Fierce

The Department of Justice (DoJ) supports Dish Network’s request for more time to buy 800 MHz spectrum licenses from T-Mobile but says seven more months is sufficient rather than the ten months that Dish had requested. In a September 18 filing with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the DoJ said a modest extension of the deadline for Dish to acquire the spectrum licenses will serve the competition goals of the final judgment that enabled Sprint to merge with T-Mobile. The DoJ referred back to a 2013 petition that T-Mobile filed with the Federal Communications Commission when

Brightspeed will open the "Brightspeed Technology Advancement Center" (BTAC) in Kansas City (MO) to recreate its network infrastructure and generate a test environment. Simulating a real network environment will enable Brightspeed to work with hardware and software for voice, DSL, broadband fiber and Wi-Fi to improve customer experience and network efficiency. BTAC will also bring Brightspeed employees and vendor partners together to develop, test and launch new products that reduce outages, lower repair times, address device and software bugs, and reconfigure network deployments.

Recon Analytics recently conducted the largest survey run to date to assess whether consumers eligible for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) are actually enrolling and if so, what they are using their ACP funds for. We asked 29,141 ACP-eligible Americans if they use ACP, and, if so, for what. The big question inside the Beltway is whether funding the ACP is a good use of taxpayer dollars. The ReconAnalytics survey indicates that if Congress is interested in seeing itself reelected, extending the ACP funding might be a good idea.

AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said it's a safe bet that AT&T and BlackRock's joint venture—Gigapower—will tap into Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding; but stressed the importance of targeting those funds in “areas that make sense for us.” Deroches said “We are not getting dollars for the sake of getting dollars. We want to make sure we can get an appropriate return on those.”

Charter Communications has frequently talked up the pace of its rural deployments, reaching 68,000 subsidized rural passings in the second quarter (Q2) of 2023. CFO Jessica Fischer said the Charter has a “tremendous opportunity” to expand its footprint to rural areas. Charter was one of the largest winners in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, and Fischer noted progress in those builds “has been going quite well” in terms of pace and penetration.

Infinera will join the Build America, Buy America (BABA) movement by bringing semiconductor component manufacturing to the US. Infinera is joining a cohort of equipment providers that have onshored operations as the industry prepares for $42.5 billion in Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding. To help operators comply with the BEAD's BABA requirements, Infinera will leverage its optical compound semiconductor facility in California and testing and packaging facility in Pennsylvania.