Telecommunication

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) signed into law a bill that makes phone calls from California’s prisons free of charge.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules to bring relief to incarcerated people with communication disabilities by easing the obstacles they face in communicating with family, loved ones, and other sources of support.

Orange Group CEO Christel Heydemann and Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, called on technology giants to contribute a “fair” share to broadband infrastructure costs, arguing such companies are driving a need for continued upgrades and have disproportionately benefitted from telecommunications investments to date. Regulators in the US, EU, and South Korea are weighing rule changes that would force the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Netflix to pay telecom companies for the large amounts of traffic they generate.

Big Tech companies shouldn't have to pay for Internet service providers' network-upgrade costs, a Google executive said amid a push in Europe to have tech companies pay for broadband expansions and improvements. In November 2021, the CEOs of 13 large European telecommunications companies called on tech giants to pay for a portion of the Internet service providers' network upgrade costs.

Lieutenant Gov Jon Husted (R-OH) is launching the newly designed Broadband Infrastructure Training Program at Buckeye Hills Career Center in Rio Grande (OH). Students will go through an approximately 12-week interactive learning journey that includes the design, installation, and service components of broadband networks.

Cable companies Charter Communications and Comcast have each raked in at least $100 million in state broadband grants in 2022, leading the pack of operators scrambling to secure government funding for expansion efforts.

I define the digital divide as a technology gap where good broadband is available in some places, but not everywhere. The technology divide can be as large as an entire county that doesn’t have broadband or as small as a pocket of homes or apartment buildings in cities that got bypassed. Until late in the 1990s, the only way for most people to get onto the Internet was by the use of dial-up access through phone lines.  At first, dial-up technology was only available to people who lived in places where an ISP had established local dial-up telephone numbers.

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) and the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) initiated the urban rate survey for 2023. The information collected in this survey will be used to develop voice and broadband reasonable comparability benchmarks that will be in place in 2023. The FCC e will be collecting the rates offered by a random sample of providers of fixed services identified using December 2021 FCC Form 477 data.

Is fixed wireless a more affordable solution than fiber? Not so fast, according to a recent 150-page study conducted by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society by CTC Technology and Energy. Fiber advantages over fixed wireless networks include a thousand times the broadband capacity and the ability to scale bandwidth by simply changing out the electronics at the ends, according to Andrew Afflerbach, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of CTC Technology & Energy.

The House of Representatives passed three communications and technology bills: