The Federal Communications Commission announced it is committing nearly $68 million in two new funding rounds through the Emergency Connectivity Program, which provides digital services for students in communities across the US. These funding commitments support applications from all three
application windows, benefiting over 100,000 students across the country, including California, Florida, North Carolina, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. To date, the FCC has committed over $5.7 billion to schools and libraries across the country as part of the Emergency Connectivity Program, which launched in 2021. The program has provided schools and libraries with three different “application windows,” for schools and libraries to apply for support. This announcement includes over $24 million from the first and second application windows providing support in the upcoming school year for one
school, three libraries, and one consortium. For the third application window, the FCC is committing nearly $44 million that will support over 200 schools, seven libraries, and one consortium. 

Over 10 million people living in 5.2 million households rely on some form of federal rental assistance. Every household that receives federal public housing assistance is eligible to participate in the Federal Communications Commission's Lifeline program and, by extension, the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). But as of July 1, just over 518,000 ACP-enrolled households indicated they were eligible because they participate in federal public housing assistance. To improve awareness of and enrollment in the Affordable Connectivity Program by people receiving federal public housing assistance, the FCC is launching a new pilot program called Your Home, Your Internet. The FCC is setting aside $10 million for Your Home, Your Internet, including: 1) $5 million for grants to up to 20 pilot participants, which may include government entities and third-party organizations serving federal housing assistance recipients, from across the country and 2) $5 million for the FCC's own outreach activities and potential collaboration with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other federal agency partners that work directly with federal housing assistance recipients. The goal is to reach and connect the households living in approximately 5 million available housing units subsidized by federal housing assistance.

[Kevin Taglang is executive editor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.]

I regularly run across articles that ask which major internet service provider (ISP) is the fastest. Most of these articles get their speed data from Ookla, which publishes comparative median broadband speeds for mobile and landline ISPs each quarter, like in this report for the second quarter of 2022. Americans love a horse race – we like to rank things, and articles that rank ISPs grab readers. But we have to take articles based upon the Ookla rankings with a grain of salt. Ookla doesn’t make any claims about its numbers – it just presents the data. There are a few things to note about the Ookla numbers. First, the results come from the many speed tests reported to Ookla. We know that a significant number of speed tests aren’t perfect due to issues at the customer end, such as an old WiFi router or taking the speed test at the far end of the house away from the WiFi router. Most importantly, Ookla reports median speeds – meaning half of all speed tests for a given ISP are faster, and half are slower than the value shown. Median speeds don’t seem to be a great metric for comparing ISPs. I like ranking as much as anybody, but I am unable to draw too many conclusions from the Ookla numbers. Perhaps the most you can say is that both fiber and cable companies are delivering decent download speeds – at least to the top 50 percent of customers. But these numbers are another example of the paltry upload speeds being delivered by the cable companies.

[Doug Dawson is president of CCG Consulting.]

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to begin writing federal rules to expand online privacy protections as soon as August 11. If adopted, the rules could impose significant new responsibilities on businesses that handle consumer data, including potentially barring certain kinds of data collection practices. The new FTC rules could take years to enact, and the commission could follow several different paths. One option would be to declare certain data collection practices unfair or deceptive, using its authority to police such conduct. The agency could also tap a less-used legal authority that empowers it to go after what it considers unfair methods of competition, perhaps by viewing certain businesses’ data-collection practices as exclusionary. A third option could focus on addressing privacy protection for children, with the FTC updating its rules under the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. And it could use its enforcement powers to target individual companies, as some privacy advocates urge.

Frontier has ambitious fiber goals, which include about 3 to 4 million homes that will probably require government subsidy to reach. CFO Scott Beasley said Frontier intends to be active with government funding programs to do just that. “We want to compete for subsidies on all of that 3 to 4 million homes and if you take a step back and think about our purpose which is build gigabit America, I mean that’s why we’re excited to build,” he said. Of course, Frontier is no stranger to government funding programs for broadband. The company has participated in past programs, including the Connect America Fund (CAF) II, the predecessor to the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF). Marc Bianchi of Cowen pointed out that Frontier does not have the best reputation with some of these government-funded programs. Frontier for example, missed CAF II deployment milestones in the past and has been accused of “subpar” network builds. “We’ve had to rebuild trust with investors, with equity holders, debt holders, regulators, government officials, and we’ve seen a lot of success there,” said Beasley about the company's past issues. “Regulators and state officials want us to build as much fiber as possible…yes there are some scars from the past, but I think we’re well on our way to repairing those.”