December 2022

Ukraine reached a deal with Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies to receive thousands more Starlink antennas to help counter Russian air attacks. More than 10,000 of the devices, which provide internet service beamed down from satellites, will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation. SpaceX’s satellites are part of the Starlink network, which transmits high-speed internet service to antennas on Earth. Starlink played an important early role in the war in Ukraine, as Russia’s military focuse

People with low incomes can get free Internet service through Comcast and the Federal Communications Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), but signing up is sometimes harder than it should be because of confusion within Comcast's customer service department. The confusion is related to a Comcast rule that makes customers ineligible for Internet Essentials low-income service if they have been a Comcast subscriber in the previous 90 days. That rule and another one related to unpaid bills are not supposed to apply to people who also qualify for the ACP.

In November 2022, the Federal Communications Commission released our pre-production draft of its new broadband maps. For the first time ever, the maps reflect broadband availability at the physical location level. In fact, prior FCC maps only provided this information at the census-block level. That means these new maps provide the best picture available to date of where broadband is and is not available across the country, and the maps will only get better over time as the FCC gets input from stakeholders across the country.