July 2019

The House Communications Subcommittee held a hearing on spectrum management and House leadership was not pleased with the infighting between the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications & Information Administration over spectrum policy. The most prominent falling-out is over the FCC's recent auction of high band spectrum in the 24 GHz band for 5G and concerns by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of "out-of-band emissions" affecting satellite weather sensing.

The Ajit Pai-led Federal Communications Commission failed to include very important data about the status of broadband availability in the US territories affected by these 2017 disasters in 2019’s Broadband Deployment Report. The FCC specifically said it chose not to report on data from disaster-stricken areas “so that such damage does not artificially deflate progress in deployment and that we can continue to track progress in rehabilitating such networks.” However, the choice not to include disaster-stricken areas is indeed that -- a choice.