Reporting

Comcast met with Federal Communications Commission officials the week of June 24 to urge them to adopt NCTA-The Internet & Television Association's proposal to use polygon shapefiles to more accurately map broadband deployment, including where service could be lit up in a matter of days (which Comcast argues should count as served). In their meeting with FCC officials, the Comcast executives made the point that the shapefiles mapping approach would be more granular than census block, saying shapefiles "accurately reflect coverage in partially served census blocks that may not be depicte

As the Senate geared up to pass its defense policy bill, the office of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) unsuccessfully pushed to add language that would require that a provision mandating Pentagon-led test beds to examine sharing 5G airwaves come with a requirement that the government “solicit and consider the input of commercial wireless service providers, equipment manufacturers, and firms developing and operating spectrum sharing technologies” as part of planning. 

Google's "Jigsaw" is a moonshot division formed in 2010, now thought of as an "elite think tank." Founded as Google Ideas, its goals included using technology to fight radicals from San Salvador to the Middle East; investigating human trafficking, terrorism, and cybercrime; and developing software to conduct the first public opinion poll in Somalia. While trying to save the internet from censorship, extremists, and hackers may sound like one of the best jobs in tech, more than a dozen current and former employees of Jigsaw said that the reality inside is bleak. Current and former Jigsaw emp

President Donald Trump’s decision to allow US companies to continue selling to Huawei followed an extensive lobbying campaign by the US semiconductor industry that argued the ban could hurt America’s economic and national security. In multiple high-level meetings and a letter to the Commerce Department, the companies argued for targeted action against Huawei instead of the blanket ban the Trump administration imposed in May.

A 911 outage prevented AT&T customers from calling emergency services for hours during the morning of July 2, officials in multiple states said. Officials in TX, MN, WI, WA, and several other states reported issues. The company soon said its fixed the problem. “Earlier this morning some wireless customers may have been unable to connect to 911,” an AT&T spokesperson said. “This has been resolved and we apologize to anyone who was affected.”

The news business is on pace for its worst job losses in a decade as about 3,000 people have been laid off or been offered buyouts in the first five months of 2019. The cuts have been widespread. Newspapers owned by Gannett and McClatchy, digital media companies like BuzzFeed and Vice Media, and the cable news channel CNN have all shed employees. The level of attrition is the highest since 2009, when the industry saw 7,914 job cuts in the first five months of that year in the wake of the financial crisis. 

Earlier in 2019, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sought public comment on a new contract for the Public Interest Registry, the non-profit organization that administers the .org top-level domain. The results were stark; more than 3,200 individuals and organizations submitted comments to ICANN, and most of them focused on a proposal to remove a cap on the price customers could be charged for .org domains. The existing contract, signed in 2013, banned the Public Interest Registry from charging more than $8.25 per domain.

Google’s bet on balloons to deliver cell service soon faces a crucial test amid doubts about the viability of the technology by some potential customers.  The company behind the effort, Loon, says its balloons will reach Kenya in the coming weeks for its first commercial trial. The test with Telkom Kenya, the nation’s No 3 carrier, will let mountain villagers buy 4G service at market-rate prices for an undefined period. Kenya’s aviation authority said its final approval would be signed in July.

As the US gets set to ban certain Chinese manufacturers from selling telecommunications equipment to US service providers, CoBank is warning that rural Americans’ access to communications services could be damaged if insufficient funding is available for rural service providers to replace prohibited equipment already installed in their networks.

This is the paradox of 5G, the collection of technologies behind next-generation wireless networks: They require a gargantuan quantity of wires. This is because 5G requires many more small towers, all of which must be wired to the internet. The consequences of this unavoidable reality are myriad.