Stories from Abroad

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocates $65 billion to broadband infrastructure spending, with approximately $47 billion of this dedicated to building networks.

The China World Internet Conference, also known as the Wuzhen Summit, is a state-run conference where bigwigs in China's tech industry used to gather, party and tout their grand ideas and growth strategies. The conference, in its eighth year, has reliably offered a look at Beijing's particular vision of global internet governance and digital sovereignty.

Ofcom, the media and telecommunications regulator for the United Kingdom, has introduced a new service to make it easier for customers to switch broadband supplier to get a better deal. Ofcom hopes that the new process, One Touch Switch, will encourage people to seek out better deals after research found that more than two-fifths of people were put off switching broadband suppliers because of the hassle.

Efforts to close the rural/urban digital divide in Canada have reached new heights in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and “stay-at-home” policies. Yet the extent to which the rural/urban digital divide extends to pricing and demand for broadband services is not well understood. Using a dataset of more than 4700 residential survey responses from southern Ontario, Canada, we assess the disparity in pricing and willingness to pay for broadband across rural and urban households.

Global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year. The greatest deteriorations were documented in Myanmar, Belarus, and Uganda, where state forces cracked down amid electoral and constitutional crises.

The Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development met to reaffirm its call for digital cooperation, innovation with information and communication technologies (ICTs), and collaborative approaches to secure universal connectivity and access to digital skills.

Project Taara’s wireless optical communications links are now beaming light-speed connectivity from Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) to Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). In the same way traditional fibre uses light to carry data through cables in the ground, Taara’s wireless optical communication links use very narrow, invisible beams of light to deliver fiber-like speeds. To create a link, Taara’s terminals search for each other, detect the other’s beam of light, and lock-in like a handshake to create a high-bandwidth connection.

NEC announced it has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the areas of global 5G and support for the digital government of Japan. NEC and AWS completed a corporate-level strategic collaboration pact in November 2020, and since then they’ve been developing offerings and strengthening delivery capabilities.

Just as nations were beginning to invest significant capital in broadband infrastructure developments, COVID-19 crippled the Caribbean. The pandemic highlighted the need for critical infrastructure and connectivity around the globe, but especially for island nations. The effort to provide adequate broadband gained some traction in 2021 as some Caribbean nations restarted economic development plans that include telecommunications infrastructure rollouts from years before 2020. In these plans, fixed broadband leads growth, mostly supported by the expansion of fiber optic networks.

Two German courts put questions to the European Union Court of Justice concerning the compatibility with EU law of the limitation, on the part of an internet access provider, on bandwidth, tethering or on use when roaming, where the customer chooses such a ‘zero tariff’ option.