The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) and the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) initiated the urban rate survey for 2024. The information collected in this survey will be used to develop voice and broadband reasonable comparability benchmarks that will be in place in 2024. The FCC will be collecting the rates offered by a random sample of providers of fixed services identified using December 2022 data filed in the FCC Broadband Data Collection (BDC) tool. The FCC will collect separate samples for fixed voice and fixed broadband services, in up to 500 urban census tracts for voice services and up to 2,000 urban census tracts for broadband services. Completed surveys will be due by Sept 5, 2023.

In the third decade of the 21st century, getting online is no longer optional, and providing financial assistance to US households that can’t afford broadband should be as much a given as food stamps. More broadly, from a macro perspective, high rates of broadband use benefit society and the economy; and from a micro perspective, those least likely to be online are those who would in many ways benefit most from it. In both cases, broadband policy should prioritize connecting remaining offline households in order to achieve universal connectivity. High broadband connectivity rates are positively linked to factors such as GDP growth and stability. They enable jobs, promote resiliency in the face of disasters, and support the massive and growing digital economy. Huge online marketplaces of every stripe are subject to network effects: They become more valuable to every user the more users there are. For all these reasons, increasing connectivity rates is broadly beneficial. Broadband enables cheaper, more convenient access to critical resources such as health care and government programs, so people with the fewest resources are often the ones who stand to benefit the most from being connected. From every angle, getting offline groups online—and aiming for as close to universal connectivity rates as possible—should be a policy priority. Doing so requires both completing deployment and increasing adoption rates. Congress and the Biden Administration should sustain funding for subsidy programs such as the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), build economic impact analyses into them, and survey households that remain offline.

Missouri was among the lucky winners of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, receiving the third highest allocation at $1.74 billion. But whether that amount will be more than enough or just right to cover all unserved and underserved locations is “the ultimate question,” said BJ Tanksley, director of Missouri’s Office of Broadband Development. “I think the thing about this is it also is a call to us, there’s just a lot of work to be done across the state.” Tanksley said that while Missouri “always predicted” it would receive a relatively high BEAD allotment, the state found over $300 million was allocated due to “the proportion of extreme high-cost locations.” He estimates roughly 300,000 locations in Missouri are “still lacking quality broadband service” and a “good portion” of those are considered high-cost areas, particularly in the south-central part of the state where the Mark Twain National Forest is located. “You have large areas of public land mixed with lighter populations between those public lands,” said Tanksley. “We don’t have necessarily mountains but it’s got lots of hills and they’re all heavily wooded for the most part. So those areas will be tough to get to.” Other areas that will likely be difficult to reach are the Western and Northern parts of the state, closer to the Iowa border.

For the city of Albuquerque (NM), providing high-quality and affordable internet is a priority. The majority of households are connected, but that doesn’t mean everybody that needs it has it and it doesn’t mean it’s affordable or reliable. Albuquerque needs more competition, more providers, better infrastructure to fill in the gaps and more affordable options. What the broadband office is dong to fill in those gaps is:

• Collaborate with private companies to bring future-proof infrastructure like fiber-to-the-home;
• Conduct marketing and outreach around the Federal Communications Commission's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP); and
• Made available a broadband survey specific to Albuquerque residents.

In June 2023, President Joe Biden announced how more than $42 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding will be allocated across the US and its territories to bring 100% broadband access to nearly 60 million unserved or underserved Americans within five years. Now, the real work begins: determining how 50 states and six territories will put that funding to work. Despite the many funding initiatives aimed to solve the problem in the US, those finances are finite and currently trending in a “fiber-first” direction. Fiber is great where attainable, but this approach overlooks the important realities of providing reliable broadband to underserved areas at scale, which indicate that fiber alone would require far more funding than what is currently available. Thanks to recent technological advancements, there are new tools available that can efficiently and cost-effectively reach those forgotten by “fiber-first” thinking. Next-generation fixed wireless access is a unique technology category that overcomes two long-battled challenges of the wireless broadband industry:

• Non-line-of-sight capabilities — the ability to maintain high performance despite physical obstacles, such as trees or buildings, between tower and home;
• Interference cancellation — a feature that ensures reliable, high-speed service in crowded (even unlicensed) radio frequencies where there are interfering signals from other devices.

For the first time ever, we have what it takes to achieve 100% coverage with readily available funds, and in timelines measured in months rather than years. Opportunities of this magnitude don’t come around often. It is critical that the US, state governments, and key stakeholders work together to deliver reliable internet to those still impacted by the digital divide.

[Carl Guardino serves as the VP of Government Affairs & Policy at Tarana]

How can we protect ourselves from A.I.? That was the question that Mike Masnick found himself fielding this summer in a WhatsApp chat with about 100 directors, actors and screenwriters. The group, including marquee talent, was worried about a grim possible future in which deepfake versions of actors perform screenplays written by ChatGPT. Masnick, a professional tech wonk, told his Hollywood listeners to work with what they had: Publicly shame projects that replace human labor with artificial intelligence, use state publicity laws against any unauthorized deepfakes, and fight hard for contractual protections. (The fight is on: A.I. is one reason for the writers’ and actors’ strikes that have paralyzed the film and television industry.) But he also suggested that they capitalize on the technology. Convinced that “A.I. plus human” is the future, he pointed to the singer Grimes. She invited people to use A.I.-generated versions of her voice, trained on music that she had done in the past, in exchange for half of any royalties. One GrimesAI song is closing in on a million listens on Spotify. “Let people be creative and they’ll do creative things and expand the interest in your own work,” Masnick said. The technological shift is inevitable, he said, so “use it to your advantage.”