Three pieces this week, and one thread running under all of them: the industry keeps measuring the wrong thing. SpaceX has told the F-C-C that Starlink makes billions in rural subsidies pointless, and Drew argues the terrestrial side is going to lose the scalability argument no matter how hard it fights. The fight worth having is affordability.
Also in this episode: what actually breaks when a room full of creators all hits upload at the same moment, and a hard look at the Broadband Communities Summit agenda in Houston, where the money and the builds get two days of stage time and the households on the other end get almost none.
SpaceX, the F-C-C, and why satellite already won the scalability argument. Social Fest 2026 and the difference between a coverage problem and a capacity problem. The Broadband Communities Summit agenda: a broken ruler, a missing affordability gap, and two bullet points for LEO.
There's a two-day broadband conference in Houston this week, and in the whole program, the word spectrum shows up once as part of a cable company's name. No CBRS, no six GHz, nobody talking about Wi-Fi eight, and satellite, the single most threatening technology to everybody sitting in that room, gets two bullet points. That's the state of the conversation right now. This podcast is generated by telepost.ai using my words, my voice, and my ideas. Check out Telepost and make sure to tell a friend. I'm Drew Lentz, and this is the Waves Weekly Rundown where I work through what's actually happening in wireless and broadband instead of what the maps say. Three things this week. SpaceX telling the FCC that rural subsidies are pointless and why I think the terrestrial side is fighting the wrong argument. What happens to a network when two thousand creators hit upload at the same second, and my outlook heading into the broadband community summit, where I read the agenda and came away concerned.
SpaceX has told the FCC that Starlink has made billions of dollars a year in rural broadband subsidies pointless. Rural telcos and electric co-ops are pushing back on the technical merits. I want to skip past the part everybody's arguing about, because I think the terrestrial side is going to lose that argument, and I think we should stop spending energy on it. Satellite is infinitely scalable, it seems. There's no stopping the number of birds these guys can put in space. Starlink V3 is pushing a terabyte per second. Amazon Leo is pushing a terabyte. Once you add laser links between the satellites, you've got an almost unlimited amount of data coming down to the user terminals. The only time satellite ever really failed in rural connectivity was latency, and low Earth orbit fixed that. So from a technology perspective, it's going to work, it's going to do everything they need it to do. That fight's
over. Here's the fight that isn't over affordability. Go into some of the most economically challenged areas like in South Texas, and the map shows coverage, multiple wireline and wireless providers. There may be fiber optic service everywhere, and there's still a gap because the people who live there can't afford to subscribe. That's true of satellite too. $100 a month, $50 a month, whatever it is, in a lot of communities it still creates the same gap. Available and affordable are not the same word. So who wins if the FCC buys this? The satellite providers, obviously, and not just the current ones. Amazon Leo and anyone else who pops up a constellation later, the losers are the wireless internet service providers, the local telephone companies, anyone who took government money to build or maintain the network they already have, and municipal broadband. Think about a city like Far, Texas, which built its own fiber network to connect one of the most broadband challenged communities in the United States. No more USDA, no more FCC. Big money gets to keep doing what it's doing, and the local guys get choked out. The ones who sponsor the baseball teams and the local events and give back to the charities. They lose the subsidies and they were the ones actually ingrained in the community. If USF dries up, the people with the money end up taking it. In the short game, sure, they'll deploy more broadband faster, but small investments over time will probably yield a better result for the community. So if you're a co-op breaking ground next quarter, don't change your plans. Keep the build on schedule. Don't pause on the assumption that federal money was the only thing making it viable and start mapping out the grant and stimulus paths you'd use if USF goes away, rather than waiting to find out. Then build and publish community-specific pricing, municipality backed plans. That's your real differentiator against a $50 or $100 satellite bill. Stop arguing that satellite can't scale and start arguing the part you can actually win. Because at the end of the day, you can rely on your neighbor in your community more than you can rely on a corporation to do what's right for your area.
