July 2020

Internet speeds were awful, so these rural Pennsylvanians put up their own wireless tower

Big Valley is a living postcard of Pennsylvania. But they had slow, unreliable, and expensive internet. The government couldn’t help. Private suppliers have long said improved speeds were too costly to provide for such a sparsely populated area. So a group of mostly retirees banded together and took a frontier approach to a modern problem. They built their own wireless network, using radio signals instead of expensive cable. “We just wanted better internet service up our valley.

Chairman Pai Names Ashley Boizelle Acting FCC General Counsel

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that Ashley Boizelle will serve as Acting General Counsel for the FCC. Boizelle joined the FCC in 2017 as Deputy General Counsel for Administrative Law and has served as Deputy General Counsel for Litigation since 2019. Boizelle will serve as Acting General Counsel from July 13 to September 4, 2020, while General Counsel Thomas M. Johnson, Jr., is on paternity leave. Boizelle joined the FCC from the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

5G Was Going to Unite the World—Instead It’s Tearing Us Apart

Tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, the handling of Covid-19, and Chinese misinformation are escalating global divisions around the deployment of 5G. A growing number of countries are aligning with either a Western or a Chinese version of the tech.