Digital inclusion efforts need to target the reasons people remain offline, and at this point, the digital divide is more of a problem of adoption than deployment. Successful digital inclusion efforts have a few key things in common: They are flexible and individualized, adhere to consistent high-level standards, and share best practices to minimize waste while adapting programs to meet local needs. Digital inclusion efforts include any of the various attempts to get people online. Low digital literacy rates among the US population and a lack of proper digital-skills institutions make advancing digital literacy a key component of getting people online. At the other end of the scale, digital navigators can help people sign up for low-cost plans or figure out how to navigate an Internet connection. The remaining barriers involve a lack of funding, scale, and reliable data that adheres to high-level standards. Digital inclusion, digital literacy rates, and awareness of low-cost plans are highly interrelated, and gaps fall largely around marginalized groups. Getting people online requires addressing all the sources of the problem individually.

Workforce and waivers. Those were two of the key themes and indeed the potential stumbling blocks for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program deployments, said TIA CEO Dave Stehlin. Now that the US government has issued a waiver for its Middle Mile grant program, the prospect of forthcoming relief for the BEAD program seems more promising. The waivers in question relate to Buy American requirements associated with the Middle Mile and BEAD programs. These specify that materials used for grant-funded projects contain at least 55% domestic content. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), asked the Department of Commerce (DoC) to waive these requirements for the Middle Mile program in September 2022. That request was granted in April of 2023. The waiver will apply to Middle Mile grant awards made between March 1, 2023, and March 1, 2024, and be effective “for the period of performance” specified by those awards. Equipment covered includes broadband routing gear, access and aggregation switching kit, microwave backhaul equipment, fiber transport materials and optical line terminals, undersea cable gear, and telemetry switches and routers. 

Americans increasingly rely on the radio spectrum for much of their daily lives. From texting friends to car navigation these airwaves play an invisible but central role. Much like other important resources, spectrum access is finite. Demand continues to grow. Federal spectrum policy experts recognize this – and have come up with creative new ways to allow greater spectrum access by sharing this vital resource. One innovative approach is the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which allows for dynamic spectrum sharing between the Department of Defense (DoD)and commercial spectrum users.  The DoD users have protected, and prioritized use of the spectrum. When the government isn’t using the airwaves, companies and the public can gain access through a tiered licensing arrangement. This means the DoD can use the same spectrum for its critical missions while companies can use it for 5G and high-speed Internet deployment. Research from the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) finds the following about CBRS deployments:

• About 45 percent of all active devices were deployed in counties where use of the spectrum is shared with DoD, known as Dynamic Protection Areas (DPA). By the end of the reporting period, there were 128,351 active devices in DPA-impacted counties with a total population of 232,348,897 residents;
• Use of the General Authorized Access (GAA) tier, which provides lower-costs to the spectrum, dominates the band. Four out of five active devices were GAA-only, which is the license tier that must accept interference from licensed and federal users;
• More than 70 percent of all active devices are deployed in rural census blocks, showing the band is playing a significant role in expanding rural wireless connectivity.

With T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G buildout at 275 million points of presence (POPs) and a year-end target of 300 million POPs, the question is: How easy or difficult is it to cover that last 25 million people? “It gets harder and harder. And as a rule of thumb, I would say that it’s about 3 times harder for every 10 million that you add. So that’s about how hard it gets,” said T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson. The geography of the US is what makes it tricky. Wireless operators tend to focus on the most populated and dense areas of the country when they roll out a new generation of technology. Then they pan out to the less populated suburban and rural areas. That’s the stage at which T-Mobile finds itself. Even without that last 25 million POPs covered with 2.5 GHz spectrum, T-Mobile is making a concerted effort to grow market share in smaller markets and more rural areas. T-Mobile is still waiting for the government to release the 2.5 GHz licenses it won in 2022's Federal Communications Commission auction, and many of those cover rural areas of the country. 

Cogent Communications has completed the previously announced acquisition of T-Mobile’s Wireline Business. The price of the deal was not disclosed. The acquisition, initially announced in September 2022, calls for Cogent to buy T-Mobile’s wireline business (formerly known as Sprint GMG), which was comprised of the long-haul fiber network assets that the company acquired when it merged with Sprint. Cogent expects the T-Mobile wireline business to “complement and eventually replace Cogent’s current leased network” as well as enable Cogent to “expand its product set, including the sales of optical wave transport services to new and existing customers.”

The Internet is bringing restructuring to the news industry. But what, if anything, does the shift from vertically integrated newspapers to specialized information services tell us about the state of journalism? After all, the car, aerospace, and computing industries all became much bigger, more innovative, more efficient, and more global after they adopted a focused-supplier approach, and these changes greatly benefited consumers. The restructuring of the news business will likely do the same. Just as we should adopt a broad definition of “news” that encompasses its many forms, we also need to decide what we mean by “journalism.”