Daily Digest 5/30/2024

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

Broadband Funding

Experts warn: Don’t wait to assemble and train your workers for BEAD  |  Read below  |  Linda Hardesty  |  Fierce
WOW! Awarded $2.39 Million Grant by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs to Expand its Footprint  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  WOW!

Local Initiatives

LiveOak Fiber Reaches Major Milestone: 50% of Georgia Broadband Expansion Completed  |  LiveOak Fiber
Hermiston (OR) considers building its own broadband network  |  Oregon Public Broadcasting

Spectrum/Wireless

Stakeholder Engagement on the National Spectrum Strategy Band Studies  |  Read below  |  Shiva Goel  |  Press Release  |  National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Widespread Customer Satisfaction Gains for Wireless Phone Service; Cell Phones Reach All-Time ACSI High  |  Read below  |  Research  |  American Customer Satisfaction Index
Satellite-to-phones service provider AST SpaceMobile announced a partnership with Verizon  |  CNBC

Platforms/Social Media/AI

Colorado becomes first state with sweeping artificial intelligence regulations  |  Route Fifty
Gov Gavin Newsom warns against perils of over-regulating AI  |  Politico
See How Easily A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation  |  New York Times
Vox Media and OpenAI Form Strategic Content and Product Partnership  |  Vox
Meta Removes AI-Generated Influence Campaigns in China, Israel  |  Bloomberg
Meta Takes Down ‘Inauthentic’ Accounts on Facebook, Instagram Linked to Israeli Firm  |  Wall Street Journal

Privacy

These Internet Browsers Promise Privacy. What Does That Actually Mean?  |  Wall Street Journal

TV

Less Than a Third of Michigan Residents Still Pay for Cable TV  |  Next TV

Policymakers

Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives FY2023 Annual Report  |  Read below  |  Research  |  National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Inside Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Growing Alliance  |  Wall Street Journal

Industry/Company News

Broadband Forum CEO: ISPs are paving a path to 'Connectivity+'  |  Read below  |  Jeff Baumgartner, Pierre Landriau  |  Light Reading
A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents from Google filled with details about data the company collects is authentic  |  Vox
Today's Top Stories

Experts warn: Don’t wait to assemble and train your workers for BEAD

Linda Hardesty  |  Fierce

Companies that plan to apply for Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds should be planning now for how they’re going to staff their projects. Evan Feinman, director for BEAD with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said state workforce groups typically wait until there is a job shortfall before they initiate training programs. “In this instance, we know there’s $42.5 billion of demand,” said Feinman. “They need to be ramping up training. I strongly encourage folks to be in dialog with workforce development bodies.” Michelle Heiliger, director of HR for Sellenriek Construction, said 25 - 30 percent of the cost for upcoming fiber deployments will go toward labor, varying a bit by geographic location and whether the labor is union or non-union. She said it’s a bad idea to wait until the last minute to secure your labor force. 

WOW! Awarded $2.39 Million Grant by the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs to Expand its Footprint

Press Release  |  WOW!

WOW! Internet, TV & Phone accepted a $2.39 million grant through the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) program. These funds represent an addition to WOW!’s contribution of $1.02 million, for a total investment of $3.41 million. WOW! will use the funds to extend its fiber network to serve nearly a thousand homes in Houston and Henry Counties in southeastern Alabama. The ADECA program works to positively impact Alabama communities through partnerships, grant programs, and services to spur community and economic development and enhance quality of life. This grant will allow WOW! to primarily target underserved areas that can benefit from additional broadband options. 

Stakeholder Engagement on the National Spectrum Strategy Band Studies

Shiva Goel  |  Press Release  |  National Telecommunications and Information Administration

