The pandemic has laid bare what rural residents have known for a long time: Rural broadband in many places is lacking. However, help is on the way. Federal and state funding programs are providing much needed assistance for rural fiber builds, and there’s never been a better time for a rural fiber build than now. This webinar will discuss design and deployment for rural networks, reviewing strategies to take fiber to the farmhouse.
The wireless industry is beginning to wind down 2G and 3G networks in an effort to repurpose that spectrum for ultra-fast 5G. But lawmakers and public interest groups are increasingly concerned that shutting down those old networks could leave millions of people who still rely on them without service, particularly in rural areas. And there’s new pressure for the Federal Communications Commission to intervene.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic began towards the tail end of the first quarter of 2020. The impact was immediate and has forever changed bandwidth usage patterns. As 2020 came to an end, subscribers, on average, were consuming close to one half of a terabyte (TB) of data, up 40% from 2019. The pandemic impact is even more pronounced with the growth in upstream bandwidth. OpenVault predicts that by December 2021, the average broadband consumption per household will be around 600-650 gigabytes -- that's more than six times the average broadband consumption level since 2015.
The upcoming sale of Yahoo and AOL to a private equity firm for $5 billion represents a massive media markdown. At their dotcom bubble peaks, Yahoo and AOL were valued at more than $125 billion and $200 billion, respectively, or $193 billion and $318 billion in 2021 dollars. AOL made one giant mistake. It famously bought Time Warner for $182 billion in cash and stock in 2000, saddling the company with debt just before the dotcom bubble burst and the rise of broadband made AOL's dial-up services virtually obsolete.
The web itself is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions—everything from voting registration to local news—is impeded by linguistic barriers.
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