Reporting

The Federal Communications Commission is creating the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program with $3.2 billion allocated by Congress. Not surprisingly, broadband service providers are focused on making sure they can access as much of that money as possible. That means leveling the playing field with current participants in the FCC’s Lifeline program. Ninety percent of Lifeline participants are wireless carriers, NCTA–The Internet & Television Association VP and general counsel Steve Morris told the FCC at a roundtable on the new subsidy.

Some states are starting to move with more urgency to solve the broadband gap. It's a problem that affects millions of Americans and is particularly urgent in light of a pandemic that has forced most interactions, from classes to weddings, to go online. While the federal government works to allocate $20 billion on top of billions of dollars in funding already earmarked for unserved communities, there remains a lack of understanding of where the problems lie.

Facebook will walk back its block on Australian users sharing news on its site after the government there agreed to make amendments to the proposed media bargaining laws that would force major tech giants to pay news outlets for their content. The code is structured so that if Facebook and Google do not sign commercial deals with traditional media outlets the Treasurer can "designate" them, and force them to pay for access to news content. The government promised to make further amendments to the code, including giving Facebook more time to strike those deals.

AT&T and Frontier have let their copper phone networks deteriorate through neglect since 2010, resulting in poor service quality and many lengthy outages, a report commissioned by the California state government found. Customers in low-income areas and areas without substantial competition have fared the worst, the report found. AT&T in particular was found to have neglected low-income communities and to have imposed severe price increases adding up to 152.6 percent over a decade.

We’ve been promised a fourth industrial revolution with fantastical things like remote surgery and driverless cars. Instead, what we have now is widespread 5G that’s more or less the same speed as (or even slower than) 4G and super-fast mmWave 5G in some parts of some major cities with highly limited range. So where is this 5G future we’ve been promised? The truth is that it’s coming along, but it will materialize more slowly and in less obvious ways than what we’ve been led to believe.

Now that the pandemic has made it clear just how essential it is to be connected to high-speed internet, lawmakers are finally putting billions of dollars into funding government programs to expand access to it. Urgency has also increased at the state level: 34 states enacted legislation or resolutions related to broadband development in 2020, per the 

A group of K-12 organizations has banded together to urge the Federal Communications Commission to incorporate cybersecurity purchases into the E-rate program. The goal of the 35-page petition is to help school districts protect their networks and data by expanding E-rate in three ways:

Comcast is delaying a plan to enforce its 1.2TB data cap and overage fees in the Northeast US until 2022 after pressure from customers and lawmakers in multiple states. Comcast has enforced the data cap in 27 of the 39 states in which it operates since 2016, but not in the Northeast states where Comcast faces competition from Verizon's un-capped FiOS fiber-to-the-home service. In Nov 2020, Comcast announced it would bring the cap to the other 12 states and DC starting in Jan 2021.

Broadcasters want to get a cut of those billions of dollars in the Federal Communications Commission's Emergency Broadband Benefit Program. The National Association of Broadcasters is telling the FCC that TV and radio advertising is particularly effective both because they are ubiquitous and because over-the-air broadcasting over-indexes for the eligible population--households with incomes below $50,000.

The faulty Federal Communications Commission national broadband map has essentially made millions of Americans without fast internet "invisible," as Microsoft put it, and unless the data improve, they're likely to remain so. But there's reason to be hopeful. Thanks to $65 million in funding from Congress in Dec, the FCC now will require internet service providers to share more detailed data, giving a better picture of what areas are unserved by broadband.