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  2. May 2022

May 2022

Utah Broadband Center Announces 2022 Grant Recipients

The Utah Broadband Center, powered by the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, recently announced its Broadband Access Grant recipients. The awardees are All West/Utah Inc, Box Elder County Government, CentraCom Interactive,  Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, and South Utah Valley Electric Special Service District. The Broadband Access Grant program offsets capital expenses in deploying “last-mile broadband” in unserved rural and underserved economically distressed areas.

Faster Verizon Fixed Wireless Speed May Soon Come Thanks to C-Band

Verizon currently cites a speed of 300 Mbps for its 5G fixed wireless offering. That speed could increase beginning as early as 2023 when the company gains access to additional spectrum that it won in the 2021 C-band auction, said Matt Ellis, Verizon executive vice president and chief financial officer. The company was the biggest winner in 2021’s C-band auction.

How small companies bring fast internet to rural places that telecom giants ignore

Installing fiber-optic internet in sparsely populated places like western Kansas is extremely expensive, even with government subsidies. But some smaller, local broadband providers are finding ways to make it work where the big national companies have not. Federal and state governments have poured billions into trying to bring more bandwidth to the remote corners of the country.

Fixed Wireless Could Add 10 Million Subscribers by 2027

Fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband could add more than 10 million subscribers in the next five years, driven by programs geared toward rural markets, according to Wells Fargo telecom and media analysts Eric Luebchow and Steven Cahall. The analysts predict that total broadband subscriber additions will accelerate to 4.5-to-5 million annually in 2023 and 2024, fueled mainly by FWA and fiber overbuilds. Over the next five years, Luebchow and Cahall predict FWA will rise from 7.1 million total subscribers at the end of 2021 to 17.6 million in 2027.

No Sohn Means No Broadband Map, and No Broadband Map Means No BEAD Money

Republicans who think there is no downside to dragging Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society]’s confirmation out interminably to block Title II — especially those who voted in favor of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 (IIJA) and are looking for that broadband money to begin flowing to their states — may wish to think again. Why?

Future-Proofing Federal Broadband Grants

There has been a lot of discussion in the last few months about how wonderful it was for Congress to have increased the speed requirements for broadband grant eligibility to 100/20 Mbps in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program grants. If we accept that 25/3 Mbps was a good definition for download speed in 2015 and that 100/20 Mbps is a good definition in 2022, then that is an acknowledgment that the demand for download broadband speed has grown at about 21 percent per year.

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