Energy and Climate

Tornadoes, heavy rain, hurricane-force wind, and storm surge. Any of these could devastate a community.

In 2021 Vice President Kamala Harris (D-CA) agreed to lead the administration’s $42 billion plan for expanding high-speed internet to millions of Americans. That year, she tweeted that “we can bring broadband to rural America today.” Today, nearly three years after Congress passed the infrastructure bill that created the program, not one home or business has been connected through it.

The United States could be on the cusp of a “digital Pearl Harbor” which will expose the fragility of the country's communications systems, according to Brookings Institution non-resident senior fellow Blair Levin. Levin’s “digital Pearl Harbor” reference harkens back to comments from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who first coined a variation of the phrase in 2012. At the time, Panetta warned the U.S. could suffer a disastrous digital attack if it didn’t strengthen its cybersecurity posture. A recently reported hack of telecoms networks by China could fit the bill.

Fiber service providers have been given a boost in their pursuit of more energy-efficient networks that can unlock significant power savings thanks to a new project launched by Broadband Forum. The project will seek to lower energy consumption when accessing the internet. The project, which is set to publish its specification in Summer 2025, will encourage the development of technologies that satisfy the power-saving requirements, test plan, and data model it sets out.

Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks spoke at the 6G Symposium about the benefits and challenges of 6G, and what the FCC has done to advance the development of 5G. "I believe 6G presents both an environmental challenge as well as an opportunity. Like 5G, 6G has the potential to increase our energy efficiency and reduce our emissions in areas like manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation. But we simply cannot take this for granted.

The Biden-Harris Administration is announcing two new actions that will help build more projects, more quickly.

The carbon footprint of fiber broadband networks is lower than hybrid fiber coax networks on every sustainability metric, from embodied carbon to carbon in the operational phases, including customer premise equipment. The Fiber Broadband Association’s Sustainability Working Group compared the carbon footprint of fiber to the home (FTTH) networks with Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) data over cable system interface specification (DOCSIS) 4.0 networks.

I write to request a detailed update on the major administrative delays in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that have resulted from unlawful red tape imposed by your agency [the National Telecommunications and Information Administration]. Despite the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) three-year-old clear statutory mandate to bring the internet to the unserved, your agency has failed to connect a single American. What NTIA has done with the money so far is create a nearly billion-dollar slush fund to “administer” the program. Speci

Phenomenal cosmic power—that’s what it’ll take to support the data center demand of the future thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and its required compute power. There’s only one problem, according to Brian Janous, cofounder of data center siting startup Cloverleaf Infrastructure: not many folks in the industry have a good understanding of the challenges and limitations energy utility companies face when it comes to powering data centers.

AI technology seems to be a hot topic in every industry, and broadband is no exception. It seems inevitable that AI will be used to help monitor and control complex broadband networks. It looks like the biggest ISPs are already phasing AI into the customer service process. The big question that nobody seems to be able to answer is if AI will change the amount of broadband the average household uses. It’s not an easy question to answer. Corporate AI centers will use lots of energy, data, and broadband. The impact on home broadband is harder to predict.