Internet/Broadband

With billions in federal broadband funding already in hand and more on the way, a significant number of states are looking to map internet coverage within their borders to get a better understanding of where help is needed according to LightBox CEO Eric Frank. LightBox provides a geospatial mapping service and was previously tapped by officials in Georgia and Alabama to help create detailed broadband coverage maps.

Verizon’s Fios internet net additions may have slowed year on year in Q4, but CEO Hans Vestberg said its total for the full-year 2021 was the highest in more than five years. The operator posted 106,000 total broadband net additions in the quarter, up from 76,000 in Q4 2020. That figure included 78,000 fixed wireless access (FWA) and 55,000 Fios Internet adds as well as the loss of 27,000 DSL customers. While the quarterly Fios figure was down significantly from 95,000 net additions in Q4 2020, full-year Fios Internet gains in 2021 totaled 360,000.

NewsGuard, a service that uses trained journalists to rate news and information sites, will become available to millions of public school students at the end of January 2022 through a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Kids increasingly turn to the internet when looking for homework help or doing research for school projects. But unlike books in a library or articles in a journal, online resources can be difficult to filter for quality and misinformation.

Midco’s chief technology innovation officer Jon Pederson says the operator’s use of fixed wireless access (FWA) technology to serve certain remote locations is actually benefitting its efforts to expand its fiber network. Pederson, who has worked for the regional US broadband provider for more than three decades, explained Midco deploys fixed wireless access service for customers in some of the most remote parts of its footprint. As it runs fiber to new towers for that service, he said it’s also taking the opportunity to push fiber into nearby communities along the way.

The recently signed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act makes the largest federal investment into universal broadband access in history. In doing so, Congress gave broadband responsibility to the states, with the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) providing oversight.  This piece lays out eight steps NTIA should take to improve the odds of success in achieving universal connectivity:

Facebook says it’s helping millions of the world’s poorest people get online through apps and services that allow them to use the internet data-free. Internal company documents show that many of these people end up being charged in amounts that collectively add up to an estimated millions of dollars a month. To attract new users, Facebook made deals with cellular carriers in countries including Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines to let low-income people use a limited version of Facebook and browse some other websites without data charges.

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the central role of digital media in our everyday lives. We now are in a historic transition, from a nation organized for a pandemic response to a recovery that surely will create a “new normal.” So it’s timely and important to look back at how digital media has been shaped during this period, and more importantly, to assess what lies ahead, based on current data and trends. This post-pandemic new normal, however defined, will not be binary.

• AT&T now shares the Games Experience award with T-Mobile.
• T-Mobile exceeds the 10 Mbps mark in Upload Speed Experience, having the fastest Upload Speed Experience.
• T-Mobile keeps hold of the Voice App Experience award, ahead of Verizon and AT&T which tied.

In the absence of a comprehensive federal law, a handful of large states have passed or begun to enact data privacy legislation. More states are likely to pass similar laws in the coming years, which would create a patchwork of different and sometimes conflicting state privacy laws regulating the commercial collection and use of personal data.