During the Great Depression, people waited in bread lines for sustenance. In today's economic crisis, the internet is often the pathway for relief. Online is where people try to keep or find work. How they see their doctor or apply for jobless benefits. How they order food and supplies. Where they find solace through faith, or laughter through entertainment. For many, it's the way they connect to friends and family, and stay abreast of the news.  For millions of children and university students, high-speed internet is their only means of continuing an education in a time of remote learning. Except tens of million of people in America are effectively denied a place in this modern-day bread line because they can't afford, or don't have access to, high-speed internet. Most are in rural areas. And the problem is particularly egregious within the nation's tribal lands, where nearly a third of Native Americans lack broadband access. 

America's "digital divide" is a longstanding problem, but the coronavirus pandemic has cast it in high relief. As in any crisis, this one also offers an opportunity. The Federal Communications Commission could expand the Lifeline program that helps low-income Americans purchase broadband access. The $9.25-per-month subsidy is dated, and the agency could double it with unspent Lifeline budget funds. (Congress could boost it to a market-appropriate $50-per-month subsidy with an additional $8 billion in funding, allowing low-income users to access more than just mobile-device services, which are impractical for a child's homework needs.) The FCC could also temporarily loosen Lifeline rules to allow any of the 33 million Americans seeking unemployment and jobs to get high-speed internet access. School districts desperate to reconnect with "lost" students are lending out iPads and setting up Wi-Fi hotspots at football fields. The FCC could help. It has more than $2 billion in its E-Rate education fund established to extend broadband for K-12 classrooms. By broadening that definition to include where the classrooms are effectively are now — in the children's homes — the FCC could use that money as intended.

The digital divide is a miscarriage in the best of times. During a national crisis, it's intolerable. 

Commerce Sec Wilbur Ross announced that the Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) is now accepting applications from eligible grantees for  Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) supplemental funds (EDA CARES Act Recovery Assistance) intended to help communities prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus. On March 27, 2020, President Donald Trump signed the $2 trillion CARES Act into law. The CARES Act provides EDA with $1.5 billion of which $1.467 billion is available for grant making.

Examples of projects that EDA may fund through its CARES Act Recovery Assistance include economic recovery planning and preparing technical assistance strategies to address economic dislocations caused by the coronavirus pandemic, preparing or updating resiliency plans to respond to future pandemics, implementing entrepreneurial support programs to diversify economies, and constructing public works and facilities that will support economic recovery, including the deployment of broadband for purposes including supporting telehealth and remote learning for job skills.

Eligible applicants under the EAA program include a(n):

• District Organization;
• Indian Tribe or a consortium of Indian Tribes;
• State, county, city, or other political subdivision of a State, including a special purpose unit of a State or local government engaged in economic or infrastructure development activities, or a consortium of political subdivisions;
• Institution of higher education or a consortium of institutions of higher education; or
• Public or private non-profit organization or association acting in cooperation with officials of a political subdivision of a State.

Sens Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) today introduced the Eliminating Barriers to Rural Internet Development Grant Eligibility (E-BRIDGE) Act, which would remove obstacles for broadband projects to receive Economic Development Administration (EDA) grants. Specifically, the legislation ensures that local communities can partner with the private sector and gives communities more flexibility in complying with their funding match requirements. Specifically, the bill would:

• Eliminate barriers to investments in broadband in distressed communities, making them eligible for EDA grants.
• Clarify that eligible recipients may include public-private partnerships and consortiums to leverage private sector expertise in project development.
• Provide flexibility in the procurement process to account for limited availability of broadband services in distressed communities.
• Clarify that funds can be combined with other federal resources.
• Provide flexibility on accounting for in-kind methods to meet non-federal cost share.

This analysis explores, from an economic perspective, the effects of modifying and expanding the “contribution base”—the supply of financial resources for the Universal Service Fund—to include both voice and broadband connections. While the Federal Communications Commission has updated the way universal service funds are distributed to orient them more toward support of both voice and broadband services, the contributions system that pays for the FCC’s mission-critical USF initiatives continues to rely precariously upon a dwindling pool of revenues from legacy services. As it currently stands, despite the promotion of broadband representing a key universal service objective today, broadband is not included within the services that are in turn assessed to support the USF. As a result, the burden of supporting the broadband-focused USF falls disproportionately (and somewhat ironically) on consumers buying traditional telecommunications services like “plain old telephone service.” And, as more Americans migrate away from such services and toward broadband, the “contributions base” used to fund the USF continues to decline—placing an even greater inequitable strain on the remaining contributors and putting at potential risk the sustainability of the very programs that are doing the most to promote access to broadband now.

The analysis concludes that the impacts of including a USF-related contribution surcharge equal to a 1% increase in the price paid for broadband could reduce broadband demand by 0.08%. This would mean, for example, that for every 1,000 consumers spending $80 per month on broadband, an $0.80 USF contribution surcharge might cause one consumer at most to reduce his or her broadband purchase in some way. The analysis also observes that this estimated potential reduction in broadband purchases does not take account of any potential gains in adoption realized and sustained as a result of programs supported by a more stable USF.

