The Pew Charitable Trusts has launched its new Broadband Research Initiative to understand why some 24 million Americans — most of those living in rural communities — still lack what is largely now considered a basic utility. “About 30 percent of rural Americans do not have access to broadband, compared to about 2 percent of urban Americans,” said Kathryn de Wit, manager of Pew’s Broadband Research Initiative. “So while there is that big gap, I don’t think that this is a policy issue that’s split very neatly along urban and rural lines,” she continued. “There’s no one-size-fits-all to broadband connectivity and solving that gap. Every community is different and has different characteristics and different needs. And subsequently, will require different solutions for closing those gaps.” The research aims to explore some of the solutions to closing the broadband gap, as well as how to get there. “The bulk of our research is really looking at how state governments are addressing these gaps in connectivity,” said de Wit, and admitted the team is still pretty early in the research. One of the areas Pew will explore closely is how states are funding and financing broadband programs, noting that many are looking to sources that might have gone overlooked in the past. Some of those sources could be in areas like community development block grants or even transportation funding. “Really, this is about broadband kind of moving out of the telecommunications silo, and tying it to other policy areas,” she added. “So, broadband is a cornerstone technology, if you’re talking about transportation, tele-health, precision agriculture, education.”

At Mobile World Congress, Facebook shared a number of updates from its connectivity team, including a partnership through which it's bringing 5G wireless internet to Alameda (CA). US-based company Common Networks is delivering ultra high-speed gigabit internet service to residential customers using Facebook's technology, as a replacement for standard home broadband. It's doing this at lower costs and faster speeds than fiber, said Dan Rabinovitsj, VP of Connectivity for Facebook. Common Networks launched in 2017 and already provides fixed wireless access to residences around the world, but in collaboration with Facebook, it's hoping to accelerate the number of people who can access gigabit internet at home. It's doing this by adopting Facebook's Terragraph technology, which uses high-frequency radio waves to speed up networks where populations are dense. Facebook also unveiled plans to improve rural connectivity, enable new carrier models, and invest in fiber. 

In 2019, 5G will a buzzword you’ll hear increasingly often, but it’s not likely to change anything in your life. By 2029, it’ll be so ingrained into your daily life you’ll have trouble remembering when your phone (or watch or eyeglasses or smart mirror) used to be slow to respond, or unable to stream such high-resolution video, and nerds will be salivating over the when 6G data networks will finally arrive. And sometime in between, someone will come up with something that will fundamentally turn how we live on its head all over again.

As the US pushes ahead with the “Cloud Act” it enacted about a year ago, Europe is scrambling to curb its reach. Under the act, all US cloud service providers from Microsoft and IBM to Amazon -- when ordered -- have to provide American authorities data stored on their servers regardless of where it’s housed. With those providers controlling much of the cloud market in Europe, the act could potentially give the US the right to access information on large swaths of the region’s people and companies. The US says the act is aimed at aiding investigations. Some people are drawing parallels between the legislation and the National Intelligence Law that China put in place in 2017 requiring all its organizations and citizens to assist authorities with access to information. The Chinese law, which the US says is a tool for espionage, is cited by President Donald Trump’s administration as a reason to avoid doing business with companies like Huawei. “I don’t mean to compare U.S. and Chinese laws, because obviously they aren’t the same, but what we see is that on both sides, Chinese and American, there is clearly a push to have extraterritorial access to data,” Laure de la Raudiere, a French lawmaker who co-heads a parliamentary cyber-security and sovereignty group, said in an interview. “This must be a wake up call for Europe to accelerate its own, sovereign offer in the data sector.”