Reporting

The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community (SRPMIC) in the greater Phoenix (AZ) area comprises two Native American tribes: the Onk Okimel O’odham (Pima) and the Xalychidom Piipaash (Maricopa). Like many Native American communities, it has limited broadband and telecom options. But Saddleback Communications, a provider of fiber-based voice and data communications to business and residential customers, recently completed a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployment, enabling internet access up to 500 Mbps to all homes in the community.

Charter Communications filed a waiver request on May 11 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) related to its award in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction. Charter, like all RDOF auction winners, promised to bring broadband to unserved areas.

More than 825 broadband providers are taking part in the Federal Communications Commission’s new Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program. One of the participants is TruConnect, a mobile virtual network operator that uses T-Mobile’s network. “Lifeline has been a terrific solution,” for getting communications into the hands of those who need it but can’t afford it, said Matthew Johnson, co-CEO of TruConnect, who runs the company with his brother Nathan Johnson. But it was frustrating during Covid-19.

Gov Ned Lamont (D-CT) is proposing to give the state's regulators greater control over broadband internet providers to further his administration’s goal of ensuring universal access to high-speed internet by 2027. Under this proposal, the state’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority, or PURA, would have oversight over the handling of consumer complaints, could order expansions of infrastructure, and regulate the general operation of the providers, which, in Connecticut include, Xfinity/Comcast and Frontier.

AT&T CEO John Stankey outlined plans to boost spending on fiber and 5G rollouts, after the company announced a move to spin off its WarnerMedia unit and combine it with Discovery in a $43 billion deal. AT&T is aiming to more than double its fiber footprint in the coming years to reach 30 million customer locations by end-2025, “with the single goal of offering the best fixed broadband service in the market.” On the wireless side, he said the operator is planning to 

Not everyone is thrilled with Starlink or SpaceX. Some reviews complain that the service is unreliable and can be slow. Astronomers are concerned that the thousands of satellites that Starlink and similar services plan to deploy will obscure their vision of the sky; others worry that the satellites will add to space that is already too crowded, and increase the risk of collisions.

Marty Cooper is best known as the “father of the cellphone” that debuted in 1973 long before the Internet, the personal computer, the cordless phone or even a television remote control. At 92 years old, the San Diego resident still is actively engaged in the wireless world — advocating on how to bridge the digital divide and bring affordable broadband Internet access to all parts of our country. He contends that 5G is a “good” technology, but for the internet to be ubiquitous to students, it is not necessary. “The enemy of good enough is perfect.

The government has a new program, the Emergency Broadband Benefit, to help Americans pay their Internet bills. Unfortunately, companies like Verizon are twisting it into an opportunity for an upsell. All Internet service provider participation in the program is voluntary, and each ISP gets to write some of its own rules for how to hand out the money.

Rural areas have complained for years that slow, unreliable or simply unavailable internet access is restricting their economic growth. But the pandemic has given new urgency to those concerns, at the same time that President Biden’s infrastructure plan — which includes $100 billion to improve broadband access — has raised hope that the problem might finally be addressed. In a recent survey conducted for The New York Times by the online research platform SurveyMonkey, 78 percent of adults said they supported broadband investment, including 62 percent of Republicans.

Starlink, a new satellite internet service from SpaceX, is a spectacular technical achievement that might one day ______. But right now it is also very much a beta product that is unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees. The Verge has not written a story about broadband access or telecom policy in recent memory without a chorus of commenters responding that Starlink would fix it in some way. Access gap?