FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

“The Republican Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have put together a smart and comprehensive set of infrastructure reforms. Their thoughtful reforms would bring families across the digital divide and further extend America’s leadership in 5G by helping to accelerate the build out of high-speed Internet services. Their ideas, including legislation that would tackle the permitting delays that persist for Internet builds on federal lands, would make an immediate difference for rural communities across the country.

I want to share with you a few of the reforms the [5G Upgrade Order] makes:

Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that the FCC will vote on his 5G Upgrade Order at its next open meeting June 9. Commissioner Carr’s order continues the multi-year effort by Congress and the FCC to eliminate needless delays of tower upgrades. In 2012, Congress required local governments to approve modifications to wireless infrastructure that do not substantially change the size of the towers or base stations.

The momentum behind America’s 5G leadership is now unmistakable. As this report shows, we have turned the page on the failed broadband policies of the previous administration, and the private sector has responded. America’s broadband builders are now trenching conduit, pulling fiber, and installing new high-speed cell sites at an unprecedented clip.

The many changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have given the world’s communications networks an impromptu stress test. Data demand has surged and shifted. “Peak hour” — the busiest period of the day on a network — now hits at different times and extends for longer durations. Signs of stress have shown up in other parts of the world so Americans have begun asking: Do our networks have the capacity to meet this surge in demand? Here’s the bottom line.

Twitter recently rolled out a new policy aimed at “manipulated media.” Its first target: a 13-second clip tweeted by Dan Scavino, White House director of social media, featuring [out of context words from Joe Biden]. The Biden campaign quickly denounced the video as “disinformation” and pressured both Twitter and Facebook to take it down. Twitter slapped the manipulated-media label on it. Facebook put a “partly false” screen over it. The debate that followed helped earn the clip millions of views.

Twitter recently rolled out a new policy aimed at “manipulated media.” Its first target: a 13-second clip tweeted by Dan Scavino, White House director of social media, featuring Joe Biden. The Biden campaign quickly denounced the video as “disinformation” and pressured both Twitter and Facebook to take it down. Twitter slapped the manipulated-media label on it. Facebook put a “partly false” screen over it. The debate that followed helped earn the clip millions of views. Imagine going after President Lyndon B.

Technology now is creating and disrupting on shorter and shorter cycles.  It is breaking down old ways of doing business and introducing fresh competition. More than ever, technology is upending markets in which the status quo thrived for decades. In the face of all this change, however, some in government succumb to paralysis by analysis. This is a real danger that regulators—particularly those overseeing the telecom sector—must avoid.  While we rightly want to understand the impact that new technologies will have, too often “careful deliberation” is little more than code for indefinite in

One theme I keep hearing at the National Rural Health Association's 2020 summit is “rural America is having a moment; let’s make it a movement.” And there’s certainly a new movement in telehealth that we should tap into.  Given the significant cost savings and improved patient outcomes associated with connected care, we should align public policy in support of this movement in telehealth.

I want to highlight three features of our decision today. First, we support the type of high-speed networks that are key to building 5G in communities across the country. So our decision marks another significant step forward for U.S. leadership in wireless. Second, when we launched this proceeding last summer, I proposed that we prioritize truly unserved communities over those that might already have fast Internet connections. Instead of treating every community with less than 25 Mbps the same, I suggested that we first focus on communities that have dial-up or nothing.