Light Reading

Spectrum is a hot topic in Washington these days, as lawmakers, lobbyists, regulators and others look for advantage ahead of the release of an implementation plan for the Biden administration's national spectrum strategy. The latest: A new bill from two top Republican Senators would require the government to reallocate at least 600MHz of midband spectrum for commercial use within three years.

While there's still a chance that funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) will be extended beyond April, one top policy expert fears that a successful extension faces an "uphill struggle." That was the assessment of New Street Research Policy Analyst Blair Levin, who shared his latest thoughts on the perils of the program in a research note. A pressing issue, he points out, is that ACP was not woven into Congress's latest budget package.

With the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) increasingly likely if Congress does not quickly step in with more funding, broadband operators are adjusting their game plans to continue to serve customers who have been benefiting from the program. Comcast, which has about 1.4 million customers on ACP, is no different.

Each of the big telephone company operators in the US—Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T—plans to expand the reach of its broadband home Internet service in the coming years. Further, each company plans to do so via a combination of fiber and fixed wireless access (FWA) connections. Those efforts could be supercharged if the operators tap into subsidies from the US government.

Service providers will not be required to list information related to the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) on their broadband labels, according to guidance issued by the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) on Monday.

Lobbyists backed by the cable industry are working to prevent 5G providers from obtaining more spectrum in the lower 3GHz band.

During America's Gilded Age, a handful of scrappy entrepreneurs built the nation's railway system and in the process created huge piles of money by controlling shipping and travel lanes across the country. Today, as AI hype begins consuming everything in sight, some are hinting that mobile network operators—and their equipment vendors—may be sitting in a similar position thanks to the data they own. After all, AI models are only as good as the data they're trained on.

Gigapower, the AT&T-BlackRock joint venture, has identified several towns in the southern Minneapolis-St. Paul area as expansion targets for a multi-gigabit fiber network that will be underpinned by an "open access" framework. Gigapower's expansion there will include Bloomington, Eden Prairie, Eagan, Savage, Apple Valley, Burnsville, Farmington, Lakeville, Rosemont and Shakopee.

A broadband coalition called the Accurate Broadband Data Alliance (ABDA) is warning the Federal Communications Commission that its national broadband map contains errors that "will hinder and, in many cases, prevent deployment of essential broadband services by redirecting funds away from areas truly lacking sufficient broadband." In a filing, ABDA alleges that "significant errors" exist throughout the broadband map, due in part to incorrect reporting by some internet service providers. "A number of carriers, including LTD Broadband/GigFire LLC and others, continue to overreport Internet se