Reporting

Permitting has long been the bane of broadband deployments across the country, but a little-known federal council is working to change that.

In July 2023, wireless and broadband provider Vistabeam acquired Airbits, which served the towns of Estes Park and Pole Hill, which are in Colorado’s Front Range area. Vistabeam also established a digital empowerment Center in Yuma, Colorado. The move into Colorado’s Front Range area is a sign that fixed wireless access (FWA) technology is maturing. The acquisition includes 25 towers. Vistabeam’s footprint is 40,000 square miles and covers more than 100 towns in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

The Coalition of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Winners has filed an emergency petition with the Federal Communications Commission regarding its request for extra funding or other relief measures. The group argues that the COVID pandemic has raised deployment costs dramatically and that the funding the companies won is now insufficient.

Over the past 26 years, the Universal Service Fund — a federal subsidy pool collected monthly from American telephone customers — has spent close to $9 billion a year to give Americans better phone and internet connections, wiring rural communities in Arkansas, inner-city neighborhoods in Chicago, and public libraries and schools across the country. Now it faces the biggest crisis of its existence, and Congress appears paralyzed in the effort to fix it.

The Good Things Foundation is the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, seeking to help a million people to get across a tech divide that has deepened during the cost of living crisis.

Meta began blocking news from appearing across its platforms in Canada in August 2023 after prolonged negotiations with the government over Canada’s new Online News Act. As Canada grapples with its worst ever wildfire season, thousands of Canadians could now be affected by a shortage of news content ac

Network restoration crews employed by wireless operators are accustomed to responding to emergencies caused by hurricanes, but the wildfires that devastated western Maui (HI) are a completely different animal. “We’re working around the clock.

Dish Network wants to buy 800 MHz licenses from T-Mobile, but it doesn’t have $3.5 billion on hand to finance the purchase, so it’s asking the US government to give it 10 more months to come up with the capital. In a filing with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Dish argues that turmoil in global capital markets in the past few years have made Dish’s ability to buy the licenses more onerous than anticipated. Dish figures that 10 months is enough time to raise additional capital and obtain financing, in part because its just-announced 

It has been more than one month since the Senate Commerce Committee favorably reported the nomination of Anna Gomez to fill the fifth, and vacant, seat on the Federal Communications Commission.

As states prepare to roll out Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program funding they will have to ensure that providers and local stakeholders are educated on the process of being approved to build with that money. Notably, the program’s letter of credit requirement will still be a must-have for those who want to work through BEAD, despite some pushback on that rule.