March 2022

Seventeen Democratic members of the House Commerce Committee’s Communications and Technology Subcommittee wrote to Alan Davidson, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), outlining their recommendations and priorities as the agency implements the broadband programs in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

It’s taken more than a year for the Federal Communications Commission to authorize all of the nearly $523 million Windstream won in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Phase I auction, but it hasn’t been resting on its laurels in the interim. During the auction, Windstream won a total of $522.9 million to cover 192,567 locations across 18 states with fiber. Jeff Small, president of Windstream’s Kinetic business, said construction on about 10 percent of its build is already underway.

AT&T announced that it has plans to cut its copper network footprint in half by 2025. However, Jeff McElfish, the CEO of AST&T’s Communications division, said the company isn’t planning to forcibly move customers off copper as they decommission copper. According to McElfish, customers are naturally migrating off copper. I find that hard to believe. CCG Consulting is still seeing DSL penetration rates in cities between 10 percent and 40 percent.