Wireless Telecommunications

The Federal Communications Commission will hold an Open Meeting on the subjects listed below on Friday, April 12, 2019:

Syracuse (NY) is the 10th worst city in the nation for digital connectivity. One-quarter of the city’s 54,000 households have no internet. That means people from more than 13,000 homes have to go to a library or a school or a neighbor’s house if they want to get online. Additionally, nearly half of the city’s homes don’t have high-speed broadband.

When Syracuse (NY) city officials conjured up a plan to buy 17,507 streetlights from National Grid, they saw an opportunity to pressure big telecommunication companies to extend better service to poor parts of the city and to make a few bucks in the process.

Here are the Federal Communications Commission's priorities for the next year:

The Trump administration is feuding internally over the fate of airwaves critical to 5G networks, threatening to undermine the country's push to speed development of the super-fast wireless service and set the global standards around the technology.

The US Department of Agriculture is collecting comment on what is the best spectrum management policy to get broadband to more rural areas. In its comments, the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) said it is all for a "rural first" approach to spectrum, which it calls quickest, most cost-effective way to get high-speed broadband to farmers, who can use it to help monitor and manage their crops.

Thankfully, the Administration is developing a National Spectrum Strategy to give the wireless industry the certainty required to plan for and build out the best and most secure 5G networks possible. We’re laying out a three-point call to action to inform the Administration’s National Spectrum Strategy:

When you signed up for cellphone service, I bet you didn’t expect that your exact location could be sold to anyone for a few hundred dollars. The truth is, your wireless carrier tracks you everywhere you go, whether you like it or not. When used appropriately, this tracking shouldn’t be a problem: location information allows emergency services to find you when you need them most.

This article studies the impact of different elements driving the business case of a 5G network. The study was performed within 3 boroughs of central London, UK, for the period 2020–2030. 5G-related costs and revenues were calculated to derive the business case. The results show that the business case for a 5G network providing mobile broadband services alone is positive over the time period 2020–2030 but has some risk in the later years of this time period.

US national security officials are planning for a future in which the Chinese firm Huawei will have a major share of the advanced global telecommunications market, and have begun to think about how to thwart potential espionage and disruptive cyberattacks enabled by interconnected networks. “We are going to have to figure out a way in a 5G world that we’re able to manage the risks in a diverse network that includes technology that we can’t trust,” said Sue Gordon, the deputy to the director of the US intelligence community.