Joan Engebretson

Satellite broadband provider Telesat has joined the rural broadband consortium that Mississippi wireless and broadband provider C Spire established in 2019. The consortium was created with the goal of spurring broadband adoption and deployment. Other consortium members include equipment providers Airspan Networks, Microsoft, Nokia, and Siklu. Telesat will provide “analysis tools” and expertise in low earth orbit (LEO) technology to “help the consortium work on new business models designed to encourage and promote third-party engagement,” a press release explains.

The Federal Communications Commission has received challenges from about 180 entities that have stated that they provide broadband at speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, along with voice service, to at least part of census blocks that were on the commission’s preliminary list of areas eligible for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction scheduled to start in Oct.

With the shift to distance learning due to COVID-19, some rural telecommunication providers – including South Dakota’s Golden West Telecommunications and Golden Belt Telephone (GBT) of Kansas — have stepped up to add free Wi-Fi hotspots and even to bring broadband to homes with school-age children at no charge. In bringing broadband directly to some homes, Golden West technicians avoided direct contact with residents by using what CEO Denny Law called a MacGyver approach in a reference to the vintage and current television series about a government agent who uses an engineering approach to

CenturyLink has warned the Federal Communications Commission that the company may not meet deadlines for completing broadband deployments funded through the CAF (Connect America Fund) program. In a meeting with senior commission officials, CenturyLink representatives attributed the deployment delays to the COVID-19 pandemic and asked the commission for a deployment deadline extension.

Only one-quarter of developed US census blocks have two or more providers of 100 Mbps broadband, according to a broadband competition report from INCOMPAS – and according to the competitive carrier association, competition is even less than that finding would suggest because the finding is based on Form 477 data collected by the Federal Communications Commission. Virtually everyone agrees that the Form 477 data overstates broadband availability.

Is the $20 billion budget allocated by the Federal Communications Commission for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) enough to meet rural broadband deployment goals?

It’s been about a decade now since EPB, the public electric utility in Chattanooga (TN), made headlines with plans to make gigabit broadband available to all citizens. As gigabit service becomes more commonplace, there is a real question whether gigabit alone is enough to create the next Chattanooga.

Could Microsoft be planning gigabit fixed wireless deployments – perhaps through service provider partners participating in the company’s Airband rural broadband program?

What is Standalone 5G? While non-standalone 5G shares existing core network infrastructure with 4G, the standalone version uses a new, cloud-native approach to the network core. Standalone 5G is designed to boost 5G performance in two important ways. First, it will provide lower latency in comparison with the non-standalone approach, which should enable it to support real-time and near-real-time applications such as autonomous vehicles and augmented and virtual reality.

The Federal Communications Commission released the winners in Auction 103 of 5G millimeter wave spectrum in the 37 GHz, 39 GHz and 47 GHz bands, and it looks like the nation’s largest mobile carriers won the vast majority of the spectrum. The auction raised a total of more than $7.5 billion. The largest winner was Straight Path Spectrum LLC, which won 4,940 out of 14,142 licenses won and which appears to be a bidding name for Verizon. The second largest winner was Fiber Tower Spectrum Holdings, LLC, which won 3,267 licenses and which appears to be a bidding name for AT&T.