If you have every played around with a spectrum analyzer, it is pretty fascinating to scan the airwaves. You can google it, there are tons of sites on how to tu

If you have every played around with a spectrum analyzer, it is pretty fascinating to scan the airwaves. You can google it, there are tons of sites on how to turn an rpi or latop into a spectrum analyzer using an inexpensive USB device (HackRF etc.) But what amazes me is how much of the RF spectrum is seemingly unused, 100's of Mhz scan by with scant detection of any sort of signal. Checking online often you are in huge swaths of spectrum reserved for the military or Satellite or something but when you scan it there's nothing there. You scan the commercial broadcast bands AM/FM/TV and the cellular bands, police fire, air and they are jam packed with activity. Most of the spectrum is not really being used. I applaud the CRBS move by the FCC, it's the first time I have seen them pry some spectrum out of the hands of the DoD. But it's a tiny slice of what they and others are just sitting on. The reason I bring this up, is there was a quote in the article " "stringing lines across telephone poles is risky with storms an ever-present threat. He needs to include fixed wireless as an alternative when considering how to budget for connecting the entire state" The problem there is that with CBRS or other bands available now, is that you still need fiber, the 5G Signal only travels so far, you need a huge fiber backbone network to connect all the cell sites together. There is really no way to have it all wireless, there's just not enough spectrum. But... if say there were more. Well, then it is conceivable one could chain together cell sites using 5G IAB, but you would need probably 10 times more spectrum that what is available with CBRS now to have any kind of bandwidth that one would consider broadband. Just an observation that I think gets sort of overlooked sometimes because it is based on technical knowledge of how wireless networks work. The reason there are really only the big 3 is because it is incredibly capital intensive to build out a network due to the number of cell sites you have to build in order to get the frequency reuse necessary to have broadband wireless and a huge fiber backbone network to connect all those cell sites back to an MTSO. If anyone is serious about having rural broadband in a country as vast as the US, in my view, the only practical was would be with much larger amounts of spectrum allocated to the effort. Which could be done in a similar arrangement as CBRS with a military preemption arrangement.