telecompetitor

The City of Amarillo (TX) plans to use American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding to build a fixed wireless network targeting low-income households. “We will lead with that technology; it doesn’t mean we won’t have to change moving down the road [or] where we can’t do line-of-sight,” said Rich Gagnon, the city's managing director and chief information officer. A particular concern in Amarillo was the large number of refugees – 12,000 – who have settled in the city, many of whom do not have broadband available to them.

Internet service provider EarthLink has joined a growing number of companies offering fixed wireless service. The company’s offering, dubbed EarthLink Wireless Home Internet, uses LTE or 5G for connectivity to the internet and can support up to 64 devices, in comparison with 10 devices for a mobile hotspot. A typical household has 11 connected devices, EarthLink notes on its website.

T-Mobile plans to make its Ultra Capacity 5G service available to 100 million more Americans in 2022, and as the company’s President of Technology Neville Ray told investors, it will have to expand its geographic coverage five-fold to achieve that goal, reaching many rural areas. Ultra Capacity 5G is the name that T-Mobile uses for 5G deployed in mid-band spectrum, which is widely viewed as supporting the optimum mixture of range and speed.

After years of broadband subscriber losses, larger telecom companies are poised to see subscriber gains in the 2023 to 2024 time frame, according to researchers at investment bank Cowen. This will occur as the telecom companies complete “record-setting” fiber broadband deployments. But the cable companies’ broadband market share will decline only slightly, from 60 percent today to 58 percent in 2027, the researchers argue. Meanwhile, the size of the broadband market will increase.

In the midst of this historic time, I sometimes lose sight of the fact that the official broadband speed definition, at least according to the Federal Communications Commission, remains at 25/3 Mbps. I’m not sure there is anything more absurd in the broadband industry than this outdated definition. Some would argue it was already outdated when it was established back in 2015, as a benchmark to measure national broadband progress.

Cable broadband provider Charter told the Federal Communications Commission that discriminatory access to utility poles threatens the ability of broadband providers to close the digital divide, one of the Biden Administration's goals and one it has promised the new infrastructure bill's broadband subsidy billions will make a reality.

Diversified broadband provider Cable One is on a path to launch 10 Gbps service. The company said it has already made gigabit service available to 99 percent of its footprint across 24 states, first offering it back in 2016. Cable One is actively upgrading its network to facilitate DOCSIS 4.0, which is the cable industry’s answer to the proliferation of fiber broadband from primarily telco competitors.