Mike Dano

For the first time ever, Congress allowed the Federal Communication Commission's spectrum auction authority to lapse—a development that prevents the agency from auctioning more spectrum to 5G network operators. At roughly the same time, President Joe Biden's nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], abruptly withdrew from contention without any clear replacement.

According to the financial analysts at Evercore, US fiber operators are significantly scaling back their network buildout efforts.

T-Mobile's fixed wireless access (FWA) Internet business appears headed into a new phase that will likely involve an expansion into rural areas of the US. "We believe this is the beginning of a slowdown in the pace in existing markets," said analysts at Evercore. However, Evercore analysts noted that T-Mobile is also in the midst of expanding its speedy 2.5 GHz mid-band 5G network to around 35 million new locations – mostly in rural areas – during 2023. That project, they said, will help prop up T-Mobile's fixed wireless growth curve, albeit with a rural focus.

Gigi Sohn may soon take a seat as Federal Communications Commissioner thanks to Democrats' narrow victories in US midterm Senate races around the country, according to the financial analysts at New Street Research. "We now believe it is likely that a third Democratic commissioner joins the [Federal Communications] Commission, either through a vote in the lame-duck session (in which case it will be the current nominee Gigi Sohn) or sometime in the first few months of 2023," wrote New Street analysts. A Democratic FCC majority could move forward in areas such as digital discrimination, merger

The airline industry has begun petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to make permanent changes to the operation of some 5G networks around airports. At the heart of the issue are 5G transmissions near airports in the C-band spectrum.

Verizon and T-Mobile have been headlining the fixed wireless access (FWA) market in the US, signing up hundreds of thousands of new customers to their respective offerings in recent months. But all that action by the market's heavyweights has been obscuring a significant amount of upheaval among some of the sector's smaller FWA providers. For example, Cincinnati Bell (now doing business as altafiber) recently acquired Agile Network Builders, a fixed wireless network operator that was a subsidiary of American Tower.

There is mounting evidence that Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society], President Biden's nomination to the Federal Communications Commission, may never get Senate approval. That could spell the end of his efforts to reinstate the agency's net neutrality guidelines trashed by former President Trump. Without Sohn, Biden's FCC will remain deadlocked with two Republicans and two Democrats, and therefore won't have the votes to move forward with net neutrality.

AT&T and Verizon – two of the nation's biggest 5G mobile network operators – own extensive fiber holdings around the country, and both argue that such ownership is critical to their long-term success. T-Mobile and Dish Network, on the other hand, are building extensive 5G mobile networks (though Dish hasn't yet switched on commercial services) without owning any fiber whatsoever. And, according to both Dish and T-Mobile, that's just fine. So, which side is right?

Cellular networks can sometimes play an outsized role in disasters because they can often function on backup power sources like generators. Meaning, when nothing else is working, cell phones can connect calls. But the nation's biggest wireless providers – as well as a variety of other entities – are pushing against suggestions that the federal government mandate the use of backup power generators at all cell sites. In general, the US wireless industry has rejected increased federal oversight over providers' operations.

The Federal Communications Commission's "rip and replace" program, formalized in June 2021 as the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, is designed to reimburse small carriers so they can tear out network equipment from Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE that the US government has deemed insecure. The program's goal is to finance the replacement of that equipment with gear from "trusted" vendors.