2,000 people in a ballroom, and every one of them hits upload at the same moment. That's not a coverage problem, that's a capacity problem, and they are not the same job. Socialfest 2026 is heading to the Rio Gran Valley with creator Keith Lee as the keynote, and the announcement tells you most of what you need to know about the network that's gonna have to carry it. A creator crowd doesn't use Wi-Fi the way a conference crowd uses Wi-Fi. If the people designing that room treat it like any other three-day event, they're gonna have a bad weekend. Coverage answers whether there's signal in the corner of the ballroom, capacity answers whether 2,000 phones can all push video out at the same second, which is exactly what a room full of creators came there to do. And here's the part people forget. The RF environment is constantly changing as devices enter and leave that room. It breathes all day long. So if you've got a system that's constantly optimizing itself, be ready for the moment when that optimization starts serving the network instead of the users. Changing channels, changing power, changing settings on the fly during the most important minutes of the event. Now who gets the phone call when it goes sideways? Unfortunately, it's usually the event director. People assume that person coordinates everything, so the complaint lands there first whether or not they have any control over the access points in the ceiling. Which means it's on the event director to stand up an IT team that can handle that kind of load before the doors open, not after. Pass point is where I'd spend effort next. People walk into the room and their phones connect automatically using credentials they already have safely and securely. No hunting for an SSID, no guessing which network has better signal. At a festival that matters twice over. The onboarding experience is the first thing an attendee touches, and the help desk cue is the first thing that tells you the network is failing. Then there's the money question, which nobody likes. Sometimes the festival springs for the network. If they don't have the budget, it falls to the venue or the convention center. Last year it was the city of Mission that did it. The honest answer is that nobody has a standing budget line for event Wi-Fi, which is exactly why the question gets settled late. Settle it early. And 6G cures, ask what percentage of the phones in that room could already use it, and the answer is probably all of them. This is a crowd that thrives on the newest hardware, the newest phones, the newest tablets. The part that might not support it is the buildings. Some of that is budget, some of it is where the gear sits in its life cycle. A good deal of it is that there's never been a compelling reason to change. So the equipment in the ceiling stays a generation or two behind the equipment walking in the door. That's a fixable problem. If you're a venue that hosts events where the latest and greatest tech is the featured use case of the audience attending, maybe that's the thing worth focusing on when the refresh comes around.
Bastrop County won $47 million. Monaghan's raised $625,000 locally through a Chamber of Commerce fundraiser. Bastrop County Cares is completely volunteer-led with a retired geologist credited as a GIS volunteer on the panel. Those are all on the broadband community summit agenda in Houston, and every one of them is a fundraising story. Not one is a story about what actually changed in the household afterwards. The summit's been around more than 20 years, and it deals with broadband in communities and municipalities. Day one is getting the money and building it, funding milestones, public-private partnerships, private investment acquisitions, real wins, and there's been some cool movement in that space over the last year. Day two turns into whether what got built actually works and who's checking. It kicks off around 9.15 with the USDA on RUS compliance in a session called Built to Last or Built to Pass. And there's a day two panel that asks in its own bullet points whether performance testing sample sizes actually reflect true network health. That's the part that gets me. It feels like the industry is finally grading its own homework and it's grading with the same ruler that was broken in the first place. Field sampling, speed tiers, coverage maps, same broken things year after year. Maybe this is the year we do something about it. We'll find out. What's missing is the affordability gap. In my community down in South Texas, that's still the number one reason connectivity isn't happening. People can't afford it. The digital equity language is there. Angela Sefer from the National Digital Inclusion Alliance is on the keynote stage Wednesday, and there's a session on the Cleveland model and bridging that city's digital divide. I hope they get to affordability because when SpaceX is telling the FCC that no more subsidies are needed because coverage is ubiquitous, that's an issue. It may be ubiquitous. It may not be affordable. A Ferrari is a great car, not everybody can afford one. The other thing I keep coming back to is that the last mile has moved indoors. It's no longer can we get it to the house? It's what happens once it's inside the home or inside the MDU or the apartment complex. Where does connectivity go from there? And that indoor last mile is a radio problem, which is why the near silence about radios matters. There's one radio session with the Ruckus and my buddies over at Cambium, but the technical side isn't front and center. That's a little crazy given what's coming from the FCC on spectrum auctions and who's going to take advantage of it. Satellite gets two bullet points, one on the rural panel about alternative technologies, one on disaster resilience. LEO as a technology appears zero times. The only Leo on the program is Leo Anderson, the CTO of Paul Bunyan Communications on the esports panel. Two sessions for the technology that's going to reshape both rural connectivity and all the funding these projects run on. NRECA will be there. NDIA will be there. I hope somebody puts the SpaceX filing to them while they're on stage. And AI shows up only as OPEX and as load on the network. There's a data center's broadband hub session on fiber and energy demands, and Dr. Nickel Turner Lee from Brookings closes day one. But nobody's selling AI to subscribers. Honestly, that restraint is notable given how AI dominates every other conference right now.
So I'll be there and I'll be talking tech on the show floor, even if the stage is all finance, asking the one question the ribbon cuttings never answer. Who's monitoring these networks after everybody goes home? The thing that ties this whole week together is that we keep measuring the easy stuff. Signal exists, money got raised, ribbon got cut, whether a household can afford the bill, whether 2,000 phones can actually get their video out, whether anybody checked a year later, those are harder to put on a slide. They're also the only ones that matter. If any of this hit a nerve, go read the pieces in full. There's more detail in each of them than I could fit here. I'm Drew Lentz. Keep your eye on the prize and take care of your community.
