Linda Hardesty

Braintree Electric Light Department (BELD) — a nonprofit, publicly owned power utility and broadband internet provider — announced it has sold its internet business to Comcast. The sales price was not disclosed. BELD said the deal will have no impact on its electric division. BELD’s approximately 2,500 internet and phone customers will have their service transferred to Comcast, beginning this year. Comcast has already been an incumbent provider in Braintree (MA) for 18 years. Comcast also announced it was buying Russell Municipal Cable TV in Springfield (MA).

While people have focused on President Biden’s Federal Communications Commission nominations, Biden also nominated Alan Davidson to head the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and there haven’t been a lot of headlines about that nomination. However, the next head of NTIA will have a broad scope of responsibilities at a critical time in US broadband infrastructure.

Microsoft wants to be the global wide area network (WAN) for 5G. Victor Bahl, chief technology officer of Azure for Operators, noted that while 5G offers big boosts in speed, those speeds get watered down because “every network operator ultimately depends on the internet at some point.” Bahl said ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) within the 5G New Radio standard is nice; its delay specification can be anywhere from one to four msec on-air latency.

Chariton Valley Wireless, a provider in Northeastern Missouri, is selling its wireless assets to Verizon, AT&T and USCelluar. According to Federal Communications Commission filings, Verizon will receive 2 AWS-1 licenses and 2 cellular licenses. AT&T will receive 3 - 700 MHz band licenses. US Cellular will receive 2 PCS licenses.

The owner of a New York City barbershop has filed a $20 million class-action lawsuit against Altice, claiming that Altice reneged on its Keep Americans Connected pledge during the pandemic. Artem Shalomayev, owner of 3715 Barber Shop in the Bronx, is suing on behalf of potentially thousands of other similarly-situated small business owners, according to the plaintiff's lawyer Jon Norinsberg.

Wind Talker Innovations is a five-year-old startup whose software creates a mesh network out of wireless devices such as smartphones and tablets. Company executives say they don’t want to compete with wireless carriers, but rather they want to extend existing networks and make them more efficient. “The focus point for us is to partner with telcos and ISPs because they do have this infrastructure in place” such as macro towers, small cells and fiber backhaul, says CEO and Co-founder of Wind Talker Matt Perdew.

Small wireless carriers expressed dissatisfaction and concern about several aspects of their business at the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) Annual Convention. They’re concerned that digital-divide money will all go toward fiber, that Universal Service Funds (USF) are drying up, that their spectrum needs are being ignored, and that they’ve missed the boat on private wireless.

When you think of Verizon and fiber, you tend to think of Fios, which is a fiber-based brand in the Northeast US that bundles connectivity, voice and video. But Verizon has other fiber as well, including long-haul routes, and the company is currently deploying lots of fiber as part of its 5G roll-outs. As part of its 5G/fiber rollouts, Verizon is also looking to help close the digital divide. And it sees fixed wireless access (FWA) as a technology to help with that.

According to the Federal Communications Commission, of the nearly $3.2 billion in available funds for the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program only $378 million has been allocated so far. That leaves more than $2.7 billion still available to help low-income households get broadband service at a reduced cost, according to the FCC tracker page.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, T-Mobile wrangled additional 600 MHz spectrum from a number of companies and from unused spectrum held by the Federal Communications Commission to bolster its capacity for Americans during a crisis. On July 27, T-Mobile filed a sixth application with the FCC f