Jon Brodkin

A new SpaceX filing outlines plans for Starlink to offer phone service, emergency backup for voice calls, and cheaper plans for people with low incomes through the government's Lifeline program. The details are in Starlink's petition to the Federal Communications Commission for designation as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier (ETC) under the Communications Act. SpaceX said it needs that legal designation in some of the states where it won government funding to deploy broadband in unserved areas.

AT&T has agreed to a $12 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit over its throttling of "unlimited" mobile data plans. As usual, refunds to individual customers amount to a fraction of what the customers paid for the hobbled service. The paltry nature of expected per-person payments was explained by plaintiffs in a filing that asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to approve the settlement.

Mediacom is telling heavy uploaders to reduce their data usage—even when those users are well below their monthly data caps. Mediacom's fastest Internet plan offers gigabit download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds with a monthly data cap of 6TB.

In response to Comcast imposing a data cap on Massachusetts residents, state lawmakers have proposed a ban on data caps, new fees, and price increases on home-Internet services for the duration of the pandemic. The legislation was filed on Jan 26 by Democratic state representatives Andy Vargas and Dave Rogers.

CenturyLink and Frontier Communications have again failed to meet broadband-deployment deadlines in dozens of states after taking money from the Federal Communications Commission. The deadline to hit 100 percent of the required deployments passed on December 31, 2020. Both CenturyLink and Frontier informed the FCC that they missed the deadline to finish deployment in numerous states. The carriers won't face the possibility of punishment yet.

Frontier Communications has agreed to expand its fiber-to-the-premises network and improve its poor service quality as part of a bankruptcy settlement in California. Frontier committed to deploy fiber to 350,000 homes and businesses within six years on a schedule that would require the first 100,000 by the end of 2022, 250,000 by the end of 2024, and the full 350,000 by year-end 2026. The settlement, filed in late December, is pending approval by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

Dozens of state lawmakers from Massachusetts urged Comcast to halt enforcement of its 1.2TB monthly data cap, saying the cap hurts low-income people during the pandemic and is unnecessary because of Comcast's healthy network capacity. The letter to Comcast Senior VP Mark Reilly, spearheaded by MA State Reps Andy Vargas and Dave Rogers, disputed Comcast's claim that a 1.2TB cap only affects a very small subset of customers it calls "super users." The lawmakers also wrote that "Massachusetts has experienced the largest relative increase of food-insecure individuals in the nation due to COVID-

Broadband and TV providers will finally be required to stop charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers own themselves, thanks to a new US law that takes effect on Dec 20. The bogus fees were outlawed by the Television Viewer Protection Act (TVPA), which was approved by Congress and signed by President Trump in December 2019.

OneWeb has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy under new ownership and says it will begin launching more broadband satellites in December 2020. Similar to SpaceX Starlink, OneWeb is building a network of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that can provide high-speed broadband with much lower latencies than traditional geostationary satellites. After a launch in December, launches will continue throughout 2021 and 2022, and OneWeb is now on track to begin commercial connectivity services to the UK and the Arctic region in late 2021 and will expand to delivering global services in 2022.

The number of broadband "power users"—people who use 1TB or more per month—has doubled over the past year, ensuring that broadband internet access service providers will be able to make more money from data caps. More customers exceeding their data caps will result in more overage charges paid to ISPs that impose monthly data caps. Higher usage can also boost ISP revenue because people using more data tend to subscribe to higher-speed packages.