Devices

More than 20 million businesses have a landline phone as their main business number. Three-quarters of people over the age of 75 rely on a landline phone. And one-third of US households have a landline phone.

The purpose of this brief is to raise awareness of the difficulties rural communities face when trying to address the device ownership issue. Rural areas are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to providing and supporting device ownership. This is a crucial piece of the internet use and digital equity puzzle. These rural-oriented difficulties are broken into three categories summarized as the “Three S’s:” Status Quo, Supply, and Support.

The Federal Communications Commission committed over $34 million in a new funding round through the Emergency Connectivity Program (ECP), which provides digital services for students in communities across the country.

On Thursday, December 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (H.R. 2617). Most importantly, the government funding package, which includes all 12 fiscal year 2023 appropriations bills, keeps the federal government running through September 30, 2023.

Iran’s government has throttled down bandwidths, stepped up filtering of social-media sites and taken down virtual private networks, according to analysts and reports by nongovernment organizations. It has also sought to intercept Starlink and other satellite internet devices, which are illegal in Iran. The number of Iranians with access to Starlink is a tiny fraction of the millions who use virtual private networks and other platforms to evade government restrictions, users say.

A new study, Broadband Internet in the U.S.

Ukraine reached a deal with Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies to receive thousands more Starlink antennas to help counter Russian air attacks. More than 10,000 of the devices, which provide internet service beamed down from satellites, will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation. SpaceX’s satellites are part of the Starlink network, which transmits high-speed internet service to antennas on Earth. Starlink played an important early role in the war in Ukraine, as Russia’s military focuse

The omnibus spending bill unveiled by lawmakers expands a ban on Chinese-owned TikTok on federal smartphones, but tough new measures targeting the tech industry didn’t make the cut. The inclusion of the proposal to ban TikTok comes after the Senate, led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), passed the governmentwide ban measure separately.

The Federal Communications Commission is committing over $65 million in new funding round through the Emergency Connectivity Program (ECP), which provides digital services for students in communities across the country.

Sen Markey and Rep Meng urged Congressional leadership to include $1 billion in the disaster supplemental division of the year-end omnibus for the Federal Communications Commission's Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), which supports devices and broadband services for students and educators to connect to the internet at home. This funding would be sufficient for the FCC to fund every valid application it received in the most recent application window.