Technical Resource Shortage. There is already a growing shortage of fiber resources that includes engineers, construction companies, and fiber consultants. The upcoming $16.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program will create a resource shortage in 2020 for those who can help companies seek grant funding. Once the grants are awarded, the size of the program will add stress to the resources needed to build networks. Companies that don’t line up their experts early might find themselves without help.

Broadband Price Increases Are Now Routine. The biggest ISPs, including Comcast, AT&T, Charter, Verizon, and others have now made it clear that they will be raising broadband rates annually—at least in the majority of their markets where they don’t face real competition. Anybody building a business plan for a new market has to decide how to predict future rate increases.

5G Cellphones Will Prove to be a Joke. At least for 2020, almost everybody who spends extra for a 5G handset is going to be disappointed. The companies deploying millimeter wave spectrum are doing it in limited downtown areas of major cities—and the speeds are only faster outdoors. Carriers implementing low frequencies like 600 MHz and 850 MHz admit that service won’t be any faster than 4G LTE.

FCC Will Eliminate the Last Vestiges of Regulation. The FCC has been actively tearing down regulations affecting the biggest ISPs. The agency has completely deregulated broadband and killed net neutrality. They’re in the process of gutting the use of unbundled network elements. They’ve preempted local authority on the placement of wireless infrastructure. Since there is a chance that the administration will change at the end of the year, the FCC will kill as many regulations as they can during 2020.

T-Mobile / Sprint Merger Will be Approved. While there is a lot of opposition to the merger, the reality is that Sprint is not particularly viable as a cellular carrier. The biggest cable companies are entering the cellular markets and will push down urban cellular prices. Dish Networks seems to have a viable plan to become a major carrier if the T-Mobile/Sprint merger is approved.

Courts Will Chip Away at the 5G Pole Attachment Rules. The authority of the FCC to override local policy for the placement of cellular infrastructure boils down to a state versus federal jurisdiction battle. The courts have already said that cellular companies must heed some historic preservation and aesthetics rules. Ultimately the courts will weaken, but not kill the FCC rules, giving cellular carriers more rights than they historically had, but not full carte blanche authority to place devices anywhere.

State Net Neutrality Will Be Almost as Powerful as Federal Policy. It will be hard for the big ISPs to comply with net neutrality rules in California and Washington without complying everywhere. It’s also likely that more states will pass similar net neutrality rules.

The RDOF Grants Will Fund Poor Broadband Solutions. Unfortunately, the $16.4 billion RDOF grants will award some grant money to technologies that are not future-proofed. Since the grants can be awarded for technologies that deliver broadband speeds of as little as 25/3 Mbps, we’ll see money go to technology solutions that might be obsolete before the end of the RDOF implementation period.

Cellular Networks Will Continue to Degrade. The nationwide use of cellular data is currently doubling every two years, which is greatly stressing cellular network quality. The cellular carriers need to implement massive numbers of small cells, add new spectrum, and fully implement 5G to keep up with the growing demand. Since those solutions will take 3–7 years to implement, cellular network quality is going to get a lot worse before the problems are solved.

Household Bandwidth Usage Will Continue to Grow. OpenVault says the average home now uses 275 gigabytes of data per month, with cord-cutting households using 520 GB per month. Opensignal and Cisco both report that household broadband usage continues to grow rapidly, at about 21% annually, or a doubling every four years. There is nothing to suggest this growth will be slowing.