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With little movement in the top markets and increases of only tens of millions of dollars per round in the rest of the country, the Federal Communications Commission is looking to get bidders in the 3.45-GHz midband spectrum auction off the sidelines and move toward the finish line. By round 85, the auction had raised $21,426,504,290 in gross bids. That is about 50 percent higher than the reserve price the FCC set of $14.775 billion to make sure the auction covers the price of relocating federal users of the 100 MHz of the band the Department of Defense agreed to share.

President Joe Biden‘s $1.7 trillion-plus Build Back Better legislative package has more than $1 billion for various better broadband building programs. According to a draft copy of the framework unveiled October 28, it includes:

Charter Communications’ dismal Q3 broadband subscriber performance — it missed analysts’ consensus growth estimates by nearly 30 percent — may seem like the harbinger of bad things to come, but influential analyst Craig Moffett believes that the real culprit in the slowdown may be sluggish household formation. Moffett said that while the quick reaction is that the growth phase has ended for cable’s most important product, he believes it is tied to declining new household formation.

The National Spectrum Consortium, made up of hundreds of companies with a vested interest in freeing up more wireless spectrum, has launched an effort to work with the government to do just that. The consortium has launched the “Partnering to Advance Trusted and Holistic Spectrum Solutions (PATHSS) Task Group,” whose goal is to collaborate with the Department of Defense to find more midband to share.

Evercore ISI media analyst Vijay Jayant predicts that while Q3 broadband subscriber increases will be lower than they have been in the past few quarters, it won’t be that dramatic of a decline. This comes just as cable operators are preparing to release their Q3 results. Comcast is expected first out of the gate, with its Q3 earnings report due on October 28, followed by Charter (Oct 29), Altice USA (Nov 4) and Cable One (Nov 4).

The Senate has passed the bipartisan State, Local, Tribal and Territorial Fiscal Recovery, Infrastructure and Disaster Relief Flexibility Act, which could free up potentially hundreds of billions more for 

The Biden Administration has released a fact sheet on its efforts to advance equity and opportunity, including educational opportunities for Black people. But neither in that pages-long email to reporters nor in a new executive order from President Biden on further advancing equity is broadband even mentioned in the equity equation.

The Federal Communications Commission, backed by the Department of Justice, told the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that it was reasonable for the FCC to reclaim a swath of 5.9 GHz licensed vehicular communications spectrum for unlicensed WiFi and it had the authority to do so.