Reporting

Gov. Gina Raimondo (D-RI) won Senate confirmation as the next US commerce secretary, a post that will thrust her into some of the most contentious economic and security questions confronting the Biden administration. The Senate easily approved her nomination by a vote of 84 to 15. She is expected to be sworn in on March 3. Gov. Raimondo, a former venture capitalist who was reelected to her second term as Rhode Island’s chief executive in 2018, will assume command of a federal agency with sweeping responsibilities and an increasingly important portfolio.

A Q&A with Bernadine Joselyn, director of public policy and engagement for the Blandin Foundation and member of the Minnesota Governor's Broadband Task Force. 

A Q&A with Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. 

President Biden’s two immediate predecessors had ambitious goals to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, but both left office having made little progress in fixing the nation’s bridges, roads, pipes, and broadband. President Donald Trump announced so many meaningless infrastructure weeks that the term became a running joke of his administration. While the goal of addressing the United States’ infrastructure is bipartisan, the details are not.

Altice USA snapped up Morris Broadband, a provider of high-speed Internet and cable TV services to customers in North Carolina. The deal, which is valued at $310 million, will expand Altice’s operations in North Carolina where it already has a presence through its 2015 acquisition of Suddenlink. Morris Broadband is a division of Morris Communications, which is a privately held media company based in Georgia that also owns newspapers, radio stations and billboards.

The residents of Thursday Island, a speck on the archipelago Torres Strait Islands, have relied for years on Facebook to learn of everything from cyclone warnings to crayfish prices. The platform doesn’t eat up data the way other websites do, a priority for the remote communities, where people often use prepaid phones. Newspapers and radio stations with staffs made up of indigenous reporters publish Facebook updates in local dialects—a critical feature for those for whom English is a third or fourth language. It’s as real-time as the island can get.

While you probably never thought you needed to understand the intricacies of how cellular networks operated by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon work, some big news that affects those operations will have real-world impacts on the services that they offer and that we rely on. In every country around the world except the US, 5G networks have been built around mid-band spectrum because it offers the right combination of coverage area and width of data lanes over which our TV shows can be streamed, Instagram posts uploaded, worldwide web browsed, etc.

Starlink is currently in a semi-public beta, serving more than 10,000 users at speeds up to 170 Mbps, with no data caps. Ookla located US counties with at least 30 Starlink samples since December, and charted Starlink's speeds county by county against all other fixed internet providers.

A group of winners in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction have asked the Federal Communications Commission for the opportunity to review certain information contained in the long-form applications of other winners whose bids have come into question. The filing from Ensuring RDOF Integrity Coalition (ERIC) notes seven bidders whose RDOF bids merit closer scrutiny including four wireless providers – LTD Broadband, Nextlink/ AMG Technology Group, Resound Networks, and Starry/ Connect Everyone. ERIC expresses concern that fixed wireless will not be able to provide the 1 Gb

The House of Representatives approved President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue plan in a 219 to 212 vote, sending the measure to the Senate as Democrats race to pass it into law before boosted unemployment payments expire in March. The legislation includes a $7.6 billion Emergency Connectivity Fund. For the duration of the ongoing pandemic, the fund will enable schools and libraries to connect students and library patrons to broadband services and devices.