaves WIA within the next two months to join DigitalBridge as managing director and head-global policy and public investment, beginning his full-time employment there June 1 (see 2203020051 or 2203020056).

Congress and the White House were both focused on fiber for all the broadband funding approved in the infrastructure bill, Adelstein said. “Their belief was you have to have fiber solutions to really make it work,” he said: “There was sort of this cabal that wanted fiber.” Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “convinced everybody that wireless was not going to be able to keep up with consumer demand,” Adelstein said.

Adelstein said he was called to testify at the Senate as a vote neared on the infrastructure bill (see 2106220066). “I was able to make the case for wireless at a really special time, and I was able to make it in the Senate, which was exactly where the deal was being cut,” he said. “We made the forceful case that wireless is able to give you mobility, is able to be upgradeable,” he said: “It’s more resilient. It’s deployed more quickly.”

Wheeler told us he’s glad Adelstein was listening, even if they disagree. “Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that future-proofing with fiber also provides the infrastructure that is essential for wireless,” Wheeler said: “There is a role for both, fiber first and wireless as an ancillary and mobile service.” The White House didn’t comment.

Provisions added to the infrastructure bill focusing on the speed of deployment help the wireless industry, Adelstein said. “If you want to build fiber out … it’s going to take a long, long time, maybe a decade,” he said. Wireless depends on fiber connections, he noted. With deep fiber “we’re going to be able to get those rural towers easier and more quickly powered up and get backhaul,” he said.

Adlestein said when he was overseeing a rural broadband program as administrator of the Rural Utilities Service during the early part of the Obama administration, then-Vice President Joe Biden had a message for him, “Give yourselves more freaking flexibility,” he said: “I have never forgotten it.” That was the message of the wireless industry when it worked on the infrastructure bill, Adelstein said: Biden “has got a little bit more wisdom than some of the staff that’s working for him.”

As industry waits for the biggest part of funding to become available, the wireless industry is already benefiting from affordable connectivity program and other programs, Adelstein said. “Cash is flowing in our industry right now,” he said. “Industry is going full tilt. … The carriers are active on 5G. The fiber buildout is really explosive right now on its own. Small cells are picking up, private-enterprise radio.”

Supply chain, workforce and equipment shortages will cause delays as $45 billion in the infrastructure bill is spent, Adelstein said. “It’s going to be very difficult to get that money out there quickly,” he said: “Policymakers have no idea. … They’re really not up to speed on how bad it’s going to be and how bad the delays are going to be.” There’s already a “bottleneck” in getting fiber deployed, he said.

Dave Mayo, executive vice president-network development at Dish Network, said at the conference networks are changing rapidly. The telecom switch is being displaced, he said. “It’s all in the cloud, which is very, very different,” he said. The way Dish is building its network with an open architecture means core network elements are close to customers, he said. Legacy networks “are not built to be able to do that,” he said.

All the carriers will be changing their networks to make them more flexible over the next five years, said Tony Sabatino, Diamond Communications chief technical officer. Infrastructure companies will see “a whole new type of customer” with 2 billion connected devices expected in 2027, he said: “We kind of look at how we enable those devices. … All the assets that we have will be valuable as we start growing networks, figuring out how we’re going to grow millimeter-wave for those who haven’t spent money on millimeter-wave.” The focus will shift from handsets to connected devices, he said.