Wednesday, May 6, 2020
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Why Rural America’s Digital Divide Persists
Parking Lots Have Become a Digital Lifeline
While More Americans Rely on Parking Lot Wi-Fi, Many Public Libraries Do Not Have Adequate Broadband
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New York State's Public Service Commission required Spectrum Internet, formed by the Time Warner Cable-Charter Communications merger, to significantly boost internet speeds upstate and expand broadband service to 145,000 residential units that currently don't have it. Lara Pritchard, a Charter spokesperson, claimed the company has completed the extension of its network to 100,421 new homes and businesses as of Jan. 31, 2020, which she claims is 13,000 ahead of the PSC schedule. Charter plans to meet the state requirement of 145,000 by Sept. 30, 2021, she said.
Niagara County Legislator David Godfrey and Orleans County Legislature Chair Lynne Johnson, who helped start the Niagara-Orleans Regional Alliance, are spearheading an effort to get both counties to 100% internet connectivity. NORA will be submitting an application to the US Department of Agriculture for funding through the ReConnect Loan and Grant program to accomplish broadband expansion in both counties. The application isn't finished yet, so the details have not been finalized.
A Q&A with New York Times technology reporter Cecilia Kang.
Kang said, "With schools closed and more people working from home, Democrats and Republicans both generally agree now with the principle of getting fast internet to every American. They disagree on how. It’s the classic big government versus small government debate. Democrats say more government funding to bring internet service to people [who cannot get fast internet service at home -- because government maps say the area already has access] can create the kind of jobs the economy will need. Republicans are backing a new mobile internet technology to replace home internet lines and solve access gaps. There were similar arguments about electricity and phone service in the early 1900s. Then, the federal government decided those services were essential, and it brought electric and telephone poles to every home, no matter the cost."
When asked what has changed since Kang wrote about gaps in internet access in 2016, she said, "The digital divide during the pandemic is changing the minds of those who didn’t think this was a real problem. I think the stories of students being left behind because they can’t connect to virtual classes will be heartbreaking and propel the internet companies and Washington to act. Here’s hoping..."
The dependence on Wi-Fi in parking lots shows the lengths to which people are going to combat the country’s digital divide, one of the most stubborn problems in technology — and one the coronavirus has exacerbated. In recent weeks, numerous federal lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, have pushed for legislation to make service more affordable, especially for families with school-age children. But such legislative pushes have happened in the past without ever crossing the finish line. “What is disappointing is that we have done nothing for years to address the problem,” said Mignon Clyburn, a former commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission who has long pressed for more funding for rural broadband and subsidies for low-income families. “Now we are in a crisis, and we are triaging.”
While More Americans Rely on Parking Lot Wi-Fi, Many Public Libraries Do Not Have Adequate Broadband
Many digital equity advocates applauded the Federal Communications Commission’s recent clarification explicitly allowing public schools and libraries to let their communities access E-Rate-supported Wi-Fi services while their buildings are closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This development will hopefully make public libraries feel more comfortable sharing their E-Rate-supported Wi-Fi access without fearing any penalties from the FCC. And, as Cecelia Kang’s recent New York Times article shows, this development is sorely needed particularly for those reliant on public library parking lot internet access in communities across the US. However, as our research team was reminded in our recent study on the broadband capacity of public libraries across the state of Montana, not all libraries in the U.S. have the broadband capacity required to provide Wi-Fi access regardless of whether their doors are open or closed.
[Colin Rhinesmith is an Associate Professor and Director of the Community Informatics Lab in the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science. Jo Dutilloy received a BA in Comparative Literature from Bryn Mawr College and is working towards a dual Master’s degree in Archives and History at Simmons. Susan Kennedy is a Graduate Research Assistant for the Community Informatics Lab at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University.]
