Federal

The Biden-Harris Administration’s Internet for All initiative is delivering on its promise to connect everyone in America to affordable, reliable high-speed Internet service by 2030. Since the President took office, more than 2.4 million previously unserved homes and small businesses have been connected to high-speed Internet service. Below are highlights of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) achievements under the Biden-Harris Administration. 

On September 6, 2024, the Federal Communications Commission launched its latest (and 18th overall, if you're scoring at home) inquiry into the state of broadband in the United States.

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB or Bureau) announced that certain Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) census block groups (CBG) are now eligible for other funding programs.

Kara Frederick, the Heritage Foundation’s director of tech policy, on her sweeping vision for re-imagining how conservatives relate to tech, including low earth orbit satellites (LEOs), Smart Cities, and generative artificial intelligence. She spoke about what the government could be doing but isn't, saying "Having a national data protection framework is also, to me, an extremely common-sense measure.

The three-year anniversary of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is fast approaching. Zero households have been connected through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, IIJA’s signature $42.5B broadband program that aims to bring universal internet service to all Americans. While all infrastructure programs take years to implement, BEAD’s pace has led to increased congressional scrutiny of the program. Whether or not the BEAD program is off track is a point of contention amongst stakeholders.

How will the elections determine how the stock markets react? Traditional wisdom says internet service providers (ISPs) will do better in policy terms under Republicans than under Democrats as Democrats are more likely to take regulatory action that hurts ISPs. This may have been true in the past, but it’s now wrong, according to NewStreet Research Policy Advisor Blair Levin. “There are discrete issues on which ISPs favor the Republican approach.

Brightspeed is on a big mission to deploy more fiber, currently passing about 90,000 new premises per month with fiber. But it is also retiring copper on a home-by-home basis for customers who are experiencing service problems.

In 2023, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Census Bureau began an experimental project to study the feasibility of—and ultimately to produce—estimates of Internet adoption for small, sub-state areas during a single year to address this knowledge gap and better serve the policymaking process. Using techniques that have been successfully employed in other data products, Census Bureau experts are combining existing data from key household surveys with auxiliary data that are known to correlate with Internet adoption rates.

The U.S.

The Federal Communications Commission has initiated the next annual assessment concerning the “availability of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans.” The FCC begins its latest inquiry under section 706 mindful that access to broadband is not a luxury, but a necessity. By this Notice of Inquiry, the FCC has initiated its latest statutorily mandated annual review, soliciting comment and data to inform its section 706 analysis.