Telecommunication

Many rural residents and businesses are furious that they can’t get fiber broadband even though there is fiber close to their home or business. They can’t understand why the uncaring company that owns the fiber can’t make the tiny investment needed to connect them to fiber that’s already tantalizingly close to them. The fiber that runs close to the home and business is likely middle-mile fiber. These middle-mile routes are often seen as too valuable by telecom companies to serve last-mile customers.

Several large telecom companies have announced big plans to expand fiber coverage, and I assume that also means heavily participating in the infrastructure law's $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant program that is aimed primarily at bringing better broadband to rural areas. It’s likely that companies want to benefit from the huge upcoming federal grants. The easiest way for them to take advantage of the federal grant is to plan to overlash fiber onto existing telco copper where the companies are already the incumbent.

I assume that most people know the famous line from Field of Dreams where the disembodied voice promises, “Build it, and he will come.” For twenty years, I’ve been advising broadband clients against taking that advice. It doesn’t make any sense to invest a lot of money into building a broadband network without first having done enough market research to know that people will buy your services. Now, I want to talk about a similar-sounding idea – build it, and they will fill it. This is a shorthand way to describe the unbelievable growth in broadband demand.

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel hereby appoints seven members to the Board of Directors of the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC). The term for the representative for commercial mobile radio service providers will end on December 31, 2022. All other positions are for a three-year term beginning on January 1, 2022. Chairwoman Rosenworcel appoints the following individuals to the USAC Board of Directors:

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s National Broadband Availability Map (NBAM) now includes 38 states, two US territories, and five federal agencies: US Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Department of the Treasury, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). The NBAM is a geographic information system platform which allows for the visualization and analysis of federal, state, and commercially available data sets.

Service providers who plan to participate in the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) could submit

House Republican Leaders sent a series of letters to federal agencies asking about steps they are taking to close the digital divide. The letters were sent by Energy and Commerce Committee Republican Leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Oversight and Reform Republican Leader James Comer (R-KY), Appropriations Committee Republican Leader Kay Granger (R-TX), Education and Labor Committee Republican Leader Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Agriculture Committee Republican Leader Glenn Thompson (R-PA).

The Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released the first ACCESS BROADBAND Report, which highlights the accomplishments of NTIA’s recently established Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth (OICG) over the past year.

Living here in many tribal and rural parts of Washington state, even on the fringes of cities including Seattle, Spokane and Leavenworth, means it’s often difficult or impossible to connect to the online world. When the pandemic largely turned the online world into the world for many urbanites, hundreds of thousands of people in Washington were shut out. The federal government has spent billions trying to solve the digital divide — a project many say is as big and necessary as it once was to get electricity into every home — and is on the verge of spending more than ever.

Associations representing cable, telecom and wireless internet service providers (ISPs) have teamed up to ask the Federal Communications Commission to create a safe harbor for companies that want to enroll eligible consumers in the new Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) subsidy before the FCC has figured out just how to transition from the COVID-19-driven Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) subsidy to ACP under rules not yet hammered out.