Telecommunication

Cable companies Charter Communications and Comcast have each raked in at least $100 million in state broadband grants in 2022, leading the pack of operators scrambling to secure government funding for expansion efforts.

I define the digital divide as a technology gap where good broadband is available in some places, but not everywhere. The technology divide can be as large as an entire county that doesn’t have broadband or as small as a pocket of homes or apartment buildings in cities that got bypassed. Until late in the 1990s, the only way for most people to get onto the Internet was by the use of dial-up access through phone lines.  At first, dial-up technology was only available to people who lived in places where an ISP had established local dial-up telephone numbers.

The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics (OEA) and the Wireline Competition Bureau (WCB) initiated the urban rate survey for 2023. The information collected in this survey will be used to develop voice and broadband reasonable comparability benchmarks that will be in place in 2023. The FCC e will be collecting the rates offered by a random sample of providers of fixed services identified using December 2021 FCC Form 477 data.

Is fixed wireless a more affordable solution than fiber? Not so fast, according to a recent 150-page study conducted by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society by CTC Technology and Energy. Fiber advantages over fixed wireless networks include a thousand times the broadband capacity and the ability to scale bandwidth by simply changing out the electronics at the ends, according to Andrew Afflerbach, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of CTC Technology & Energy.

The House of Representatives passed three communications and technology bills:

The US is still struggling to complete the break up with Chinese telecom companies that Donald Trump started four years ago. The problem: Small communications networks, largely in rural areas, are saddled with old Chinese equipment they can’t afford to remove and which they can’t repair if it breaks. The companies say they want to ditch the Chinese tech, but promised funds from Congress aren’t coming quickly enough and aren’t enough to cover the cost.

In March 2022, the Federal Communications Commission issued a Second Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FCC 22-20) that asks if the rules should change for allocating the costs of a pole replacement that occurs when a new carrier asks to add a new wire or device onto an existing pole. The timing of this docket is in anticipation of a huge amount of rural fiber construction that will be coming as a result of the tsunami of state and federal broadband grants. The current rules push the full cost of replacing a pole onto the entity that is asking to get onto the pole.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed rules that would modify the intercarrier compensation regime to address ongoing harmful arbitrage practices that raise costs for long-distance carriers and their customers. The FCC seeks comment on proposed changes to its Access Stimulation Rules to ensure that they apply to traffic that terminates through providers of IP-enabled services (IPES Providers).

On July 13, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee passed five health and telecommunications bills. This includes:

A recent telecommunications outage left millions of Canadians without access to internet and cell services for hours. It was a stunning reminder that Canada must revolutionize the industry and dismantle the oligopoly that runs it. On July 8, more than 10 million customers of Rogers Communications were left without internet and cell services when a maintenance update went sideways. At least two days later, some customers were still without service, while others had unreliable access. It was the second time in 15 months the Rogers service failed.