Developing a common and comprehensive factual understanding about how we use, need, and could potentially expand access to spectrum is critical to meet the Nation’s diverse spectrum requirements while also maintaining trust in the process.  It’s core to the National Spectrum Strategy's study-first approach to building a spectrum pipeline. For the Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) demonstration, the Department of Defense relaunched Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions (PATHSS) to engage key stakeholders.  We are thrilled to partner with and support them on that important joint DSS priority. For the co-led band studies, the responsibility to establish a multistakeholder forum for non-Federal engagement falls on NTIA – and I can tell you that we’re approaching it with real excitement.  We know just how instrumental that engagement was to the identification of bands to be studied in the Strategy.  We know how much the execution, too, will benefit from those contributions.  Involving diverse stakeholders in our process is pivotal to ensuring that the public has confidence in the work that results.  So if you’ve been excited to participate, rest assured – you haven’t missed any opportunity to engage. The Implementation Plan builds in time to convene the multistakeholder forum on the band studies while agencies apply for SRF funding (you can read more about that process by visiting the An Update on Implementing the National Spectrum Strategy webpage). We’ll have more details on the when, where, and how to share with you soon.

Widespread Customer Satisfaction Gains for Wireless Phone Service; Cell Phones Reach All-Time ACSI High

The 5G revolution is in full swing as consumers perceive significant improvement in both the wireless phone service they receive and their chosen mobile devices. The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report covers three categories of wireless phone service providers—mobile network operators (MNOs), fullservice mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), and value MVNOs—as well as cell phone manufacturers. ACSI scores are reported on a 0 to 100 scale. Key takeaways include:

  • MNOs show a return on their infrastructure investments, with customer satisfaction rising 3% year over year to an ACSI score of 76, led by AT&T (up 4% to 78).
  • Customers find that full-service MVNOs have boosted their overall quality and value, but not all aspects of the customer experience
    improve unlike either MNOs or value MVNOs.
  • Thus far, full-service MVNOs have not leveraged their higher value perceptions to outpace MNOs and remain tied with them for
    customer satisfaction at 76.
  • Across the three wireless categories, value MVNO Consumer Cellular is the customer satisfaction leader after gaining 4% to match its previous record-high score of 85.
  • The enhanced network capabilities now available to value MVNO customers combined with aggressive pricing is proving to be a winning combination, particularly against the backdrop of recent inflationary pressures.

Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives FY2023 Annual Report

Through the Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives (OMBI), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) directly addresses the lack of high-speed Internet access, connectivity, adoption, and equity at our nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). OMBI works through these anchor institutions to impact their surrounding anchor communities. Anchor institutions invest in their communities as a way of helping them join nationwide efforts to make sure no one is left out or left behind in terms of having access to high-speed Internet service. Congress has directed NTIA to provide grants through the Connecting Minority Communities (CMC) Pilot Program to HBCUs, TCUs, and MSIs. These grants facilitate educational instruction and learning, including through remote instruction. In addition, these grants support consortia including Minority Business Enterprises (MBEs) and tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organizations. This progress report provides context to OMBI’s mission to expand high-speed Internet access for anchor institutions and their underserved, minority communities. It also spotlights OMBI's pivotal role in advocating for and monitoring progress towards this objective. Additionally, and a key achievement in 2023, OMBI successfully launched the Connecting Minority Communities (CMC) Pilot Program.

Broadband Forum CEO: ISPs are paving a path to 'Connectivity+'

Jeff Baumgartner, Pierre Landriau  |  Light Reading

Amid slowing broadband subscriber growth, service providers are exploring ways to drive up overall revenues alongside average revenues per user with new services and applications. Some operators are pursuing that with premium whole-home Wi-Fi offerings, low-latency gaming tiers and home security or bundling in streaming services that take advantage of the high data speeds. Support of such strategies and initiatives is of growing importance at the Broadband Forum, an organization that works with standards that support the end-to-end broadband ecosystem. Broadband operators have largely solved the core connection issue, so they are now pushing ahead with "services-led broadband" or "connectivity+" strategies, said Broadband Forum CEO Craig Thomas. He said open source platforms such as Prpl and the Reference Design Kit (RDK) are playing a critical role in achieving that by extracting the software platform from the hardware and giving service providers a way to experiment with and rapidly deploy new services and applications. These open source platforms also provide operators with the foundation to create new types of service bundles that ride the broadband operator's primary broadband connection.

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Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org), Grace Tepper (grace AT benton DOT org), and Zoe Walker (zwalker AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.


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Kevin Taglang

Kevin Taglang
Executive Editor, Communications-related Headlines
Benton Institute
for Broadband & Society
1041 Ridge Rd, Unit 214
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