Adoption

The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau seeks comment on a petition filed by the National Lifeline Association (NaLA) seeking clarification of the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) and Enforcement Bureau (EB) Chiefs’ authority to suspend a participating provider’s Affordable Connectivity Program enrollments and hold a participating provider’s funding based on the “adequate evidence” standard , or in the alternative, reconsideration of the removal rule (47 C.F.R. § 54.1801(e)(2)).

Exploring the need for a Digital Equity Foundation, options and best practices for its potential structure, governance, and the benefits such a foundation could bring to the public. 

Charter Communications said that it will commit an additional $1 million to its 2022 Spectrum Digital Education grant initiative, boosting the total amount invested in the six-year program to $8 million. Charter launched Spectrum Digital Education in 2017, and through February 2022 the company said grants and in-kind contributions have helped 99 nonprofit organizations and more than 95,000 people in 22 states and Washington (DC).

The Utah Broadband Center, powered by the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, recently announced its Broadband Access Grant recipients. The awardees are All West/Utah Inc, Box Elder County Government, CentraCom Interactive,  Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, and South Utah Valley Electric Special Service District. The Broadband Access Grant program offsets capital expenses in deploying “last-mile broadband” in unserved rural and underserved economically distressed areas.

Verizon currently cites a speed of 300 Mbps for its 5G fixed wireless offering. That speed could increase beginning as early as 2023 when the company gains access to additional spectrum that it won in the 2021 C-band auction, said Matt Ellis, Verizon executive vice president and chief financial officer. The company was the biggest winner in 2021’s C-band auction.

Installing fiber-optic internet in sparsely populated places like western Kansas is extremely expensive, even with government subsidies. But some smaller, local broadband providers are finding ways to make it work where the big national companies have not. Federal and state governments have poured billions into trying to bring more bandwidth to the remote corners of the country.

Fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband could add more than 10 million subscribers in the next five years, driven by programs geared toward rural markets, according to Wells Fargo telecom and media analysts Eric Luebchow and Steven Cahall. The analysts predict that total broadband subscriber additions will accelerate to 4.5-to-5 million annually in 2023 and 2024, fueled mainly by FWA and fiber overbuilds. Over the next five years, Luebchow and Cahall predict FWA will rise from 7.1 million total subscribers at the end of 2021 to 17.6 million in 2027.

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few months about how wonderful it was for Congress to have increased the speed requirements for broadband grant eligibility to 100/20 Mbps in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants. If we accept that 25/3 Mbps was a good definition for download speed in 2015 and that 100/20 Mbps is a good definition in 2022, then that is an acknowledgment that the demand for download broadband speed has grown at about 21 percent per year.

Hundreds of thousands of Michigan households in rural and urban communities don’t have access to high-speed internet. According to federal data, the average percentage of households in the state’s 83 counties without high-speed internet access is 17.5 percent. Around 13.5 percent of those households don’t have smartphones, computers or tablets that can connect to high-speed internet.

AT&T is enlisting employees across the organization to make its fiber rollout to 30 million homes by 2025 a success, taking an all hands on deck approach to ensure it pushes penetration rates up as quickly as possible to get a return on its hefty investments. CEO John Stankey said its initial focus for the build has been filling in a patchwork of earlier fiber deployments in metropolitan areas to enable it to advertise in a more efficient fashion.