Reporting

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?

On May 13, Gov Jay Inslee (D-WA) signed the Public Broadband Act (H.B. 1336), removing all restrictions on public broadband in the state of Washington, according to the bill’s primary sponsor, WA State Rep Drew Hansen (D-23). This critical leap forward in Washington drops the number of states with laws restricting community broadband to 17. The bill grants public entities previously restricted by statute from offering retail telecommunications services the unrestricted authority to provide Internet services to end-users.

President Joe Biden's promise to cut the price of Americans' internet bills has provoked a fierce lobbying campaign by cable and telecom companies to prove that the cost of broadband has already dropped. Internet providers are desperate to fend off any move to regulate the prices they charge, while the government is increasingly viewing connectivity as an essential service.

Mediacom Communications subsidiary MCC Iowa LLC filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission seeking review of the rights-of-way management practices of the city of West Des Moines and what the company calls the city’s exclusive relationship with Google Fiber. It focuses on what MCC Iowa says is a $50 million taxpayer financed conduit network that the city is building for the exclusive use of Google Fiber.

President Joe Biden asked a group of Republican senators to flesh out their $568 billion infrastructure proposal with additional details, including how they would pay for it, a step that could begin more substantive negotiations on the issue. President Biden said that he was optimistic the group could reach a reasonable agreement and planned to discuss a more detailed offer from the Republican senators next week.

As policymakers consider the best way to expand broadband availability, a key question is where to set speed targets which, in turn, will impact the technology used – fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), fiber-fed copper, fixed wireless or satellite. While some people argue that any government broadband support programs should be technology-neutral, we shouldn’t be “expectations-neutral” or “outcomes-neutral,” argued Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Gov Doug Ducey (R-AZ) has signed legislation to expand broadband access in Arizona, something he called for in his January State of the State address. House Bill 2596 allows the installation, operation, and maintenance of telecommunications equipment within the Arizona Department of Transportation's (ADOT) rights-of-way by private broadband providers.