Wireless Telecommunications

This study draws on participant observation and interviews with low-income adults in Chicago to show how the poor stay connected to phone service and mobile Internet through the possession of multiple phones, including those subsidized by government aid. The “accumulation” of phones by individuals is widely observed, though underexplored in scholarship. Popular media coverage in the US frames the possession of multiple phones by people in poverty as criminal or excessive.

The scale of Chinese state support for the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G, the close supply chain integration between the United States and China, and China’s role as an economic and military competitor to the United States create enormous economic, security, supply chain, and data privacy risks for the United States.

Sacramento (CA) has come to stand as an example of the complexities involved in actually getting 5G services turned on. Sacramento’s journey toward 5G started in 2016 with an agreement between the city and a company called XG Communities.  The agreement called for XG to identify and organize a database of city assets—namely, street light poles, conduit, fiber and utility circuitry—that could be made available to carriers that wanted to pay for the rights to install small cells on city property.

The Federal Communications Commission just gave the wireless infrastructure effort a lift by streamlining the rules for deploying small cells. I found last week’s editorial by the mayor of San Jose (CA) quite odd. Mayor Sam Liccardo argued that the new FCC rules to encourage faster deployment are an industry effort to “usurp control over these coveted public assets and utilize publicly owned streetlight poles for their own profit, not the public benefit.” But the new streamlining rules do no such thing. Public rights of way will still be public.

While several slices of spectrum can carry mobile internet, the most promising for rural school districts is one the Federal Communications Commission first reserved for educational television broadcasts in the 1960s. Over three decades, the government gave away more than 2,000 spectrum licenses to school districts and education nonprofits, primarily in urban areas. But the FCC effectively stopped issuing such licenses in 1995, because many license holders weren’t using their spectrum, and instead making money by leasing it to commercial telecommunication companies.

At the start of 2018, a wide array of analysts predicted a dramatic upswing in the amount of money wireless network operators would spend improving their networks this year compared with spending in previous years. Indeed, the analysts at Deutsche Bank Research in February predicted nationwide carriers would increase their overall capex during 2018 by 14% over last year to $30.5 billion—which they pointed out would be the market’s biggest capex figure since 2014.

More than 10.7 million low-income households in the United States lack access to quality internet service. In cities like San Jose (CA), local governments are using streetlight poles to facilitate equitable access to high-speed internet to dramatically improve educational outcomes for low-income students and expand economic opportunity for their families.

The Federal Communications Commission's Brendan Carr is taking off the gloves in a fight with San Jose (CA) Mayor Sam Liccardo. “We must do better than Mayor Liccardo’s failed broadband policies,” Commissioner Carr wrote on Twitter  in response to a Liccardo op-ed. “Under his 3+ year leadership, San Jose approved zero small cells-ZERO-depriving residents of broadband options.

Sprint has been slowing traffic to Microsoft’s internet-based video chat service Skype, according to new findings from an ongoing study by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts. More than 100,000 consumers have used the researchers’ Wehe smartphone app to test internet connections. Among leading US carriers, Sprint was the only one to throttle Skype, the study found. The throttling was detected in 34% of 1,968 full tests — defined as those in which a user ran two tests in a row — conducted between Jan. 18 and Oct. 15.

The internet is an invisible mesh that enables instantaneous global communications, but delivering all those bits quickly to more people in more places requires increasingly exotic approaches. Here are a few things you may not realize about how communication pipes work around the world: