Internet/Broadband

As the City of South Bend’s Civic Innovation team works to better connect residents in our community, we need to first understand residents’ current experiences across connectivity options.

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said, “I’m pleased that the Fifth Circuit agreed with what I and many others—including bipartisan members of Congress—have said about the Universal Service Fund. It is constitutional, both in concept and implementation. The Universal Service Fund continues to connect rural communities, schools, libraries, healthcare providers, and low-income households all across the country.

 The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded two grants totaling more than $25.7 million to two Tribal nations—The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Pueblo of Acoma in New Mexico—as part of the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP).

Charter Communication has announced a $70 million investment in its already existing network in Maine. The investment will cover more than 700,000 homes and businesses across the company’s service area in the state. Charter also announced an additional $12 million dollars in funding that will provide broadband services to over 3,500 unserved homes and businesses in the rural areas of the state. 

ABI Research’s latest report on the state of the fixed wireless access (FWA) market forecasts that 5G FWA subscriptions will reach 72 million by 2027, representing 35% of the total FWA market five years from now. LTE FWA services are already widely deployed worldwide, but they often can’t provide the speeds required to compete with wired broadband connections.

Coming from one of the more conservative courts in the country, this decision is a ringing ratification of the system Congress established to ensure that all Americans have affordable access to telecommunications service and advanced services like broadband. This should not come as a surprise, but once the USF was subjected to a legal challenge, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society joined with public allies to defend this critical mechanism for ensuring universal broadband.

The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the decades-old funding mechanisms governing Federal Communications Commission subsidies, a decision that assures the delivery of billions of dollars in broadband aid across a variety of government programs. The FCC, for more than a quarter-century, has operated this pot of subsidies known as the Universal Service Fund, amounting to roughly $9 billion annually.

In a hearing before City Council in June 2022, Baltimore’s then-chief broadband official Jason Hardebeck outlined a vision to bring next-generation internet connection to one of the poorest parts of town, the public housing project Gilmor Homes, within a matter of weeks. He pitched the idea as step one in an aggressive campaign to establish 100 communal Wi-Fi hotspots across West Baltimore, all within a year. But within two months of outlining his proposal for Gilmor Homes to the City Council, Hardebeck was fired from his post without reason given, he says.

Half of all households eligible to participate in the Affordable Connectivity Program are unaware of the benefit. That's too many households. A January 2023 survey of low-income households found that 37 percent of eligible households that knew little about ACP said they would be likely to apply with more information and 31 percent said they would be likely to apply if they knew whether they qualified.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew tried to allay mounting national security concerns about the Chinese-owned video app but encountered open hostility in his first appearance before Congress, a five-hour thrashing that underscored the popular app’s precarious future in the United States. Lawmakers from both parties sought to tie Chew personally to the Chinese Communist Party, frequently interrupted him and called him “evasive.” While he p