Tuesday, November 12, 2019
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Broadband for America’s Future Starts with Anchors
Municipal Districts: The Fix for What Ails Rural Internet?
US Government Is Tripping Over Itself in Race to Dominate 5G Technology
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The Federal Communications Commission adopted the ambitious National Broadband Plan in 2010, laying out a policy framework meant to end the connectivity gap over the decade. With the 2010’s ending in a few weeks, it’s time for policymakers to refresh their approach to digital equity. The Benton Institute for Broadband and Society launched “Broadband for America’s Future: A Vision for the 2020’s” to re-invigorate the effort to close the digital divide in the next decade. The report synthesizes broadband learnings from communities, public-interest advocates, government officials, and industry experts to form a national broadband agenda. Four key building blocks anchor the agenda: advancing broadband deployment, promoting broadband competition, ensuring affordability and adoption, and supporting community anchor institutions. Benton's Jonathan Sallet identified the SHLB Coalition’s “To and Through” philosophy as a fundamental principle for community anchor institution broadband policy. To put it simply, connecting anchors to high-quality broadband enables them to serve as jumping off points to extend connectivity to surrounding residents and businesses in the community. The Benton report compiles case studies illustrating the real-world effectiveness of “To and Through”:
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Merit Network, a nonprofit organization governed by Michigan’s universities, operates nearly 4,000 miles of fiber-optic infrastructure, connecting all anchor institutions in the state. Recognizing that 368,000 rural Michigan homes lack broadband, Merit has started the Michigan Moonshot project to better understand how it can leverage its fiber network to end the digital divide in rural communities.
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Southern California’s Imperial County left its antiquated telecom provider behind to form the Imperial Valley Telecommunications Authority (IVTA), which partnered with the local power and water utilities to create a fiber-optic communications network. IVTA not only connects 30 CAIs, but also brings wireless internet to students beyond the campus in 11 underserved communities.
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Kent County, an agricultural county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, contracted with a private sector company to deploy fiber to all the anchor institutions, and then built out off that backbone to deploy fiber to the home. Residential consumers were thrilled to upgrade from DSL to gigabit connectivity in a matter of months.
Rural communities must often get creative if they want to bring broadband to their residents, and sometimes their hands are tied due to state restrictions or a lack of favorable legislation. Smaller municipalities in New Hampshire, however, may soon have the option of forming a multi-town district for the purpose of establishing a broadband system. State Sen. Jeanne Dietsch is at the forefront of just such a legislative effort, which she considers important for the “smallest towns that can’t attract a provider on their own.” At present, the bill that would authorize the multi-town district option has not been finished. Dietsch is still working with legislative service requests. But once the law is written, it will be on the docket for the Legislature’s upcoming session.
As America races to deploy next-generation wireless technology, several arms of the government are at odds over how to allocate space on the radio-frequency spectrum for 5G. The Federal Communications Commission, which sets policy for spectrum licenses, has openly fought with the Commerce Department, which houses agencies that use spectrum for weather satellites that are crucial to predicting hurricanes. The departments of Transportation, Energy and Education have also objected to various plans to open up airwaves for faster networks. And amid all the fighting, a top Trump appointee responsible for mediating spectrum disputes abruptly quit. The resulting delays in spectrum allocation are no small matter, threatening to undermine America’s efforts to dominate the wireless technology that will be embedded in so many innovations in the future.
Speculation is at a fever pitch surrounding Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s pending decision on how to sell the 5G-friendly airwaves in the so-called C-band, with many suspecting the FCC may take up an item on the matter at its Dec. 12 meeting. The satellite operators holding the airwaves prefer a private sale, which they say would be the fastest way to repurpose the spectrum, and their three-member C-Band Alliance offered a revised plan to do so on Nov 8. The group a day earlier sought to counter in a letter to lawmakers what they saw as misinformation raised in a House Commerce Committee hearing.
The C-Band Alliance has conducted a number of White House meetings while advocating for its proposal. That could help counter efforts to get the issue on Trump’s radar from Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), a vocal critic of the private-auction plan. He prefers an FCC-run sale. Sen Kennedy is planning a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the issue featuring FCC auction staffers. Meanwhile, Eutelsat, a former member of the satellite alliance, has broken with its former cohorts and is now telling the FCC that the commission “should closely oversee and control the auction of this spectrum to ensure a fair, transparent, equitable, and impartial auction and proceeds distribution process.” Wireless carriers are clamoring for this mid-band spectrum, which puts additional pressure on Chairman Pai. The need has spurred Verizon to back the private sale proposal and may be a motivating factor for some lawmakers eyeing the process. “If we don’t want China and South Korea to win the race to 5G — and seize the economic benefits 5G will bring — we need to substantially increase the amount of mid-band spectrum available to US companies quickly,” said Sen. John Thune (R-SD).
Google is teaming with one of the country’s largest health-care systems on a secret project to collect and crunch the detailed personal health information of millions of Americans across 21 states. The initiative, code-named “Project Nightingale,” appears to be the largest in a series of efforts by Silicon Valley giants to gain access to personal health data and establish a toehold in the massive health-care industry. Google launched the effort in 2018 with Ascension, the country’s second-largest health system. The data involved in Project Nightingale includes lab results, doctor diagnoses, and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient names and dates of birth. Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of millions of patients.
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
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