While continuing to fight for Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) funding, we must also prepare for a future without the program if Congress doesn’t act. We spoke with NDIA community members about what you need to help consumers transition off of ACP.  On January 8, NDIA officially filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission sharing your needs and requests and advocating for what consumers and organizations working with ACP recipients need in this challenging time. Our requests to the FCC: 

1. Enforce the consumer protections in the ACP Order, stating that service providers must obtain “affirmative opt-in, either orally or in writing, to continue providing the household broadband service after the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program.”
2. Require Internet Service Providers to inform participants of the program’s end 90, 60, and 30 days prior to its end.    
3. Create a comprehensive list of protections for public distribution. This should be published in a standalone document on the FCC’s website so consumers and advocates can easily find it. 
4. Lead a public awareness campaign informing the public on the wind-down.                 
5. Help ACP Outreach Grantees transition ACP sign-up outreach efforts to services that guide community members in changing to an alternative affordable plan. Without the resources to reach households directly impacted by the loss of ACP, grantees risk losing community trust, which may undermine the success of future broadband benefit programs.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded nearly $80 million in the third round of grants from the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund’s first Notice of Funding Opportunity. This round includes the first awards in the Testing & Evaluation (T&E) category, designed to expand industry-accepted T&E activities, making testing more accessible to the entire wireless ecosystem. The $1.5 billion Wireless Innovation Fund supports the development of open and interoperable wireless networks. Open and interoperable wireless equipment will help drive competition, strengthen global supply chain resilience and lower costs for consumers and network operators. The grantees for this round are:

• DISH Wireless will collaborate with Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc., Mavenir Systems, Inc., and VMWare, Inc. to create the Open RAN Center for Integration and Deployment
• VIAVI Solutions will establish a hybrid physical lab infrastructure and cloud-based testing lab-as-a-service (LaaS) or VALOR. VALOR aims to create a fully automated, cooperative, open and impartial testing-as-a-service (TaaS) offering that is dedicated to Open RAN interoperability, performance and security.
• Virginia Tech will develop a novel and comprehensive cybersecurity testing framework and demonstrate its effectiveness using 5G O-RAN Proof-of-Concept (PoC) testbeds.
• Cirrus360 will develop a new test method that uses a digital twin of integrated RAN components to model their implementation. 
• Northeastern University aims to develop and operationalize AutoRAN, a new testing methodology based on a collection of automated and continuous software pipelines designed to automatically test disaggregated Radio Access Network (RAN) components.
• Rice University will develop the ETHOS testing framework. This framework will examine communication performance along with the impact that the computing environment and machine learning domain have on RAN software performance.

Agriculture ventures across the spectrum are adopting smart technologies to be more productive—all of which require decent broadband. 

• Weeding Robots can slowly roll through a field of vegetables and mechanically kill weeds while avoiding crop plants. This has the added benefit of reducing the amount of water needed for the crops since weeds use much of the water applied to a field. 
• Growing Saffron in Greenhouses: The process is fully automated using smart AI software and creates the  perfect temperatures, humidity, and irrigation that enables four crops per year, compared to the natural one per year.
• Wine Robots: Cornell AgriTech and PhytoPatholoBots (PPB) have developed robots that hopefully will help to eliminate the mildew problem among wine grapes. In the vineyards, the robots can be used to selectively spray plants at the first sign of mildew, which drastically reduces the amount of pesticide needed and also prevents the spread of the disease.