Lawmakers ended what had been an effort to allow media organizations to band together to negotiate revenue sharing deals with tech giants, leaving the provisions out of a massive spending bill amid intense pushback from industry and advocacy groups. The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) was omitted from a bicameral agreement on Congress’s sprawling defense-spending legislation.
Wednesday, December 7, 2022
AT&T is looking to expand fiber beyond its traditional local exchange carrier service territory, said AT&T Chief Operating Officer Jeff McElfresh. AT&T already did an out-of-region fiber deployment in Mesa (AZ) and apparently is sufficiently satisfied with the results so far to consider doing more of the same.
Elon Musk and SpaceX are launching a military-branded version of Starlink called Starshield. According to its newly launched website, Starshield will be the military and government version of Starlink, a satellite based internet service. It will first focus on three areas: Earth observation, communications, and hosted payloads. So it will be a spy satellite, a communication platform, and will be customizable for the individual customer. The satellite bus is part of its main body and can be outfitted with different sensors depending on the user’s needs.
NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association released its 2022 Broadband/Internet Availability Survey Report highlighting the ongoing efforts of rural broadband providers to deliver better broadband services to rural Americans. Survey highlights include:
Congress recently earmarked $64 billion toward ending the digital divide, but this is just a drop in the funding ocean. For this ambition, the US has reserved additional billions across 15 agencies and 133 programs. To help navigate this complex task, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the National Broadband Map in hopes of minimizing inefficiencies.
How much broadband will Americans get for the $75 billion that Congress committed in 2021? That’s enough money to equip an additional 17 million households with broadband, taking the US to 99 percent broadband coverage, according to a Federal Communications Commission staff paper and data from the Census Bureau.
A federal effort to map out and better understand who in America has decent internet and who does not is already getting challenged by those in the know, including the Colorado Broadband Office, which has submitted 13,000 challenges of the data. The map is just two weeks old. And the state isn’t done challenging the data collected by the Federal Communications Commission, said Brandy Reitter, executive director of the state’s broadband office. “Thirteen thousand is a lot but likely doesn’t include all missing locations,” Reitter said.
The Federal Communications Commission's recent restrictions on five Chinese telecoms’ technologies — adopted on Nov. 25, 2022 — could impact state and local governments in ways previous bans haven’t. “Up until now … the federal agencies have been prohibited from buying this kind of technology, but it's still been widely available to state and local governments, to private companies, individuals,” said Jack Corrigan, research analyst at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET).
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