Telecommunication

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau announced that RiverStreet Communications of North Carolina has notified the FCC that it will not fulfill its commitment to offer voice and broadband service to certain census block groups (CBGs) within its Connect America Fund (CAF) Phase II auction supported service area in North Carolina. In addition, Cebridge Telecom LA and Cable One VoIP LLC d/b/a Sparklight have notified the FCC of their decisions to withdraw from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) support program in all the CBGs covered by their authorized win

The city of Joplin (MO), has taken broadband competitiveness into its own hands and has wooed ALLO Fiber to build a fiber network in the city that will compete against the long-time incumbent Cable One. This is bad news for Cable One. But it could also spell bad news for cable providers all over the country. For several decades cable operators have been careful to respect each other’s footprints, rather than competing against each other in many markets.

Some smaller US telecommunications providers are toying with the notion of shutting down their copper networks, following years of pioneering efforts by bigger network operators like AT&T and Verizon. According to the financial analysts at New Street Research, Frontier and TDS Telecom are eyeing the savings they might be able to derive from shuttering legacy network technology. To be clear, virtually all of the US market's telco operators are shifting from copper to fiber for their new network buildouts and upgrades.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) launched a new mapping tool, the NTIA Permitting and Environmental Information Application, to help grant recipients and others deploying infrastructure identify permit requirements and avoid potential environmental impacts when connecting a particular location to high-speed Internet service.  The application is designed to help federal broadband grant re

It seems like the Universal Service Fund (USF) has been stuck in a loop for years, as debates over how it could be improved and better funded rage on. There are plenty of possible solutions on the table, yet the wheels just keep on spinning.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted new rules requiring cable and satellite TV providers to specify the “all-in” price clearly and prominently for video programming service in their promotional materials and on subscribers’ bills. On June 20, 2023, the Commission released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), observing that consumers who choose a video service based on an advertised monthly price may be surprised by unexpected fees that cable operators and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) providers charge and list in the fine print separately from the top-line listed service pri

I believe we can’t ignore the history of our industry if we want to avoid the worst of it from happening again. There are a variety of factors that led to the rural mess that created the need for BEAD and other broadband grant programs. I think the downward trajectory started with the divestiture of AT&T into AT&T as a long-distance company and large regional telephone companies. The newly-formed company lobbied hard to be able to make profits over and above the low, but steady profits that could be earned by a regulated utility.

As part of a growing effort to stop prison telecommunications monopolies from charging exorbitant fees for calls between prisoners and their families, in 2023 Minnesota became one of the first states to make all phone calls free for prisoners.

Each of the big telephone company operators in the US—Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T—plans to expand the reach of its broadband home Internet service in the coming years. Further, each company plans to do so via a combination of fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) connections. Those efforts could be supercharged if the operators tap into subsidies from the US government.

During America's Gilded Age, a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs built the nation's railway system and in the process created huge piles of money by controlling shipping and travel lanes across the country. Today, as AI hype begins consuming everything in sight, some are hinting that mobile network operators—and their equipment vendors—may be sitting in a similar position thanks to the data they own. After all, AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on.