Fierce

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited a recently completed Comcast rural broadband project in Stafford County, Virginia, highlighting that this is a public-private project between Comcast and the county. The giant cable company is involved in public-private partnerships across its national footprint. For years cable operators such as Comcast, Charter and Cox have fought hard against municipal broadband projects, always crying that it’s wrong for taxpayer dollars to compete against their private investments.

A director at the US National Science Foundation has harsh words for the country’s telecommunications companies: We’ve lost the 5G race. But the Next-G game is just getting started, and US companies can win by playing to American strengths, said Sudharman Jayaweera, a program director at the National Science Foundation. In addition to telephone companies lagging, no US vendor has significant market share in the 5G infrastructure equipment market, which is dominated by Huawei, ZTE and other companies, Jayaweera said. The US lags in both research and true 5G networks.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has said 2024 will be “the year of execution” for Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD). But the agency still has a ways to go in approving initial proposals for each state and territory. Louisiana was the first to get its plan approved in December.

In 2021, Los Angeles County leaders decided they wanted to close the digital divide in some underserved areas. So, the county issued a request for proposal, soliciting bids from broadband providers. Surprisingly, WeLink, a relatively unknown fixed wireless access (FWA) provider, won the contract, beating out incumbents such as AT&T and Charter Communications.

When the internet was new, people talked a lot about long-haul networks in the United States. That’s because a lot of the early data centers were on the East and West coasts, and they needed to be connected. These days long-haul networks are largely overshadowed by last mile builds. There’s a lot of existing long-haul and middle-mile fiber that can be patched together to create the desired routes for any business.

Dish Network recently revealed that it was not going to buy the 13.5 MHz chunk of nationwide 800 MHz spectrum from T-Mobile. Since then, questions brewed: Who will buy it? Does anyone have $3.59 billion at their disposal? If so, what will they do with it? T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert confirmed the auction has begun. “We have commenced. We have interested parties.

“You do not like it, so you say. But try it, try it and you may.” Like Dr. Seuss’ famous green eggs and ham, the people have tried fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband and by golly, they like it. These days it’s here, it’s there and—if a pair of fresh survey reports are any indication—it's not going anywhere. New reports from Ericsson and J.D. Power show FWA beating cable and competing well with fiber rivals in customer satisfaction. J.D.

Cable companies Charter and Comcast have been wooing subscribers to their mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) services. But they can’t convince all their internet customers to include wireless in their plans. The stumbling block seems to be inertia.

Fiber companies have made being environmentally friendly a central part of their messaging—especially when it comes to comparing the technology to its counterparts, like cable and copper.

Earth Day is here, and Fierce Network is celebrating by looking into how telcos are approaching their sustainability agendas. Fierce reached out to several internet service providers (ISPs) to ask how they're making their businesses more environmentally friendly. For companies Fierce didn't hear from, it took a look at their recent environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports to check their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Scope 1 emissions are a company's direct emissions from owned or controlled sources.