Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), co-chair of the Senate Broadband Caucus, said that the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) 2020 Broadband Deployment Report shows progress has been made in better connecting communities across the country. However, the report is based off of flawed data. "[T]his report is not perfect, and I appreciate the FCC’s recognition that more granular data is needed," she said. "The report is a positive news that the digital divide continues to close and that we continue to make progress. However, with nearly 30 percent of rural communities still lacking access to 25/3 Mbps service, I remain deeply committed to expanding broadband connectivity across our state, especially as telecommunication capability is vital during these trying times.”

CenturyLink has warned the Federal Communications Commission that the company may not meet deadlines for completing broadband deployments funded through the CAF (Connect America Fund) program. In a meeting with senior commission officials, CenturyLink representatives attributed the deployment delays to the COVID-19 pandemic and asked the commission for a deployment deadline extension.

This isn’t the first time CenturyLink has warned the FCC of a potential delay in meeting CAF deployment milestones. Earlier in 2020, the company said it was not certain if it had met the 80% deployment milestone, which came at the end of 2019. It would seem likely that the FCC will offer some type of CAF deployment deadline extension, as the FCC has been quite lenient in extending other deadlines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More than 18 million Americans -- about 5.6 percent of the US population -- lack access to high-speed internet, according to the Federal Communications Commission. And now that the pandemic is demanding most Americans do their jobs, complete schoolwork and access healthcare remotely, experts say the internet-access problem has become untenable. "We are the country that created the internet. We think of ourselves as the most affluent nation on Earth," said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "We should be embarrassed that millions of people have to drive to a closed library or a fast food restaurant in order to do their jobs or do their homework." Building broadband networks, the best of which require installing fiber-optic cables underground, is expensive regardless of the locale, said Mitchell, whose organization advocates for local solutions in improving broadband infrastructure. But fewer people in rural areas means fewer potential customers, giving publicly traded companies a lower return on investment. With less incentive to improve infrastructure and scarce competition, these companies leave many rural residents with few, and outdated, options.

The actions taken by broadband providers to ensure the performance and reliability of their networks over the last two months have largely succeeded. However, nothing changes the simple fact that the amount of data traffic these networks have delivered has far exceeded in two months what most operators expect to deliver in a calendar year. That type of consumption is changing how operators think about architecting their networks, the peak and sustained usage models, over provisioning, and the upgrade cycles they can expect when equipment runs hotter and more consistently than it ever has before. For cable operators, these new parameters have already resulted, or will result, in an accelerated investment cycle initially in order to accomplish two bandwidth-increasing goals: 1) Splitting existing optical nodes to reduce service group size and increase downstream capacity for all users and 2) Moving to mid-split or high-split architectures in order to increase upstream capacity.

In many cases, existing optical nodes were split once in conjunction with the rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 capacity in headends and hub sites. Now, because of the new capacity requirements as a result of the pandemic, operators are looking to segment a larger percentage of their node base, as well as further segmenting already-split nodes. We have already heard stories of operators accelerating their node split programs by anywhere from 6 to 12 months. Each node split typically results in a doubling of the DOCSIS channel licenses on existing Converged Cable Access Platforms which allow cable operators to lower operating costs by using a single platform for offering traditional video and IP-based broadband services to the consumer.

[Jeff Heynen is senior research director for broadband access and home networking at Dell'Oro Group]

How can it be that American school children are camping out in school parking lots to get enough connectivity to listen to their lessons. How can it be that 17% of US schoolchildren don’t have connectivity at all? How exactly are they supposed to be learning now that public education has gone remote? In New York City, where 1.1 million kids attend public school, 225,000 are still waiting for devices like laptops or Ipads. But even if they get the devices, and honestly, what is New York waiting for, they may not be able to zoom into their schools. Wouldn’t it make sense to take tax payer money and pay regular people to organize themselves into broadband cooperatives. They could do something concrete that could potentially unleash learning, innovation and entrepreneurship for all Americans A sort of Rural Electrification Act for internet connectivity?

[Peg Tyre wrote  "The Trouble With Boys" and "The Good School;" she is director of strategy at the Edwin Gould Foundation]

Altice USA notched its best-ever quarter for broadband subscribers additions in the first quarter. Altice added 50,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter as well as an additional 9,000 subscribers for its Altice Advantage tier, which is its low-income family broadband program. Driven in part by voluntary speed and rate increases, Altice's total broadband revenues in the first quarter increased by 14.2%. Altice's fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments in the Optimum footprint slowed down due to permitting issues. Due to that slowdown, Altice said its capex for the year would now be below $1.3 billion. With the build out of DOCSIS 3.1 and fiber technologies, 1-Gig sales were up by 56% in March.

Siding with The New York Times, a federal judge has ordered that the Federal Communications Commission must disclose information about users who submitted comments during the 2017 net neutrality proceeding, despite the agency's objections that doing so could compromise people's privacy. US District Court Judge Lorna Schofield in the Southern District of New York ruled that disclosure of the data -- including commenters' IP addresses, time stamps, and user-agent headers -- is in the public interest, particularly given concerns that many comments were fraudulent. “If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed,” Judge Schofield wrote. “Disclosing the requested data in this case informs the public understanding of the operations and activities of government in two ways -- at the micro level with regard to the integrity of the FCC’s repeal of the particular net neutrality rules at issue, and at the macro level with regard to the vulnerability of agency rulemaking in general.”

“The strongest argument in favor of finding a substantial privacy interest is that digital advertisers and digital platforms could combine this data with other available information to create a detailed and intimate profile that might include information about a person’s race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religious belief, sexual identity and activity, income level, purchasing habits and medical information,” she wrote. “If the record provided further insight into how likely it is that this risk would materialize, then the agency might have sustained its burden of showing that the disclosure of IP addresses and User-Agent headers would compromise a substantial privacy interest.”

"Litigation should not have been necessary to get this vital information," said Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor, Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. "I hope the Commission will now comply promptly rather than drag things out with appeals that will not succeed."