Internet/Broadband

[Commentary] What does gigabit civic engagement look like? The initial winners of the Charles Benton Next Generation Engagement Award demonstrate not just what “could be” but what “is”. Civic engagement is about working to make a positive difference in the life of our communities. It is about developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means improving the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes. An engaged individual recognizes himself or herself as a member of the larger social fabric and, therefore, considers social problems to be at least partly his or her own. Such an individual is willing to see the community-wide dimensions of issues, to make and justify informed decisions, and to take action for the benefit of the community. My father spent a lifetime advocating for a holistic approach combining access to fast, fair, and open communications networks and the training to develop 21st century skills. He undoubtedly would have been extremely proud that his name is attached to this award and to the project winners in Louisville, Kentucky; Austin, Texas; and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Chicago and California are the United States’ top Gigabit city and state, according to research from telecom equipment maker VIAVI.

The data comes from the VIAVI Solutions Gigabit Monitor database and is summarized in a report titled “The State of US Gigabit Deployments.” VIAVI – formerly JDSU – found that Gigabit services are available to more than 8.5 million people in California and more than 6 million people in Chicago. The rest of the top ten states are Illinois (about 6.5 million), Colorado (5.2 million), Georgia (4.2 million), Florida (3.4 million), Utah (2.4 million), New York (2 million), Tennessee (2 million), Texas (1.2 million) and Michigan (976,000). On the city list, Chicago is followed by Atlanta (about 3.8 million), Denver (2.3 million) New York (2 million), Nashville (1.26 million), San Francisco (1.2 million), San Jose (1.1 million), Detroit (922,000), Fresno (586,000) and Chattanooga (506,000).

Fixed broadband speeds are getting faster, thanks to infrastructure upgrades that are allowing internet service providers to offer faster and cheaper packages. The average US fixed broadband download speed was 64.17 Mbps (15th in the world) in the first half of 2017, while the average upload speed was 22.79 Mbps (24th in the world), according to data released from internet speed test company Ookla. That’s up from a 54.97 Mbps download speed and an upload speed of 18.88 Mbps in 2016. For this report, Ookla measured internet speeds from 111 million tests initiated by 26 million unique users. Of the ISPs, Comcast’s Xfinity had the fastest national Speed Score — a single metric that factors in low-end, median and top performance for upload and download rates across a carrier’s network — while CenturyLink had the slowest.

Mapping analyses of AT&T’s 2016 broadband deployment data reported to the Federal Communications Commission for Wayne County, MI, (Detroit) and Lucas County, OH, (Toledo) show the same pattern of “digital redlining” of low income neighborhoods as National Digital Inclusion Alliance research has previously revealed in the Cleveland and Dayton areas.

The new maps, showing Census blocks in the two counties where AT&T offers fast fiber-enhanced “VDSL” broadband service — and blocks where it doesn’t — are part of NDIA’s ongoing research into the FCC’s Form 477 Fixed Broadband Deployment data for June 2016. NDIA has found a high correlation between neighborhoods where AT&T has chosen not to deploy the newer fiber-to-the-neighborhood technology, and those with poverty rates of 35 percent or more. In areas where the company hasn’t installed VDSL capacity, households as well as small businesses are still dependent on older, slower, all-copper ADSL2 service with maximum downloads speeds as low as 1.5 mbps or even 768 kbps.

House Republicans emerged from a month of network neutrality negotiations with no new draft bill text, said Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR). Before August, he set his sights on a hearing scheduled for Sept 7 on net neutrality legislation featuring testimony from top tech and telecom CEOs — but there’s no such hearing and, as a GOP committee aide confirms, no new draft bill. “Obviously there are some difficult issues yet to resolve with language,” Chairman Walden said. On the hearing, he cited “scheduling issues with the principals” and said a new draft “would be the topic of that hearing when it does happen, or if it does happen.” Republicans are still in discussions to “see if we can legislate,” said Chairman Walden, who has sought to codify open internet rules since 2015 without any real negotiation with Democrats. “Everybody’s operating in good faith, and we have other matters we can address in the meantime,” he said.

Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said of the cancelled hearing: "We're still working through that issue, and I think we're in pretty good shape." But she said she didn't know if the hearing would be re-scheduled, despite "great conversations" taking place. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), ranking Democrat on the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, said he's heard of a draft net neutrality bill floating around, but said if that's the case, he and other Democrats hadn't seen it. "I'm sure at some point in time, in the distant future, there may come a time when it makes sense to put this into legislation, but I don't think we're at that time yet.” Democrats favor keeping the FCC's net neutrality rules.

Can the “smart” and the “inclusive” come together in a way to make our cities better places to live for everyone? An answer in the affirmative is possible, but not inevitable.

For this to happen, stakeholders—mayors, businesspeople, and community leaders—must have an appreciation of three things:

1. The smart city and the inclusive city are very different
2. One (inclusiveness) does not follow necessarily from the other (a smart city).
3. Action is necessary to bridge the gap between a smart and an inclusive

As of August 2017, two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62 percent of US adults reported getting news from social media. While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and nonwhite. For the first time in the Center’s surveys, more than half (55 percent) of Americans ages 50 or older report getting news on social media sites. That is 10 percentage points higher than the 45 percent who said so in 2016. Those under 50, meanwhile, remain more likely than their elders to get news from these sites (78 percent do, unchanged from 2016).

The gap between the share of Americans who get news online and those who do so on television is narrowing.

As of August, 43 percent of Americans report often getting news online, just 7 percentage points lower than the 50 percent who often get news on television, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in August. This gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large. The share of Americans who often get news from TV – whether from local TV news, nightly network TV news or cable news – is down from 57 percent in early 2016. At the same time, the portion of Americans often getting news online, either from news websites/apps or social media, grew from 38 percent in early 2016 to 43 percent today. What’s more, the decline in television news use occurs across all three types of TV news asked about in the survey – local, network and cable – but is greatest for local television news. As of August 2017, 37 percent of Americans said they often get local TV news, compared with 46% in early 2016.

Facebook promised to address the spread of misinformation on its platform, in part by working with outside fact-checking groups. But because the company has declined to share any internal data from the project, the fact-checkers say they have no way of determining whether the “disputed” tags they’re affixing to “fake news” articles slow — or perhaps even accelerate — the stories’ spread. They also say they’re lacking information that would allow them to prioritize the most important stories out of the hundreds possible to fact-check at any given moment. Some fact-checkers are growing frustrated, saying the lack of information is undermining Facebook’s efforts to combat false news reports.

Modernizing Lifeline for broadband is critical for poor people and people of color, who are more likely to be on the wrong side of the digital divide and who cite cost as a major barrier to adoption. Lifeline is the only federal program poised to increase broadband adoption and provide a pathway out of poverty for millions of people. When talking about Lifeline, we hear a lot about waste, fraud and abuse. But this narrative is overblown and frankly offensive.

I have long been troubled by the tenor of the Lifeline debate: There’s a tendency to wage war on the poor, to demonize and assume the worst about Lifeline recipients. And I cannot sit here today, especially as white supremacy is on the rise around the country and in the White House, without directly confronting the racist undertones of these assumptions. We should avoid inflated stories of waste, fraud and abuse at the expense of poor people and people of color, who rely on Lifeline to meet basic needs. The first priority should be expedient implementation of the 2016 Order. We should reject radical measures such as moving Universal Service funds to the U.S. Treasury “to offset other national debts,” as the FCC Chair’s office evidently suggested to the GAO. This could undermine all USF programs, including Lifeline and others designed to connect rural Americans, schools and libraries.