Closing the Digital Divide with Rural Broadband
The estimated 42 million U.S. consumers who currently lack broadband internet service offer tremendous growth opportunities for ISPs—especially with the tailwind provided by government-led initiates to expand rural broadband and close the digital divide. However, much work needs to be done for service providers to capitalize on this potential and expand network functionality to more subscribers. Longstanding networking challenges such as IPv4 exhaustion and the transition to IPv6 will need to be readdressed—often for the first time in many years.
A recent survey by A10 Networks and Gatepoint Research, Insights 2022: Rural Broadband Expansion, explores how the companies leading efforts to close the digital divide are managing IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 migration. Executives at regional ISPs, mobile network companies, fiber-to-the home (FTTH) providers, regional telcos, and web and cloud hosting companies shared their current plans, concerns, and priorities—and revealed the obstacles that remain to be overcome in this critical effort.
Top Priority: Driving Growth
U.S. ISPs are currently seeing strong customer growth across multiple access technologies. Nationwide, broadband subscribers reached 135.5 million in early 2021, including 26.5 million FTTH subscribers, 87.4 million cable broadband subscribers, and 19 million DSL subscribers. Mobile broadband and fixed wireless access (FWA) are booming as well, with more than 360 million 5G subscriptions expected in the North America region by 2026.
Survey respondents confirmed this trend, with 89 percent of respondents reporting strong growth rates—up to 20 percent or more in some cases. Continuing this positive momentum is the top objective cited by over half of the executives surveyed, surpassing important objectives of improving their subscribers’ experience, strengthening security, making new investments, and reducing costs combined. However, accomplishing this goal will be more easily said than done.
IPv4 Exhaustion Complicates Rural Broadband Expansion
As they rush to expand broadband coverage to unconnected communities and customers, service providers run into a critical constraint: IP connectivity. With free IPv4 addresses already fully allocated by the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) and other regional RIRs, service providers who have exhausted their own allocation have to look elsewhere; 21 percent are already leasing public IPv4 addresses from another service provider. With market prices peaking at a high of $59 each over the summer, or $590,000 to support 10,000 subscribers, the economics of this strategy can be unforgiving for companies already funding the buildout of new FTTH locations at an estimated cost of $1,800 each.
While 75 percent of respondents still have an allocation of available IPv4 addresses, this won’t be true for long. Only 21 percent of those surveyed feel comfortable they have sufficient allocation for the foreseeable future, and more than half expect to run out in three years or less. With fewer resources or scale than their Tier 1 counterparts, and fewer subscribers per investment dollar, regional and rural ISPs need a more cost-effective way to mitigate IPv4 exhaustion.
Making the Transition to IPv6—Somehow, Someday
The transition to IPv6 has vastly expanded the supply of available IP addresses, but it doesn’t solve the immediate issue of IPv4 exhaustion for the regional ISPs who are largely responsible for expanding broadband access. For the many budget-constrained ISPs that have previously built their networks on an IPv4 foundation, the conversion to IPv6 is a long and costly project with significant risk to service availability and applications from such a major change.
Many older subscriber and network devices are not IPv6 compatible, and most traffic and web sites are still based on IPv4. As a result, because the new standard lacks backward compatibility with its predecessor, even those service providers that manage to convert their networks to IPv6 using dual stack will still need to maintain or even expand their IPv4 capacity to deliver IPv4 content. In the short term, IPv6 represents not a solution, but rather an additional driver of cost and complexity to be addressed.
At the same time, IPv6 migration will be an inevitable necessity to keep pace with industry transformation. In this light, it’s no surprise that most regional ISPs are already preparing for IPv6, with a plan in place to complete their transition within the next five years. On the other hand, more than one-fourth have yet to move forward, including a full 15 percent of those expecting to run out of IPv4 addresses within the next year. This hesitancy may stem in part from the concerns many respondents shared about the move to IPv6, including the impact on subscriber service (46 percent), high equipment replacement costs (39 percent), and a lack of resources or expertise (39 percent).
Solving IPv4 Exhaustion while Bridging to IPv6
Carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) technology offers a way to address both key IP connectivity challenges associated with closing the digital divide. Multiple internal addresses can be mapped to a single global public address and vice versa, making it possible to support 64 or more subscribers per IPv4 address while reducing IPv4 acquisition costs up to 80 percent. In addition to easing the impact of IPv4 depletion with CGNAT, an advanced carrier-grade networking solution will include transition technologies that offer service providers a cost-efficient way to convert IPv4 to IPv6 and IPv6 to IPv4, allowing a more gradual IPv6 migration process while maintaining a seamless and secure subscriber experience. To learn more about how ISPs are capitalizing on the rural broadband opportunity, the challenges they’re facing, and the role of CGNAT in digital divide initiatives, download the full report.