The novel coronavirus crisis has accentuated the digital divide in South Carolina as well as the need for greater internet access, suggested Molly Spearman, the SC education superintendent. Spearman said digital and technological inequality across the state has "become very apparent," as educational institutions are shuttered and schooling shifts homeward, with parents in some cases tapped overnight as full-time teachers. When schools were first closed amid a rising tide of COVID-19 cases, a slice of SC school districts were able to transition to a technology-heavy teaching plan, which demands internet access, virtual meetings and the like, Spearman explained. But more than a dozen school districts went, due to community conditions, the pencil-and-paper route – distributing material, collecting it at intervals and evaluating it. "We have seen that divide speak out, because in some counties … there are still areas that families do not have access to the internet," Spearman said. "So that makes it more difficult. So that is certainly a struggle for families."
Rural North Dakotans are more likely to have access to fiber connectivity and gigabit-speed Internet than those living in urban areas. This case study highlights the efforts of 15 local companies and telephone cooperatives who came together to invest in rural North Dakota and build gigabit fiber networks across the state. Their success is traced back to the companies’ acquisition of 68 rural telephone exchanges from monpoloy provider US West (now CenturyLink) in the 1990s. The local providers then leveraged federal funds to connect rural residents and businesses with some of the most extensive and future-proof fiber networks in the country. Some key lessons:
- When US West, the regional telephone monopoly, didn’t believe their rural North Dakota networks would be profitable, the local providers saw an opportunity to acquire US West’s rural territories in the state and to expand their services.
- More than three quarters of rural North Dakotans have access to fiber broadband today, compared to only 20 percent of rural residents nationally. Over 80 percent of North Dakota’s expanse is covered by fiber networks.
- National telecom monopolies refuse to invest in rural areas even though they receive billions in subsidies, while local co-ops and companies continue to innovate and build better networks for their communities.
Stakeholders at all levels of government — federal, state, and local — are pivoting to stay flexible and get creative around the Census amid an unprecedented set of new challenges. While increasing online outreach is helpful to some, it’s also problematic in a place like Detroit, where many residents are on the challenging side of the digital divide, without access to technology or a reliable high-speed Internet connection at home. To reach these folks, Census workers there are taking a decidedly low-tech approach, including Census literature in food boxes given out by distribution centers and local churches. The Census effort also piggy-backed on a massive $23 million cross-sector investment made in digital equity. A number of entities teamed up to give public school students in Detroit tablets with six months of Internet service, so that they could continue learning online while sheltering during the crisis. With the school district already an established Census partner since Jan, organizers were able to include cards encouraging recipients of the tablets to go online and fill out the Census.
And Detroit is far from the only community grappling with low access to technology or the Internet. That is a problem that also extends to rural areas of the country, including Indian Country, which are the regions that are home to Indian reservations. Kevin Allis is the CEO of the National Congress of American Indians, and he said his group is concerned about an undercount costing its communities resources for the next decade, which is particularly troublesome because their lands are held in federal trust, making them almost entirely reliant on the government for support rather than property tax revenue. Almost 40 percent of those communities also have no access to broadband, Allis said.
2020 has demonstrated the resilience of our network plan we laid out over half a decade ago. And it’s given us all the motivation we could ever need to continue connecting Americans and first responders through FirstNet, fiber, 5G and more. We recently wrote a whitepaper titled “7 Principles of AT&T’s Network Transformation” that summarizes the next phase of our network journey. It’s a transformation that must start from the network edge – where customers actually connect to the network, such as over 5G or fiber – and extend to the network core with disaggregation and software-defined networking (SDN). Network function virtualization is also vital, and is similar to how gadgets have been replaced by apps on our phones. We are turning network equipment into software running on servers. Our Network Cloud embodies these principles and is at the heart of our 5G deployment. It is built on open source software which our developers helped create, including the Airship platform that powers it.
