Governor Wes Moore (D-MD) announced that Maryland is awarding nearly $92 million to expand high-speed internet access to an estimated 14,500 households and businesses across the state through Connect Maryland, an initiative to close the digital divide through the Office of Statewide Broadband. The Connect Maryland Network Infrastructure Grant Program made 35 awards to Internet Service Providers and local jurisdictions to construct new broadband networks to service unserved households. Leveraging the state’s funding, these projects invest more than $143 million to connect communities as remote as homes in the mountains of western Washington County to areas in more densely populated jurisdictions in the state, including Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. The full list of awards can be viewed here.

I ask this question after Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society] recently withdrew her name from consideration as a Federal Communication Commissioner. But the objections to Sohn were all the kinds of smokescreens that politicians use to not admit the real reason they opposed the nomination; because she is in favor of regulating broadband and the public airwaves. The big broadband providers and the large broadcasting companies (some companies which are both) have been lobbying hard against the Sohn nomination since it was first announced. But I think the failure to approve Sohn breaks the historical convention that lets the political party in power decide who to add as regulators. I predict this will not end with this failed nomination. The primary reason for this is that votes for an FCC Commissioner are no longer purely along party lines. The large ISPs and broadcasters make huge contributions to Senators for the very purpose of influencing this kind of issue. I think we’re now seeing the textbook example of "regulatory capture," an economic principle that describes a situation where regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries they are supposed to be regulating. The FCC is a textbook example of a captured regulator. 

Telecom carriers and analysts have been talking about lower capital expenditures (capex) for 2023, so it’s no surprise that Dell'Oro Group released a report citing a decline in worldwide telecom spending in 2023. Dell'Oro states that the decline is going to continue for a while. Global telecommunications capex is projected to decline at a 2% to 3% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next three years, as positive growth in India will not be enough to offset sharp capex cuts in North America. For wireless, the market research firm is now modeling capex in the North America region to decline from 10% to 20% in 2023. Part of that has to do with the state of 5G rollouts. With the upper mid-band spectrum available nearly nationwide, operators are in a better position to scale back investments. More spectrum in the nation’s pipeline and wider bandwidths will be critical to justify another major capex cycle; spectrum efficiency gains alone likely will deliver minimal improvements. Capex and base station deployment are not tightly correlated, but in this case, the drop in capex will align with a roughly 10% drop in high-power base station deployment in North America.