Wireless Internet

In coordination with the Department of Commerce and the Federal Trade Commission, The National Institute of Standards and Technology has completed the Congressionally directed (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021) studies on the following technology areas that are expected to be critical to the global competitiveness, economic growth, and national security of the United States in the coming decade: 

Years after a lawsuit alleged Apple was adding software that slowed down older iPhones, the tech giant has agreed to pay a settlement worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Cotchett, Pitre & McCarty, one of the firms representing Apple customers in the suit, announced Aug. 9, 2023, that the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals dismissed two appeals from people challenging the settlement.

The Federal Communications Commission has lost—albeit hopefully temporarily—its authority to conduct spectrum auctions. But luckily for consumers and industry, the agency still has tools to make desperately needed mid-band spectrum immediately available for terrestrial broadband uses. Thanks to changes in technology, the landscape around the lower 12 GHz band (12.2-12.7 MHz) has evolved significantly over the last several years. At the same time, 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) has taken the connectivity world by storm.

AT&T, which was the second biggest spender in the Federal Communications Commission's C-band auction in 2021, is taking advantage of the satellite companies’ early clearing of the band to access its full C-band spectrum holdings. AT&T has been deploying a combination of C-band and 3.45 GHz across the country, with its 5G network mid-band network now covering more than 175 million people. AT&T’s nationwide 5G network, which includes low-band spectrum, covers about 290 million people. AT&T said it’s now doubling its available C-band spectrum for deployment.

In a deal involving Ohio service providers, NKTelco has acquired Hometown Cable. The deal includes more than 6,000 addresses in and around the communities of Coldwater, St. Henry and Montezuma, as well as fixed wireless access assets serving Mercer, Auglaize, Miami and Darke counties. Former Hometown Cable customers will be supported by NKTelco’s fiber ring, which offers status monitoring and continuity services. They also will have access to the Flight Data packages and multi-gigabit broadband, NKTelco says.

Comcast becomes the first internet service provider to offer a product designed to maintain connectivity when a storm hits, trees are down, or a customer experiences a local outage, with the launch of Storm-Ready WiFi. With severe weather impacting many parts of the country, there has never been a greater need for a back-up connectivity solution.

In June 2023, President Joe Biden announced how more than $42 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding will be allocated across the US and its territories to bring 100% broadband access to nearly 60 million unserved or underserved Americans within five years. Now, the real work begins: determining how 50 states and six territories will put that funding to work. Despite the many funding initiatives aimed to solve the problem in the US, those finances are finite and currently trending in a “fiber-first” direction.

Policies, regulations and standards governing video and broadband remain vitally important to the "cable" industry. But the cable industry is now keeping close tabs on other critical areas that weave into the broader telecommunications sector as cable operators move rapidly into mobile and wireless and explore ways to fully converge their networks and services. Meanwhile, those same operators must also get engaged with standards and policies focused on new and emerging categories such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI). That's all to say that Dr.

In May 2023, the House Commerce Committee marked up nineteen pieces of telecommunications-related legislation.  One bill in particular, the American Broadband Deployment Act of 2023 (H.R. 3557), represents what I’m seeing as a new trend of actions taken by big internet service providers (ISP) to preempt the authority of local governments.  H.R. 3557 would preempt a host of current rights of local governments to manage public rights-of-way for telecom infrastructure.

The largest cable and wireline phone providers and fixed wireless services in the US—representing about 96% of the market—acquired about 840,000 net additional broadband Internet subscribers in Q2 2023, compared to a pro forma gain of about 700,000 subscribers in Q2 2022.