Texas could have nearly $5 billion directed toward expanding broadband availability statewide if voters approve a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in November. Texas will receive more than $3.3 billion in federal money—more than any other state—to help expand broadband access.
Brightspeed will open the "Brightspeed Technology Advancement Center" (BTAC) in Kansas City (MO) to recreate its network infrastructure and generate a test environment. Simulating a real network environment will enable Brightspeed to work with hardware and software for voice, DSL, broadband fiber and Wi-Fi to improve customer experience and network efficiency. BTAC will also bring Brightspeed employees and vendor partners together to develop, test and launch new products that reduce outages, lower repair times, address device and software bugs, and reconfigure network deployments.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D-CA) resolved a $93 million settlement with Google over allegations that its location-privacy practices violated California consumer protection laws. The settlement follows a multi-year investigation by the California Department of Justice that determined Google was deceiving users by collecting, storing, and using their location data for consumer profiling and advertising purposes without informed consent.
The European Commission has recognized early on the disruptive potential of 5G and later 6G.
Mobile communications markets are usually characterized by a limited number of operators. Despite being markets exhibiting high concentration, many mobile network operator mergers have been recently proposed and approved subject to remedies (or commitments by the merging parties). The research investigates the merger induced effects on consumer surplus, in which a model has three firms selling horizontally and vertically differentiated products.
Recon Analytics recently conducted the largest survey run to date to assess whether consumers eligible for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) are actually enrolling and if so, what they are using their ACP funds for. We asked 29,141 ACP-eligible Americans if they use ACP, and, if so, for what. The big question inside the Beltway is whether funding the ACP is a good use of taxpayer dollars. The ReconAnalytics survey indicates that if Congress is interested in seeing itself reelected, extending the ACP funding might be a good idea.
Worldwide, there is an ongoing policy and regulatory push to make very high-speed broadband available as widely as possible. Underlying the policy interventions to support higher speeds is an implicit assumption that higher speeds will enable different (and socially valuable) uses. Extensive data on usage published by the UK telecommunications regulator finds that the linkage between broadband speeds and traffic per line—allowing for demographic factors—shows that higher speed has a weak relationship to traffic.
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