Providing reliable, high-speed internet to remote parts of the U.S. has been a challenge for years. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created a renewed sense of urgency to solve it. Finally solving America’s digital divide will depend on either a technological innovation or governmental intervention.
House Committee Chairs sent a letter to 61 federal agencies requesting information on conversions of political appointees to civil service positions during the Trump Administration. Federal law requires that personnel actions are carried out in a way that the “selection and advancement” of employees in the civil service are “determined solely on the basis of relative ability, knowledge, and skills, after fair and open competition,” rather than on the basis of “partisan political purposes.” In accordance with civil service protections, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) requires all ag
Dish Network announced fiber agreements with Everstream, Segra, Uniti and Zayo. Those four fiber partnerships will provide fronthaul and backhaul support for Dish's 5G network to sites covering approximately 60 million US citizens. Dish expects to have some small preliminary 5G markets live in the first quarter of 2021 before having its first major 5G market deployment by the third quarter. The agreements with the four fiber companies will give Dish access to fiber coast-to-coast to connect to markets with its cloud-native, Open RAN based 5G network.
5G is expected to provide the connective tissue for many emerging technologies critical to productivity, innovation, and national competitiveness. Some commentators have panicked over the so-called “race” for 5G, pointing in fear at China’s hundreds of thousands of new base stations, and projections of hundreds of millions of 5G subscribers this year alone. But if we are going to base policy decisions on this race (and it is questionable that we should), understanding how infrastructure and subscription numbers are actually counted matters.
The European Commission is planning to present the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in December, a legislative package that will have far-reaching implications for the EU’s digital economy. Early drafts of these plans suggest that the Commission will ban some practices by search engines, operating systems, and cloud service providers to address concerns that their practices are unfair for consumers and new market entrants.
As 2020 comes to a close, we find ourselves 10 years out from the National Broadband Plan, 20 years down the road from initial discussions of the appropriate regulatory classification of broadband, and 25 years since the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The time is ripe take a step back and evaluate what has worked well and what has not. In a recent paper, noted telecommunications policy thinkers Howard Shelanski and Jonathan Nuechterlein set out to do just that.
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