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  2. August 2020

August 2020

Back to School: A Look at the Internet Access Gap

More than one in five low-income households did not have any access to the internet in 2018, more than four times the rate of all other households. A staggering 43.7 percent of low-income households lacked access to personal high-speed internet at home, more than double that of the rest of the population.  Our analysis of data from the American Community Survey (ACS) shows that immigrant communities are also heavily affected. More than 5.2 million immigrant households, almost three out of 10, lacked access to personal broadband internet access at home in 2018.

BroadbandNow Proposes New Definition for Broadband Internet

BroadbandNow is proposing a new definition for broadband internet – increasing download speeds by fourfold to 100 Mbps and upload speeds by 8X to 25 Mbps. Currently, the FCC definition of broadband internet is a minimum of 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. The benchmark has not changed since 2015.

Trump’s flagrant assault on the First Amendment is disguised as a defense of it

President Donald Trump has sent a message to the Federal Communications Commission: Cross me for misusing my powers in this way, and you’ll be punished, too. The president wants Mike O’Rielly, his fellow FCC commissioners, and appointees across agencies to know what happens when they dare to put the rule of law first, just as the president wants Twitter, and Facebook, and all influential companies on the Internet or off to know how carefully they must tread with him in charge.

Why Your Internet Sucks

A transcription of a segment on The Indicator from Planet Money, "Why Your Intenet Sucks." 

One question that comes up regularly in one form or another from listeners: Why does our Internet suck so badly? And I can understand if you live in a rural area where, you know, it's inevitably patchy service, you know, it's hard to connect people. But 80% of people in the US live in urban areas, where we're all clustered together, which means we should be easy to service, right? And yet, our Internet sucks, too. Why is that? 

PHLConnectED: Connecting K-12 students to the internet

PHLConnectED will connect up to 35,000 K-12 student households with internet service in Philadelphia. The program will offer eligible student households up to two years of high-speed internet. Participants will not pay any out-of-pocket expenses or installation fees. PHLConnectED has three key components:

FCC Establishes Bidding Procedures for December C-band Auction

The Federal Communications Commission established final application and bidding procedures for the auction of 280 megahertz of mid-band spectrum for 5G and other advanced wireless services. This auction will offer 5,684 new flexible-use overlay licenses based on Partial Economic Areas (PEAs) for spectrum in the 3.7– 3.98 GHz band. This spectrum holds the potential to be prime spectrum for 5G services, and the procedures adopted today will ensure the assignment to auction winners of contiguous spectrum blocks allowing wide channel bandwidths that support 5G deployment.

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