Broadcasting&Cable

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he thought 5G wireless technology could indeed help close the rural digital divide but conceded there were challenges to building out the next-generation technology to wherever it needed to go. In terms of smartphones, Chairman Pai said, 5G might be more a "big city use case," but he saw opportunities beyond urban with fixed wireless, which was why he was bullish on the trial window for the spectrum in the 2.5-gigahertz band. He also pointed to precision agriculture and telemedicine.

Microsoft is pushing the Federal Communications Commission to respond to its May 2019 petition for rulemaking on expanding access to the so-called white spaces between TV channels. The company wants the FCC to allow more sharing in the broadcast band for unlicensed wireless. In meetings with FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr, Microsoft and its representatives came armed with a report outlining how wireless internet providers have been able to boost their throughput tenfold using TV white spaces.

Over the past few decades, the notion of a world without the newspaper industry has gone from grimly conceivable to a foregone conclusion. Once the cornerstone of localism and community, over the past two decades, the local newspaper has become nearly extinct. History is set to repeat itself in the broadcast television space. From 2014 to 2019, the total percentage of local advertising dollars spent on broadcast television fell from 14.3% to 11.2%. By 2023, BIA Kelsey forecasts, that percentage will drop to 9.7%.

The future of the American mobile broadband industry has hinged on a small courtroom in lower Manhattan, where carriers and regulators are squaring off over a plan to reshape the wireless business as we know it. The last hurdle to T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint is a federal lawsuit, filed by ten state attorneys general in the Southern District of New York, accusing the merger of being anti-competitive. This is regulators’ last chance to stop the merger from going through, by proving that a merged T-Mobile will mean higher prices and worse service for wireless customers.