The future of affordable broadband internet access is uncertain for 1 in 6 households across Missouri as the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) runs out of funding. Launched in December 2021, the ACP allows households that qualify to save up to $30 a month on their internet bill. The program also helps households obtain technology, such as laptops and other computers. 394,043 Missouri households are currently enrolled in the program. But that number could soon drop to zero as funding for the program is running out. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) website, the program stopped taking in new applicants earlier this month. The FCC states that “Barring additional funding from Congress, April is expected to be the last month enrolled households will receive the full benefit.” Jannie Dunning of the Show Me Broadband spoke about the importance of the ACP at a press conference earlier this week. “No one should have to choose between the ability to improve their lives with access to the internet or food. This is unacceptable,” Dunning said. 

It’s easy to understand the growth in download bandwidth due to people streaming higher quality video and similar uses. Why do you think upload broadband usage is growing even faster? According to OpenVault, average upload usage has increased 290% since 2019, while average download usage has increased by 270%. There are some obvious reasons why upload bandwidth usage has been growing. There is now a substantial percentage of people who work from home. Several studies I’ve seen and surveys we’ve conducted show that over 30% of homes have somebody who works at home at least part of each week—with many folks now working from home full time. But as I’ve been thinking about upload usage, I also think there has been a lot of pent-up demand that is getting slowly resolved as internet service providers improve upload speeds. I talk to people about their home bandwidth a lot, and I realized that I probably know a dozen people who have told me that they have to ration upload broadband. We’re seeing providers bringing faster upload speeds, and this will ease a lot of these problems. As pent-up upload demand is resolved, we should continue to see average upload usage growing faster than download usage over the next few years.

First, cable and fiber companies dismissed fixed wireless access (FWA) completely. Then, they passed it off as a temporary fad. Subscribers, they said, will return to their wireline providers when wireless bandwidth inevitably runs out. While that may still prove true in the long run, the team at New Street Research (NSR) indicated things aren’t exactly looking pretty in the short term. Until now, the FWA market has been dominated by T-Mobile and Verizon, with the former adding a total of 541,000 FWA subs in Q4 2023 and the latter 375,000, according to NSR’s count. AT&T ended 2023 with 93,000 Internet Air subs after launching in the back half of the year. NSR said based on early results, AT&T’s FWA trajectory looks a lot like T-Mobile’s. While AT&T executives haven’t given much insight into the growth they expect, NSR predicted the company will add around 180,000 FWA subs per quarter over the next few quarters, with a peak expected to come in six to eight quarters. One thing that’s not factored into NSR’s forecast is AT&T’s hiccup, a cellular outage which left tens of thousands of customers in the U.S. and Canada stuck without service.  It’s not entirely clear what caused the disruption, but given Internet Air runs on AT&T’s cellular network, it’s worth considering how it will play into AT&T’s efforts.

Over a decade ago, Neal Patwari lay in a hospital bed, carefully timing his breathing. Around him, 20 wireless transceivers stood sentry. As Patwari’s chest rose and fell, their electromagnetic waves rippled around him. Patwari, now a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, had just demonstrated that those ripples could reveal his breathing patterns. A few years later, researchers from MIT were building a startup around the idea of using Wi-Fi signals to detect falls. They hoped to help seniors live more independently in their homes. It’s a tantalizing idea: that the same routers bringing you the internet could also detect your movements. Fast-forward nearly a decade: we have yet to see a commercially viable Wi-Fi device for tracking breathing or detecting falls. In 2022, the lighting company Sengled demonstrated a Wi-Fi lightbulb that could supposedly do both—but it still hasn’t been released. Wi-Fi sensing as a way to monitor individual health metrics has, for the most part, been eclipsed by other technologies, like ultra-wideband radar. But Wi-Fi sensing hasn’t gone away. Instead, it has quietly become available in millions of homes, supported by leading internet service providers, smart-home companies, and chip manufacturers. Soon, thanks to better algorithms and more standardized chip designs, it could be invisibly monitoring our day-to-day movements for all sorts of surprising—and sometimes alarming—purposes. Yes, it could track your breathing. The flip side of this, however, is that it could also be used for any number of more nefarious purposes.

Charles D. Ferris, a Washington lawyer who helped enact landmark civil rights legislation as a top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and who helped usher in an era of telecommunications deregulation as head of the Federal Communications Commission, died Feb. 16 at his home in Chevy Chase (MD). He was 90. As chairman of the FCC from 1977 to 1981, Ferris loosened restrictions on the radio, telephone, cable, and satellite television industries, arguing that the public interest was often better served by a competitive marketplace rather than government regulators trying to play the role of referee. His tenure “transformed how the FCC does business,” according to broadcast and media scholar Reed W. Smith, with deregulation only escalating during the Reagan administration. Ferris “changed the FCC’s status from being a behind-the-times and sluggish agency to being one that was activist and innovative,” Smith wrote in a 2014 article for the Journal of Radio & Audio Media. Nominated by President Jimmy Carter and unanimously confirmed by the Senate in October 1977, Ferris had hardly any technical knowledge of broadcasting and communications, though he dryly noted that he had been “using a telephone and listening to the radio” since boyhood and had “been watching television” for nearly as long. What he lacked in policy expertise he made up for in political experience, having spent nearly 14 years on Capitol Hill as an adroit and decisive chief counsel to Sen Mansfield and, briefly, Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. Ferris sided with fellow Carter administration officials such as Alfred E. Kahn, the head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, in championing a looser approach to government oversight. He hired a bevy of economists to an agency that had long been staffed primarily by lawyers, and argued that unless regulations were “improving the market,” they “were nothing but a nuisance.” Under his direction, the agency removed rate regulations on telephone equipment and paved the way for consolidation between the telephone and computer industries, notably by allowing AT&T to enter the computer field through a subsidiary. The agency was also credited with helping encourage a cable television boom by eliminating key restrictions on programming and satellite use; eliminating paperwork requirements for local radio broadcasters; simplifying the licensing procedure for new radio stations; and helping women and minorities qualify for broadcast station ownership.