What ISPs Must Become by 2030

Show notes

Broadband went from a nice-to-have to a must-have almost overnight, and the industry has been recalibrating ever since. David Zumwalt, President and CEO of WISPA, joined us to talk through what that shift revealed, where consolidation is heading, and what independent operators need to be doing now to stay relevant in a market moving toward universal coverage.

David came into his role at WISPA on June 1st, 2022, days after the BEAD notice dropped. Before that, he was chief operating officer of Broadband VI in the US Virgin Islands, running a network of roughly 9,000 residential, commercial, academic, and government subscribers. That background shapes how he talks about the industry, practically and without nostalgia.

The conversation started where a lot of honest industry conversations start: COVID.

Before the pandemic, operators had predictable rhythms. Commercial traffic ran during the day, residential traffic ran at night, and maintenance windows were planned around those patterns. When COVID hit, the entire network lit up at once. Historical data became unreliable almost immediately. Decisions that would normally take weeks had to be made in hours, and some of those decisions created problems that lasted well beyond the emergency itself.

David described sourcing mobile hotspot equipment during the early days of the pandemic to help students connect for remote schooling. Some of that equipment came from product lines that were later sanctioned and removed from approved use in the US market. Operators who moved quickly to solve a real problem ended up carrying that burden long after the crisis had passed.

The point isn't that those decisions were wrong. It's that market disruptions create exactly those kinds of pressures, and the next disruption will too.

From there, the conversation turned to how broadband is now perceived.

When consumers treat internet connectivity the same way they treat electricity or running water, that changes the competitive dynamic considerably. David laid out both sides of the utility question clearly. Utility classification can make pole attachment rights and permitting easier. It can also introduce regulatory frameworks that slow down the kind of rapid innovation that has made broadband services so adaptable. What matters in the end is how the customer perceives the service, and that perception has already shifted.

For operators, the implication is straightforward. If your customers see broadband as a commodity, competing on connectivity alone gets harder. That's not a future concern. It's happening now.

On consolidation, David was direct.

The broadband industry is following a pattern visible across every connectivity and technology sector over the past few decades. Fewer players, larger scale, more M&A activity. The operators being acquired or positioned for acquisition tend to share common traits. They run consistent back office systems. They have repeatable processes. They use a deliberate vendor stack rather than accumulating tools reactively.

David shared an example from his own experience at Broadband VI. Shifting field staff terminology from tower teams to outside plant teams was a small change that made the organization immediately legible to potential partners. Introducing five nines uptime as an operational discipline changed how the team handled outages and equipment, not just how the company looked from the outside.

Those aren't cosmetic improvements. They reflect the kind of operational maturity that makes a business easier to scale, easier to value, and easier to integrate.

The most forward-looking part of the conversation was about what comes after universal coverage.

David's position is that by 2030, everyone who wants broadband will have access to it through some combination of terrestrial, mobile, and satellite systems. When that happens, the differentiator stops being coverage and starts being everything else. What over-the-top services does the ISP offer? What can the network do beyond delivering connectivity?

He pointed to a specific example from California, where the state engaged ISPs to use their existing network infrastructure for wildfire early warning and remote sensing. That became a real revenue stream, coming from a regulatory environment that most operators would not associate with new business opportunities.

Precision agriculture came up as another direction, where automated drone applications for fertilizer or pesticides require communications infrastructure that rural ISPs are often already positioned to provide.

The underlying question is the same in both cases. What can the network do that the operator hasn't thought to offer yet?

On technology choices, David's view is straightforward. No single technology is the right answer everywhere. In the US Virgin Islands, frequent windstorms take down telephone poles and wired infrastructure can take months to restore. Fixed wireless can be operational again in days. Fiber buried in granite is cost-prohibitive. The operator who commits to one approach regardless of conditions is almost guaranteed to be wrong in some markets.

What matters is understanding the specific community, the specific terrain, the specific customer need, and deploying whatever combination of tools actually serves that.

The MVNO parallel was worth noting. Mobile networks consolidated dramatically, but the rise of MVNOs created a layer of differentiated customer relationships sitting on top of shared infrastructure. Something similar may be ahead in broadband, where the underlying delivery mechanism matters less than the service relationship built around it.

Catch the full conversation with David Zumwalt, President and CEO of WISPA, on the Bandwidth podcast. We cover COVID's lasting impact on ISP operations, the utility debate, M&A positioning, the path to universal coverage, and what operators should be building toward now.

Available now on Spotify , Apple Podcasts , and the Bandwidth Podcast YouTube Channel .

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