Fierce

AT&T and the FirstNet Authority are sitting pretty after the FCC voted 4-0 to hand over a chunk of the 4.9 GHz band for the operation of FirstNet’s nationwide public safety network. The 50 megahertz of spectrum in question is reportedly worth up to $14 billion. But their giddiness might not last too long if the Coalition for Emergency Response and Critical Infrastructure (CERCI) has anything to do with it. CERCI is already threatening to challenge the FCC’s decision in court.

In case you had any doubts about Verizon’s fiber ambitions, the company revealed just how far it thinks it can go by acquiring Frontier’s footprint. Once (and if) the acquisition closes, Verizon expects to reach more than 30 million fiber passings by 2028. In the longer-term, it’s targeting 35-40 million locations passed, a goal easier said than done, analysts noted.

Telecommunications companies are sitting on thousands of old central office (CO) facilities sprinkled across the U.S. that could be just right for serving latency-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. And it seems they’re waking up to this fact as they continue efforts to retire the old copper network gear previously housed in these structures. AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Frontier Communications and Ziply Fiber are among the operators which have started using their old COs for colocation and other cloud deployments. Lumen, meanwhile, is using COs for enterprise colocation.

Making broadband available to the masses is no easy task in any environment. But try doing it for people living in decades-old apartment buildings. A majority (82 percent) of multi-dwelling units (MDUs) over 10 years old report internet connectivity challenges, according to a recent study from Comcast’s Xfinity Communities in collaboration with Parks Associates. Issues include maintaining device connections over a Wi-Fi network and insufficient bandwidth, which can be difficult to fix due to the infrastructure of older apartment buildings.

A group in Vermont got so fed up with the lack of high-speed broadband in small towns and rural areas—and the complete lack of interest by incumbent telephone and cable companies—that it went to the Vermont legislature for permission to create a communications union district (CUD). There are now nine CUDs successfully operating in Vermont, and these groups are poised to garner the lion’s share of Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) awards in the state. The trailblazing CUD was ECFiber, which has been so successful that it doesn’t plan to apply for BEAD funds because it’s already

Technology Policy Institute President Scott Wallsten believes that federal broadband programs have mostly thrown key economic principles out the window. “And a persistent digital divide is partly the result of that,” he said. Rather than just focusing on the cost of capital or the cost of laying fiber, he said broadband programs should apply economic concepts to "maximize total net benefits" for consumers and also balance trade-offs between supply, different deployment technologies and what consumers want. For example, he said a consumer could consider moving from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps “a huge

Joseph Wender, director of the Capital Projects Fund (CPF), said that the program has awarded all the states and territories their portion of the $10 billion fund, and the awardees have decided to spend $8 billion on broadband infrastructure projects. The CPF was created as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which became law in March 2021. ARPA included a variety of programs to help Americans during and after the Covid crisis.