Reporting

Several nonprofit groups held a “wireless boot camp” for Tribal nations from Northern California, the first in what organizers said will be a series of training sessions for Native American communities seeking to improve their connectivity where commercial internet service providers haven’t. Members of the Yurok Tribe, Hoopa Valley Tribe and Bear River Band met with experts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), the Internet Society and the University of Washington. The gathering, attended by about 20 people, was a chance for tribes that received 

The Biden administration’s broadband plan has been steadily scaled back by “bipartisan compromise” and telecommunications lobbying. While Congress is finalizing a $65 billion version that contains some excellent improvements, experts say it falls well short of fixing the real problem: broadband monopolization and the high prices that result. Roughly two thousand companies and organizations have been lobbying Congress to impact the infrastructure proposal, telecommunications giants among them.

The Senate infrastructure bill includes a package of digital initiatives that together amount to the largest one-time investment in broadband in US history, totaling $65 billion.

Jessica Rosenworcel just gaveled her seventh monthly meeting as Acting Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman and left-leaning telecom industry observers are growing increasingly anxious about the White House’s lack of a permanent choice. Speculation has run rampant about potential contenders, from former Obama-era FCC staffer Gigi Sohn to Free Press co-CEO Jessica González to sitting Commissioners Geoffrey Starks. The normally five-member FCC has been short a commissioner since January, and the resulting 2-2 deadlock has stalled Democratic agenda items like restoring net neutrality.

Verizon is enlisting artificial intelligence models to help place thousands of 5G wireless transmitters for optimal performance.

US operator Mediacom revealed work is well underway on a plan to expand high-speed broadband to 500,000 new locations over the next three years, stating construction projects are currently in progress in 20 communities. The company has been working with state and local government agencies in Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Wisconsin to facilitate its plan.

The current state of the broadband market is unlike anything seen over the past two decades, with operator enthusiasm high and money pouring in from all sides, according to Corning’s Director of Fiber-To-The-Home Market Development Joe Jensen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jensen pointed to the pandemic as a catalyst for much of the current activity, noting it validated the idea that broadband is critical infrastructure and helped spur higher fiber take rates among consumers.

T-Mobile has committed to a June 30, 2022 shutdown date for Sprint’s LTE network. It’s an expected move as T-Mobile continues to absorb Sprint’s network and customers into its own base, and comes six months after its contentious planned January 1, 2022 shutdown of Sprint’s 3G CDMA network.

Federal agencies are competing with one another over radio waves used to help predict changes in the climate as the sky is increasingly cluttered with noise from billions of smartphones. On one side are NOAA and NASA. They have developed space satellites that passively capture and decode the faint energy signals given off by changes in water vapor, temperatures, rain and wind that determine future weather patterns.

Lumen Technologies plans to sell a swath of its US telecommunications network to Apollo Global Management for $7.5 billion, including $1.4 billion of assumed debt. The investment giant will carve out some of Lumen’s so-called incumbent local exchange carrier assets, a collection of telephone and broadband infrastructure that covers 6 million residential and business customers across 20 states, mostly in the Midwest and Southeast. Lumen’s remaining operations will focus on large business clients, who generate most of its revenue, as well as home-broadband subscribers in 16 states including C