Analysis

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to vote on April 25 to restore its authority over the companies we pay to get online, and reinstate federal net neutrality protections that were jettisoned by the Trump administration in 2017.  Net neutrality protections are supposed to ensure that we, not the internet service providers (ISPs) we pay to get online, get to decide what we do online.

After spending some time going over my predictions about the future of broadband, I've come to a few conclusions:

On April 25, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will—for the seventh time in 20 years—address the issue of net neutrality.

The American Samoa draft BROADBANDiNEI Digital Equity Plan—released by the Broadband Coordination, Opportunities, Redevelopment and Deployment (BCORD) Office—reflects priorities, strategies, collective needs, and opportunities identified through local coordination with regards to providing affordable, accessible, secure, equitable, internet-for-all.

Ten-year-old Miguel is putting his new digital literacy skills to an unexpected use: writing stories about his need for a brother. “It is boring only having sisters,” Miguel, who has four sisters, explained. Miguel and his mother Maria teamed up to take bilingual digital literacy classes through the University of Houston-Downtown's (UHD) e-library program.

In 25 years, our broadband networks will likely be carrying at 12 to 15 times the volume of data that they carry today, and probably more. Unfortunately, there is no easy path to upgrade middle-mile networks to keep up with the expected future demand. Faster lasers can’t alone satisfy the future demand for increased middle-mile bandwidth.

What does future demand for broadband speed and usage mean for last mile technologies? The fastest broadband technology today is fiber, and the most common fiber technology is passive optical network (PON), which brings broadband to local clusters of customers.

The federal Digital Equity Act and the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program will collectively send more than $1 billion to Illinois, and state officials have been working for more than a year to lay out their roadmap for implementation. The State Digital Equity Plan describes how Illinois officials envision supporting broadband adoption, digital devices, and digital skills, while the BEAD 

The recent decision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to increase the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps got me thinking about the long term trajectory of the demand for broadband speed. One way to think about future demand is to look back at the broadband speeds 25 years ago. In 1999, both telcos and cable companies offered 1 Mbps DSL broadband connection as an upgrade to dial-up—and 1 Mbps became the de facto definition of broadband at the time.

We all have eclipse on the brain, so I thought it’d be fun to look at some eclipse broadband stats. In the path of totality, 8% of locations are either unserved or underserved according to the NTIA definition of reliable broadband. That’s just over 1 million locations out of 11.9 million locations in the path of totality in total. If the path of totality were a state, it would be ranked 19th in terms of access to broadband. It’s also interesting to think about the competition situation in the path of totality.