Fierce

Hurricane Helene caused devastating damage smack dab where Carolina West Wireless offers wireless services in western North Carolina. At the peak of the storm’s damage, nearly 70 percent of its network was down. Nearly a month later, only a few sites remain out of service, including a site in the mountain community of Chimney Rock, which was nearly wiped off the map.

Analysts expect the U.S.

For competitive reasons, wireless carriers typically don’t reveal too many specifics about their network expansion and upgrade plans. So when T-Mobile executives were asked to elaborate on their plans for mid-band 5G upgrades, they steered the conversation to the tools they use to determine how they’re going to expand coverage – as opposed to detailing exactly where and when they will deploy. Their approach – and brace yourself, this is going to be a real shocker – is based on artificial intelligence (AI).

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.