Wireless Internet

While communications impacts are minimal so far, the FCC will continue to monitor how these sets of wildfires are affecting residents’ ability to receive the information they need to stay safe. Should conditions change, the agency stands ready to support in any way it can, including any requests to deploy FCC staff to help with any communications network recovery.

As we move into 2025, the Trump Administration and Congress have a unique opportunity to enact infrastructure policy reforms that will serve as a springboard for finishing 5G deployment and setting the stage for all the future G’s. This is critical to America’s economic success and the safety and vitality of our communities. With a mixture of common-sense reforms and strengthening existing rules, we can build on prior successes and set the stage for continued generational investments in wireless.

On January 2, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published the Final Bead Alternative Broadband Technology Policy Notice to provide additional guidance to states and territories regarding the use of non-fiber technologies to serve unserved and underserved locations through the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. The BEAD Program is designed to deploy broadband service to all unserved and underserved locations

An AT&T effort to replace aging copper connections with wireless options is gaining regulatory steam, potentially paving the way for more operators to do the same. That could have significant implications for the wireless network operators offering those alternatives.

The principal purpose of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program is to deploy broadband service to all unserved and underserved locations. To achieve this goal, Eligible Entities (states) may fund a variety of technologies that satisfy the BEAD Program’s minimum technical requirements. The BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) establishes a clear hierarchy of technologies that states must apply when awarding subgrants for Unserved and Underserved Service Projects: (1) Priority Broadband Projects (end-to-end fiber); (2) other Reliable Broadband Service (RBS) projects;

The US cable industry has gone through fits and starts trying to add mobile to the service bundle over the years. But cable has finally hit the mark by focusing on bundling home broadband and mobile and creating an early form of convergence that cable's key competitors, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, are now trying to emulate with fiber network buildouts alongside a wave of fiber-focused mergers.

It’s been interesting to watch cable companies downplaying FWA cellular wireless. For example, in September, Comcast President Mike Cavanaugh said that FWA wireless is a ‘near term’ issue that is competing for the lower end of the market. CEO Brian Roberts was quoted this year about competing against FWA saying, “Three companies are all simultaneously within a short period of time are all offering a home connectivity product by their own admission a lower speed, more easily congested network.” And yet, the carriers selling FWA continue to sell at astounding numbers.

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) awarded more than $273 million as part of the first batch of grants from the Public Wireless Supply Chain Innovation Fund’s second Notice of Funding Opportunity.

Scientists at University College London recently achieved a speed on a wireless link of 938 Gbps. That’s over 4,000 times faster than the current average speed being delivered by T-Mobile, the current fastest cellular provider in the U.S. The team is researching techniques for multiplexing multiple radio transmissions into a coherent transmission. The scientists achieved the speeds by utilizing a huge span of spectrum between 5GHz and 150 GHz.

Despite the furor over T-Mobile’s shares after CEO Mike Sievert’s comments about their fourth quarter earnings, the wireless chief actually had plenty of other issues to talk about, particularly his company’s wireless spectrum and how that might be used in the future. Sievert talked about the use and availability of its midband spectrum, both 2.5 GHz and C-Band, at