Devices

The St. Louis Public Library is adding 8,000 hotspots and 1,500 Chromebooks for city patrons who don't have internet or computer access at home. Residents can check out these devices for free for more than a year. Money for the library's total 17,500-device program comes from the federal Emergency Connectivity Fund. Through an earlier allocation by the fund, the library had already bought and loaned 4,000 Chromebooks and 4,000 hotspots. Because of the new funding, due dates for those devices have also been extended until Sept. 30, 2023.

The City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (PA), and Computer Reach successfully donated 324 desktop computers, 74 laptop computers, 427 monitors, 243 keyboards, and 170 mice to Computer Reach. This first donation, totaling $92,000 and completed in early August 2022, is the culmination of multiple years of work by the Department of Innovation & Performance (I&P) to give back these devices to the community and avoid paying an e-waste recycler for proper disposal.

In April 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to free up 1,200 megahertz of spectrum in the 6 GHz band for unlicensed use, earning cheers from Wi-Fi and fixed wireless groups. But more than two years on, scuffles between industry associations representing cable, broadcasting, utility and public safety interests have left the future of the 6 GHz band in limbo. The spectrum is extremely important to cable operators and operators in general because it enables cable companies to offer the fastest service not only to your home but within your home via Wi-Fi technology.

New Street Research believes that, as the economy takes a turn for the worse, postpaid cellphone plans are a better value than prepaid phone plans. New Street named T-Mobile and cable companies as the main beneficiaries of this trend – at the expense of AT&T and Verizon. “Competition has driven down the price of postpaid plans, while eliminating barriers to adoption (contracts; credit thresholds),” wrote New Street’s Jonathan Chaplin and Philip Burnett.

Over the past two years, school districts have sent kids home with laptops and tablets in unprecedented numbers. Thousands of these devices and the internet connections that power them have been purchased through two federal subsidy programs overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) known as E-Rate and the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF).  Giving students these devices has led to a dramatic increase in screen time and made it more difficult for parents to protect their children from exposure to objectively harmful online content.

The recently enacted CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is providing a lot of funding to bring more chip manufacturing back to the US. This funding fills a big hole in the US supply chain. Specifically, the CHIPS legislation: Appropriates $1.5 billion for the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund, to spur movement towards open-architecture, software-based wireless technologies, funding innovative, ‘leap-ahead’ technologies in the US mobile broadband market.