Reporting

Leaders from the Biden Administration said access to high-speed internet will bring opportunity and dignity for residents of rural communities in Wisconsin and across the country. Tom Perez, White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, and Don Graves, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Commerce, visited Dairyland Power Cooperative in La Crosse (WI) on November 30 to talk about federal money for broadband infrastructure. Dairyland is one of the recipients of the Middle Mile Broadband Infrastructure Grant, a program created through the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Two top executives in the 5G industry renewed calls for more spectrum for commercial uses just weeks after the Biden administration released a 26-page national spectrum strategy. AT&T CEO John Stankey and Verizon's top networking chief, Joe Russo, both said that companies need access to more spectrum in order to innovate and grow the industry. Critics of President Joe Biden, including Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, argue that his administration hasn't done enough to support the 5G industry.

Connect2First has constructed 4,371 miles of fiber network across 18 Arkansas counties, and the internet service provider still has over 600 miles to go. Sales and Marketing Director Candace Looper said the company is seeing take rates between 40 and 60 percent in areas where service is already available. Connect2First is a wholly owned subsidiary of First Electric cooperative that provides fiber-to-the-home internet and home phone service to the coop’s members.

A federal program that provides $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes is expected to run out of money in April 2024, potentially taking affordable Internet service plans away from well over 20 million households. For months, supporters of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) have been pushing Congress to give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) more funding for the program.

Dish’s Boost Mobile wireless network now covers 89 markets, with a footprint of 140 million people. The company recently added 12 new markets: Billings, MT; Cincinnati, OH; Columbia, SC; Denver, CO; Philadelphia, PA, Fayetteville, NC; Jacksonville, FL; Minneapolis, MN; Portland, OR; Shreveport, LA, Tucson, AZ; and Washington, DC. Dish bought the Boost Mobile business, which at the time was prepaid only, from T-Mobile as a condition of T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint. The deal closed in 2020. Dish owns spectrum and is moving traffic onto that network as it is built.

Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) hinted that she will introduce new legislation before the end of 2023 to address a significant funding gap for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). The ACP, which offers free or discounted high-speed internet to qualifying households, is expected to run out of money in April of 2024.

Bringing broadband to under-served parts of rural America is one element of a giant infrastructure program that began in 2021 when President Joe Biden signed it into law. It was hailed as a historic opportunity to repair America’s bridges, rebuild its roads for electric vehicles and update its power grid and communications technology. However, instead of the anticipated surge, total infrastructure spending has fallen by more than 10% in real terms since the passage of the law. The most charitable explanation is that it takes time for big projects to get going.

In the year since the release of ChatGPT, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been moving fast and breaking things, and copyright law is only beginning to catch up. Intellectual property law has shaped the internet for three decades.

The House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing that included testimony from each of the five (yes, there are five now) FCC commissioners. A partisan tone was set by the get-go as the title for the hearing was "Oversight of President Biden's Broadband Takeover." The key questions for the Republican Members of the panel going into the hearing were:

Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative (MEC) is using Ciena tech to build middle mile backbone scalable from 100 Gigabit to 400 Gigabit. MEC serves 31,000 member accounts across nine Virginia counties and five North Carolina counties. It delivers broadband in its service territory through its subsidiary EMPOWER Broadband. Specifically, the co-op is leveraging Ciena’s 8114 Coherent Aggregation Router and 5160 Service Aggregation Switch for the middle mile network.