Agenda

How the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will allocate the 10% of the BEAD funding ($4.25 billion) set aside for high-cost locations has to be an estimate because the NTIA hasn’t shared guidance on how it plans to do that calculation. On a closer reading of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), I want to offer a possible — even likely — scenario where certain states get almost no funding in the high-cost allocation because their Unserved locations are dispersed and not concentrated.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society supports the FCC’s inquiry into data caps which limit the amount of access consumers have to data before they are charged surplus fees or cut off from service. There is scant evidence that such caps are necessary and their consequences can be especially disastrous for vulnerable populations. Data caps are particularly problematic for low-income individuals who may find themselves facing unexpectedly large fees at the end of the month as a result of surpassing a data cap.

Today kicks off the Biden-Harris Administration’s Affordable Connectivity Program Week of Action. We have more than 300 organizations from across the country committed to raising awareness about ACP. The Internet is now the essential tool for communications in our modern world. It is essential for access to work. Access to education. Access to healthcare.

The drumbeat of artificial intelligence (AI) corporate chieftains calling for government regulation of their activities is mounting. As Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin (D-IL) observed, it is “historic” to have “people representing large corporations… come before us and plead with us to regulate them.” There are three challenges for AI oversight: dealing with the velocity of AI developments, parsing the components of what to regulate, and determining

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will announce the allotment of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funds to the US states and territories in June 2023. And NTIA has indicated it wants areas that are unserved with broadband to receive the funds first. Jonathan Chambers, a partner with the fiber construction company Conexon, says that in terms of deploying fiber to unserved rural areas, deployments are going to be mostly aerial deployments as opposed to trenched deployments.

The US Department of Education, Federal Communications Commission, non-profit group Civic Nation, and broadband operators joined hands to launch a “Week of Action” designed to boost sign-ups for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).

Comcast is pushing back on a Federal Communications Commission order that will require internet service providers to provide their customers with “broadband nutrition labels” indicating such things as what kind of speed they're getting and what fees they're paying.

Frontier CEO Nick Jeffery said that the company believes it will be out of the copper business within five years. At the end of the first quarter of 2023, Frontier still had 9.9 million copper passings compared to 5.5 million fiber passings.