In Baltimore (MD), nearly one-quarter of households lack internet access at home and 18% lack access to a device. The Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition includes 50 organizations from across the city to address the digital divide that has existed in Baltimore for years, but is being exacerbated in a time when school and work often require device and internet connectivity at home, and gathering points that would provide access like schools and community centers are closed. It brings together nonprofits working on tech access, organizations of parents and teachers working to improve education, foundations, school leaders and government. And it is setting goals for action:

• Delivering home internet access to 2,000 disconnected homes and growing public Wi-Fi through approaches that include mesh networks
• Refurbish at least 2,000 devices for students and workforce development nonprofits, along with identifying inventories of existing devices
• Creating a tech support hotline to help introduce virtual work and learning to residents participating in workforce training and skills programming

The policy role was on view recently. The Baltimore City Council and Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young’s office enacted a measure allowing City schools to use $3 million from the city’s Baltimore Children and Youth Fund to purchase devices and expand connectivity for students. It provided more funding toward the effort after the school district mounted a big effort to buy 12,000 Chromebooks and 14,000 chargers and put the digital divide alongside boxed meals as a pressing need that was fitting for the special fund. “Our children need food and they need digital access right now,” said City Council President Brandon Scott on April 28, adding that it’s important for students at all levels to get access.

History at the crossroads, one of those inflection points when we have the opportunity to learn from our experiences and use them to build a better future. Coronavirus brings us to another of those crossroads. Which road will we take? We could retreat again to the outdated policies and decisions of the past several years without recognizing how they set us up for a pandemic that is worse than it might have been. Or we could take stock of the unpreparedness that paved the way for this scourge and avoid what will surely be more, and perhaps even worse, plagues ahead. There is plenty to praise in the coverage of the coronavirus contagion, so praise that I do. But every day brings news of more fired journalists and newsroom cut-backs, costing us dearly. Communities across the nation depend upon reporting that is both wide and deep, but each lost reporter deprives citizens of information that we urgently need, and each expands the opportunity for a misinformation contagion to spread alongside the virus.

One lesson from the pandemic is the glaring shortfall of our telecommunication infrastructure. There are millions, tens of millions, of people who lack broadband at home. They are the still-employed trying to do their jobs online, the unemployed searching desperately for jobs, students who cannot attend classes online, potential entrepreneurs wanting to build new businesses from remote areas, communities of color and native lands by-passed because of the constricted build-out we have endured these many years, and sick people denied the opportunity for healthcare. Telework, tele-education, and telemedicine are must-have resources in the twenty-first century. I have long called this a civil right because without these things no one can fully participate in our democracy and society. We should have advanced far beyond where we are by now. But it cannot be accomplished without a true and comprehensive private-public sector partnership. It is time to stop the mind-numbing, fatuous debate of the past 25 years and finally get the broadband job done. 

[Michael Copps served as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission from May 2001 to December 2011 and was the FCC's Acting Chairman from January to June 2009.]

Opensignal’s latest analysis demonstrates that 5G greatly improves the real-world speeds that users experience. And, even more significantly, 5G offers faster average download speeds than Wi-Fi in seven out of eight leading 5G countries. The US is the exception, where Wi-Fi continues to offer a small edge over 5G because of the large number of US 5G users connecting on widely available, but relatively slow, 5G networks that are deployed using low spectrum bands. In most countries, initial 5G services have been offered exclusively on fast, high-capacity, mid-band spectrum — around 3.5Ghz, sometimes called the C-band — but in the US T-Mobile and AT&T have launched their main service on low-band spectrum which has less capacity, but is better suited to offering wide coverage. 

Sens Ron Wyden (D-OR), Kamala Harris (D-CA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) urged Comcast to open all of its public Wi-Fi networks to the approximately 12 million American students who lack internet access at home, as schools rely on online education as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. In a letter to Comcast, the lawmakers wrote, “Comcast has taken important steps to help Americans get connected during this global public health emergency. But it can—and should—do more to help children and teachers in Oregon and across the country. We urge you to start by dropping the paywall and providing free access to Comcast residential public Wi-Fi networks. While Comcast started providing free access to its business customers' Wi-Fi access points on March 13, 2020, the paywall remains on the millions of Comcast-operated public Wi-Fi networks located in homes and apartment buildings across America."

The letter asks Comcast to answer a list of questions by May 22. For example, the senators asked Comcast how many subscribers rent an Xfinity gateway and how many customers "have opted to disable the public Wi-Fi network in their Comcast-supplied cable modem/Wi-Fi router, which Comcast enables by default."

T-Mobile added 452,000 branded postpaid phone subscriptions in the first quarter of 2020. Total branded postpaid net additions were 777,000 in the first quarter. Prepaid net losses were 128,000, yielding 649,000 total branded net adds for the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA hit an all-time record high of $3.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year despite the environment created by COVID-19. Free cash flow, excluding payments for merger-related costs, was $893 million, up 37% year-over-year.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Sens John Thune (R-SD), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Jerry Moran (R-KS), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced the COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act. The legislation would provide all Americans with more transparency, choice, and control over the collection and use of their personal health, device, geolocation, and proximity data. The bill would also hold businesses accountable to consumers if they use personal data to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act would:

• Require companies under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission to obtain affirmative express consent from individuals to collect, process, or transfer their personal health, device, geolocation, or proximity information for the purposes of tracking the spread of COVID-19.
• Direct companies to disclose to consumers at the point of collection how their data will be handled, to whom it will be transferred, and how long it will be retained.
• Establish clear definitions about what constitutes aggregate and de-identified data to ensure companies adopt certain technical and legal safeguards to protect consumer data from being re-identified.
• Require companies to allow individuals to opt out of the collection, processing, or transfer of their personal health, geolocation, or proximity information.
• Direct companies to provide transparency reports to the public describing their data collection activities related to COVID-19.
• Establish data minimization and data security requirements for any personally identifiable information collected by a covered entity.
• Require companies to delete or de-identify all personally identifiable information when it is no longer being used for the COVID-19 public health emergency.
• Authorize state attorneys general to enforce the Act.