The prison communication industry is dominated by two companies—Securus and ViaPath. Together, they serve the vast majority of jails and prisons. Bundling of services is standard practice: devices, communication services, payment services, and even ownership of the inmate networks. Political indifference, limited competition, service bundling, contract lock-ins, and poor infrastructure have all been part of a systemic failure to provide affordable and quality communication for the incarcerated and their families. This failure also comes at a terrible social cost: Video calls between incarcerated people and their families reduce reconviction up to 31 percent, especially for those whose families are too far away to visit in person. Communication between people with mental health issues and their support system is critical to their stability and well-being. Secure and private communication is essential for individuals to connect with their legal counsel and exercise their civic rights. Ameelio submits the following recommendations on how to bring affordable, accessible, and quality connectivity behind bars. We hope they are helpful as broadband and corrections teams work together to deliver digital equity to the incarcerated people in prisons, jails and detention centers across the country.

[Dan “April” Feng currently serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Ameelio, a non-profit startup that connects incarcerated individuals and their families through low-cost and cutting-edge technology.]

Arizona and Missouri are going to use a cost model as part of their Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program grant review process. Consultants have built complex models that are supposed to predict the cost of building broadband anywhere in the country. The models have to be loaded with specific inputs for any given location, and the models are then supposed to calculate what it will cost to build a broadband network. These two states are using the cost models in the worst possible way because they are using the costs suggested by the cost models to help pick grant winners. That means they are accepting the results from the cost models as a real metric and will reject grant proposals that are above or not within a certain range of the cost model estimate.

There is a plan to almost eliminate latency. It’s a new internet standard called L4S that was finalized and published in January, and it could put a serious dent in the amount of time we spend waiting around for webpages or streams to load and cut down on glitches in video calls. It could also help change the way we think about internet speed and help developers create applications that just aren’t possible with the current realities of the internet. L4S stands for Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput, and its goal is to make sure your packets spend as little time needlessly waiting in line as possible by reducing the need for queuing. To do this, it works on making the latency feedback loop shorter; when congestion starts happening, L4S means your devices find out about it almost immediately and can start doing something to fix the problem. Usually, that means backing off slightly on how much data they’re sending.

The Federal Communications Commission renewed the charter of the Task Force for Reviewing the Connectivity and Technology Needs of Precision Agriculture in the United States (the Task Force) for a period expiring on January 1, 2025. The purpose of the Task Force is to:

• identify and measure current gaps in the availability of broadband internet access service on agricultural land;
• develop policy recommendations to promote the rapid, expanded deployment of broadband internet access service on unserved agricultural land, with a goal of achieving reliable capabilities on 95 percent of agricultural land in the United States by 2025;
• promote effective policy and regulatory solutions that encourage the adoption of broadband internet access service on farms and ranches and promote precision agriculture;
• recommend specific new rules or amendments to existing rules that the FCC should issue to achieve the goals and purposes of the policy recommendations described in the second item in this list;
• recommend specific steps that the FCC should take to obtain reliable and standardized data measurements of the availability of broadband internet access service as may be necessary to target funding support, from future programs  dedicated to the deployment of broadband internet access service, to unserved agricultural land in need of broadband internet access service; and
• recommend specific steps that the FCC should consider to ensure that the expertise of the Secretary of Agriculture and available farm data are reflected in future programs dedicated to the infrastructure deployment of broadband internet access service and to direct available funding to unserved agricultural land where needed.