Universal Service Fund
FCC Receives Over 180 RDOF Eligible Area Challenges, Including Some Big Ones from WISPs
The Federal Communications Commission has received challenges from about 180 entities that have stated that they provide broadband at speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, along with voice service, to at least part of census blocks that were on the commission’s preliminary list of areas eligible for the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse auction scheduled to start in Oct. According to data compiled by broadband engineering and consulting firm Cooperative Network Services LLC, 10 entities, primarily wireless internet service providers (WISPs), have each submitted challenges for 10,000 census blocks or more. Eight of the top 10 RDOF eligible area challenges came from WISPs. The remaining two were from broadband providers that primarily use wireline infrastructure — Frontier and Consolidated Telecommunications.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the FCC has not delayed the RDOF auction start date – not yet at least. In light of all the RDOF eligible area challenges, a delay would now seem likely.
On May 1, 2020, Frontier respond to NTCA, NRECA and WISPA, who questioned claims made in Frontier’s challenge to the list of census blocks deemed initially eligible in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Phase I auction. Frontier confirmed the vast majority of the census blocks listed in its challenge represent existing builds, including those undertaken as part of the Connect America Fund II program over the past five years. Frontier said although these census blocks will not be eligible for RDOF Phase I, they remain high cost and Frontier will not be eligible for ongoing high-cost support in these areas. Frontier said to the extent individual homes in portions of some of these census blocks are unserved at speeds of 25/3 Mbps, Frontier and members of NTCA, NRECA and WISPA will be able to bid on these areas when mapping is complete and RDOF Phase II is implemented.
Every day, tens of millions of Americans rely on the Global Positioning System. A recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission, however, will degrade the effectiveness and reliability of this critical technology. On April 20, the FCC announced its approval of Ligado Networks’ application to create a cellular network by repurposing a portion of radio spectrum adjacent to that used by GPS. The power and proximity of Ligado’s ground emissions on this spectrum will drown out GPS’s space-based signals. If you’ve ever tried to talk to a friend while standing next to the speakers at a rock concert, you get the point.
We need a comprehensive, whole-of-nation approach to develop technologies that affect so many. Disregarding the concerns of industry and government—objections grounded in hard data—the FCC’s Ligado decision is a shortsighted giveaway that will disrupt our way of life and potentially cost the American people billions of dollars. The first and most sacred responsibility of government is to protect and defend its people. GPS allows us to pinpoint 911 calls, launch precision airstrikes, prepare our forces for combat, and otherwise act to safeguard health and well-being. Interfering with the accuracy and reliability of GPS risks the safety of the American people and undermines national and economic security. America deserves a better alternative.
A new coalition, backed by a wide range of players in the mobile ecosystem --, including U.S. operators AT&T and Verizon -- has formed to advocate for government policy that helps drive open radio access network (RAN) adoption to fund research and development of open and interoperable 5G networks. Executive director for the 31-member Open RAN Policy Coalition, launched today, is former Acting Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Diane Rinaldo. She outlined some steps the group thinks policymakers can take to facilitate the open RAN ecosystem, including: support global development of open and interoperable wireless technologies; signal government support for open and interoperable solutions; use government procurement to support vendor diversity; and fund research and development. The new coalition is meant to complement standards work by the O-RAN Alliance and global deployments driven by Facebook’s Telecom Infra Project (TIP). Facebook is also a founding member of the collective, which TIP endorsed.
Accessibility
FCC Certifies First IP Captioned Telephone Service Using Only Automatic Speech Recognition
The Federal Communications Commission's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau granted conditional certification to MachineGenius to provide Internet Protocol Captioned Telephone Service (IP CTS) using only automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. This is the first such grant and provides an opportunity for advanced technology to meet the FCC’s high reliability standards in providing captioned telephone service for deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans. Conditional certification permits MachineGenius to receive Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS) Fund compensation pending verification that its service to registered users meets or exceeds the FCC’s minimum TRS standards.
MachineGenius will be using an app that can be installed on existing mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets that are Wi-Fi or mobile-data enabled. By delivering ASR-generated captions on an over-the-top smartphone app, MachineGenius says it is able to reduce the cost and increase the speed of delivery of telephone captions, while providing a degree of accuracy comparable to captioning provided by communications assistants.
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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