US wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time. Researchers from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the US and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T throttled Netflix 70% of the time and Google’s YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn’t slow down Amazon’s Prime Video at all. T-Mobile US throttled Amazon Prime Video in about 51% of the tests, but didn’t throttle Skype and barely touched Vimeo. 

"They are doing it all the time, 24/7, and it’s not based on networks being overloaded," said David Choffnes, associate professor at Northeastern University and one of the study’s authors.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is looking to root out waste, fraud and abuse in Lifeline, the FCC's phone subsidy program for the poor. But he's not ready to cap the budget on the program just yet. His office began circulating its latest proposal for cleaning up the program. The latest proposed action is what the FCC is calling an "administrative clean-up" but it doesn't tackle some of the more controversial items on the agency's to-do list, such as instituting a funding cap and excluding wireless resellers from participating in the program. The FCC is still considering those issues separately.

The biggest fix to the Lifeline program in this proposal is making sure that subsidies go to people who are alive. Specifically, the agency will put in additional requirements to ensure that carriers enrolling subscribers can verify the person is still living. It will also prohibit carriers from incentivizing employees or agencies tasked with signing up new customers by paying commissions for the number of customers they enroll.

Democrats are offering President Donald Trump's rural supporters a reason to turn against him in 2020 — his failure to bring them the high-speed internet he promised. Several presidential candidates including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-South Bend) have rolled out proposals for tens of billions in new federal dollars to bring fast broadband service to rural America, with Sen Warren’s $85 billion plan leading the spending pack. They call broadband yet another example of President Trump letting down people who helped send him to the White House in 2016, including people in the same farm-heavy states suffering from the president’s trade wars. President Trump’s challengers also say the slow internet speeds that prevail in much of the nation are a drag on the economy and a threat to US competitiveness. “I see that the country of Iceland has all hooked up, and we’re not,” said Democratic hopeful Sen Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) when asked about President Trump’s record. Sen Klobuchar pledges to connect all US households to broadband by 2022.

President Donald Trump pledged during the 2016 campaign to deliver broadband to rural Americans as part of a trillion-dollar national infrastructure package. Leaders of his 2020 reelection campaign also cited the need for rural connectivity earlier in 2019 as they tried to pitch the Trump administration on a plan for a government intervention to spur along super-fast 5G wireless connectivity. But President Trump’s big infrastructure plan went nowhere in Congress, and the president has disavowed the idea of federal meddling in 5G, preferring to let the private sector take the lead. Meanwhile, rural areas continue to heavily lag cities in internet availability and speeds. Shirley Bloomfield, who represents more than 800 rural telecommunications providers as chief of the trade group NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association, said that she came away “disappointed” after meetings with Trump officials early in the administration failed to result in muscular rural broadband policies or funding. "You don’t have that complete coordination, which would have really created a national strategy for how we’re going to tackle broadband connectivity for all Americans," she said. "I think people got distracted by a lot of other topics and ... felt politically kind of backed into their corners, and I think the window closed." But, Bloomfield added, “There’s always 2021, you know.” But, unless Democrats sweep the White House and both houses of Congress in 2020, rural broadband funding will likely require bipartisan wrangling. 

The Federal Communications Commission released a report on the 911 outage originating in CenturyLink’s network that occurred Dec 27, 2018. The findings are the latest example of the risks involved in what the FCC calls the telecom “tech transition.” The 911 outage studied in the report was what is known as a “sunny day” outage – one not caused by weather or other natural disaster. Sunny day outages have become increasingly common as the telecommunication industry has been modernizing networks to centralize certain network functionality and to rely more heavily on internet protocol communications. The FCC calls this shift the “tech transition.” And while many aspects of the transition are good, including the ability to operate networks more efficiently, there is a downside: The impact of small problems can be magnified, as occurred during the CenturyLink 911 outage.

Hillsboro’s (OR) publicly supported internet project aims to undercut its rivals on pricing and substantially outpace them in speed. The city council has set pricing for its forthcoming service, called HiLight, offering superfast gigabit service for $55 a month. That’s about half what Comcast charges for the same speeds. Hillsboro says it will offer speeds up to 4 gigabits for $300 a month, the same price as Comcast’s 2 gig plan. The first homes will be online early in 2020, according to the city, about a year behind the initial schedule. Hillsboro says it will take a decade before HiLight reaches all neighborhoods in the city, which has more than 100,000 residents.

Cable and internet companies remain resolutely unpopular in consumer surveys. Backers of publicly funded internet say municipal projects are necessary amid the federal rollback of net neutrality protections, which require providers to treat all internet traffic equally. Yet municipal internet service has had a mixed track record in Oregon and across the country and skeptics warn that local governments are ill-equipped to compete with large telecom companies. Lake Oswego voters rejected city-backed internet service in 2016.

“A taxpayer-funded broadband network is redundant to the many providers that already serve the community,” Comcast said. “Building and operating a broadband system isn’t easy. The fact that Hillsboro is again delaying the implementation is a demonstration of the complexities of such an endeavor.”

Multnomah County is moving forward with a study of a countywide public broadband network, but the scope will be somewhat smaller than anticipated. Portland chipped in just $25,000 to help fund the research, a third of what the county had sought.

Apparently, Google has shut down a service it provided to wireless carriers globally that showed them weak spots in their network coverage because of Google’s concerns that sharing data from users of its Android phone system might attract the scrutiny of users and regulators. The withdrawal of the service has disappointed wireless carriers that used the data as part of their decision-making process on where to extend or upgrade their coverage. Even though the data were anonymous and the sharing of it has become commonplace, Google’s move illustrates how concerned the company has become about drawing attention amid a heightened focus in much of the world on data privacy. The service was provided free to carriers and vendors that helped them manage operations. The data came from devices running Google’s Android operating system, which is on about 75% of the world’s smartphones, making it a valuable resource for the industry.

The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the US Department of Commerce identified 46 additional Huawei affiliates that require inclusion on the Entity List, as part of a routine review of all Entity Listings. Since May, the Dept has added over one hundred persons or organizations to the Entity List in connection to Huawei. The new restrictions on these affiliates are effective Aug 19th. BIS has also announced that it will extend the Temporary General License (TGL) authorizing specific, limited engagements in transactions involving the export, reexport, and transfer of items – under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) – to Huawei and its non-US affiliates which are subject to the Entity List. The continuation of the TGL is intended to afford consumers across America the necessary time to transition away from Huawei equipment, given the persistent national security and foreign policy threat. This license will be effective on Aug 19 and last an additional 90 days. Outside of the scope of the TGL, any exports, reexports, or in-country transfers of items subject to the EAR will continue to require a license granted after a review by BIS under a presumption of denial.