Friday, January 3, 2020
Headlines Daily Digest
States will be the battlegrounds for 2020 tech policy fights
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The tech industry's most consequential policy fights in 2020 will play out in the states, not Washington (DC). Momentum on a range of tech issues, from governing online privacy to regulating the gig economy, has stalled in DC as impeachment and election campaigns consume attention. State leaders and legislators are stepping in to fill the void. For example, California and Vermont are facing litigation over their attempts to impose their own net neutrality regulations after the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Obama-era open-internet rules. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) said he intends to advance statewide net neutrality legislation. State-by-state policy battles will be headaches for all the companies involved. It's expensive to distribute lobbyists in state capitol buildings across the country and deal with localized politics and varying legislative processes. States will be the focus of corporate lobbying while Washington is distracted.
Tope broadband stories from 2019:
- Policymakers wake up to the importance of universal broadband.
- Full court press put on broadband mapping problems.
- Carriers are ultra-competitive over 5G.
- Edge computing is hot and should get hotter.
- Policymakers also wake up to the need for more spectrum.
- Windstream files for bankruptcy and Frontier could follow.
- Fixed wireless gains momentum.
- Video shakeup continues – with little agreement on where it’s going.
Only about a third of California households in rural areas are subscribed to internet service, compared with 78 percent in urban areas, according to an EdSource analysis of data from the California Public Utilities Commission. The divide between students who have access to internet and computers required to do assignments at home and those who don’t is known as the “homework gap.” And it threatens to slow down efforts to close the gap in educational opportunities between students in rural regions of California and their wealthier counterparts around the state. A lack of internet access may also exacerbate the achievement gap — a consistent difference in scores on standardized tests between black and Latino students and their white and Asian peers. Knowing many of their students lack internet at home, teachers at Alpaugh Unified’s two schools — and those around the country facing similar challenges — don’t assign homework that requires students to get online.
[This article is part of an EdSource special report on the challenges of students and districts in California’s rural communities]
For an estimated 1.6 million rural residents in Georgia, high-speed internet access is nonexistent at home. “This is a community problem because it impacts our economic development, it impacts our skills, it impacts our education and healthcare,” says Steve Fortmann, founder, president and CEO of Paladin Wireless in Royston. “But the biggest thing [internet access impacts] is opportunity. Back in the 1800s, it was the railroad that connected you to the world and opportunities. Today it’s the internet.”
Lack of access to broadband in rural areas has been on business and legislative leaders’ minds for some time. In 2016, the Georgia General Assembly approved Senate Resolution 876, creating a study committee to examine how the lack of broadband affects communities and explore solutions. The committee worked with the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government (CVIOG), which collected and analyzed data from homeowners and other internet users. This led to the 2018 passage of state Senate Bill 401, the Achieving Connectivity Everywhere (ACE) Act that provides planning, deployment and incentives for broadband services. The Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA) created the Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative (GBDI) to operationalize the ACE Act.
For all the talk about 5G, operators still prefer to keep some things to themselves, such as exactly how many 5G cell sites they’re deploying. CTIA, which lobbies for the big wireless carriers in the US, has estimated the industry may need more than 800,000 small cells by 2026. But you’re not going to get the individual companies to readily reveal exactly how many 5G cell sites—macro plus small cells and everything in between—they’re deploying. Wall Street investment firm MoffettNathanson, relying on public record requests, conducted extensive research into the number of small cells deployed in some of the nation’s largest cities. MoffettNathanson obtained detailed data for about 15,000 small cell locations across New York, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Sacramento and Cincinnati. While acknowledging that the data was imperfect and didn’t completely reveal the inner workings of small cell networks, they concluded on a high level that while small cells were growing like weeds, the expectations for their long-term return potential probably should be tempered.
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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Kevin Taglang
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