Internet/Broadband

The Federal Communications Commission's Privacy and Data Protection Task Force announced additional partnerships between the agency’s Enforcement Bureau and state partners on privacy, data protection, and cybersecurity enforcement matters.

The 2024 Rural Telecommunications Benchmark Study provides data from 147 rural telecommunications companies and provides insight into the financial and operational performance of the telecommunications industry. As of June 2024, participating companies accepted $950 million of federal, state, and local government broadband grants compared to $600 as of 2022. THhis represents a 50 percent increase in broadband grants over the amounts for 2022.

Elon Musk made an explicitly future-forward pitch to Pennsylvania voters Saturday—arguing that a vote for former President Donald Trump was a vote for the progress of humanity itself. Musk has spoken at length about his desire for humanity to become a “spacefaring civilization” and colonize Earth’s moon or Mars, even specifying which type of government he thinks would fit an off-world colony (direct democracy). He’s been equally specific about what kind of government he thinks is necessary on Earth to enable that future, namely, one that will ease up on regulating his vast business empire.

Telecommunications companies are sitting on thousands of old central office (CO) facilities sprinkled across the U.S. that could be just right for serving latency-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. And it seems they’re waking up to this fact as they continue efforts to retire the old copper network gear previously housed in these structures. AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Frontier Communications and Ziply Fiber are among the operators which have started using their old COs for colocation and other cloud deployments. Lumen, meanwhile, is using COs for enterprise colocation.

Most households in the U.S. today would consider internet service to be a necessity—and like many household expenses, it's gotten more expensive lately, at least in some areas. At U.S. News & World Report, we’ve been surveying Americans about their Internet Service Provider (ISP) experiences throughout the year. This time, we aimed to get feedback specifically related to costs for consumers living in the most populous states. Here's what we found, starting with some overall takeaways based on responses from across all five states:

Making broadband available to the masses is no easy task in any environment. But try doing it for people living in decades-old apartment buildings. A majority (82 percent) of multi-dwelling units (MDUs) over 10 years old report internet connectivity challenges, according to a recent study from Comcast’s Xfinity Communities in collaboration with Parks Associates. Issues include maintaining device connections over a Wi-Fi network and insufficient bandwidth, which can be difficult to fix due to the infrastructure of older apartment buildings.

A group in Vermont got so fed up with the lack of high-speed broadband in small towns and rural areas—and the complete lack of interest by incumbent telephone and cable companies—that it went to the Vermont legislature for permission to create a communications union district (CUD). There are now nine CUDs successfully operating in Vermont, and these groups are poised to garner the lion’s share of Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) awards in the state. The trailblazing CUD was ECFiber, which has been so successful that it doesn’t plan to apply for BEAD funds because it’s already

Building on the Defeating the Digital Divide series, Kids First Chicago presents new findings from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS) data, released in December 2023, and makes three key recommendations: 

Frustrated by years of substandard broadband service from regional telecommunications monopolies, Kendall County (IL) residents have joined the growing chorus of Americans that are tackling the problem head on by building their own better, faster, more affordable fiber networks. The Kendall County network, part of a public-private partnership with Pivot-Tech, is being funded by a tax-free revenue bond. Kendall County officials say that the full cost of the network, which will include private investment from Pivot-Tech, is expected to ultimately be $67 million, serving more than 13,000 locat

Comcast said it would comply with recommendations from BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division (NAD) about its business Internet service ads. The challenge, brought by AT&T, related to the claim that “Comcast Business Internet has speeds up to 12x faster than Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.” The claim was made on television and radio ads, and in direct mail. NAD made two recommendations.