Thursday, September 2, 2021
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No equity without a permanent broadband benefit
AT&T on Adopting a Mid-Band Spectrum Screen
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COVID and Connectivity
Results from a new survey of US adults reveal the extent to which people’s use of the internet has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, their views about how helpful technology has been for them and the struggles some have faced. The vast majority of adults (90%) say the internet has been at least important to them personally during the pandemic, the survey finds. The share who say it has been essential – 58% – is up slightly from 53% in April 2020. There have also been upticks in the shares who say the internet has been essential in the past year among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education, adults under 30, and those 65 and older. A large majority of Americans (81%) also say they talked with others via video calls at some point since the pandemic’s onset. And for 40% of Americans, digital tools have taken on new relevance: They report they used technology or the internet in ways that were new or different to them. Some also sought upgrades to their service as the pandemic unfolded: 29% of broadband users did something to improve the speed, reliability or quality of their high-speed internet connection at home since the beginning of the outbreak. Still, tech use has not been an unmitigated boon for everyone. “Zoom fatigue” was widely speculated to be a problem in the pandemic, and some Americans report related experiences in the new survey: 40% of those who have ever talked with others via video calls since the beginning of the pandemic say they have felt worn out or fatigued often or sometimes by the time they spend on them. Moreover, changes in screen time occurred for Americans generally and for parents of young children. The survey finds that a third of all adults say they tried to cut back on time spent on their smartphone or the internet at some point during the pandemic. In addition, 72% of parents of children in grades K-12 say their kids are spending more time on screens compared with before the outbreak.
- The digital divides related to internet use and affordability were highlighted by the pandemic and also emerged in new ways as life moved online. For all Americans relying on screens during the pandemic, connection quality has been important for school assignments, meetings and virtual social encounters alike. The new survey highlights difficulties for some: Roughly half of those who have a high-speed internet connection at home (48%) say they have problems with the speed, reliability or quality of their home connection often or sometimes.
- Affordability remained a persistent concern for a portion of digital tech users as the pandemic continued – about a quarter of home broadband users (26%) and smartphone owners (24%) said in the April 2021 survey that they worried a lot or some about paying their internet and cellphone bills over the next few months. From parents of children facing the “homework gap” to Americans struggling to afford home internet, those with lower incomes have been particularly likely to struggle. At the same time, some of those with higher incomes have been affected as well.
- Affordability and connection problems have hit broadband users with lower incomes especially hard. Nearly half of broadband users with lower incomes, and about a quarter of those with midrange incomes, say that as of April they were at least somewhat worried about paying their internet bill over the next few months.3 And home broadband users with lower incomes are roughly 20 points more likely to say they often or sometimes experience problems with their connection than those with relatively high incomes. Still, 55% of those with lower incomes say the internet has been essential to them personally in the pandemic.
Online businesses and platform work can create the impression that the digital economy is ephemeral and placeless. But the digital economy is experienced locally, and its effects are spatial. Measuring them requires better community-level data on economic activities online. While new government data measures broadband subscriptions down to neighborhoods, existing public data do not measure how broadband is used in local communities, and whether this digital activity affects economic outcomes. We analyzed monthly data on over 20 million domain name hosts/websites in the US from 2018 to 2020, and our results show the density of domain name hosts positively predicts community economic prosperity. Interactions between the density of these hosts and broadband subscriptions also predict lower monthly unemployment rates over time, including after the March 2020 pandemic. Commercial data can improve our understanding of broadband's impacts, including its potential for inclusive growth in diverse communities.
For America’s Latino community, education has long been the engine of generational advancement and prosperity. But the digital divide threatens to grind these gears of progress to a halt. Before the pandemic, more than one-third of Latino families and nearly 30 percent of Black families lacked a broadband connection at home. That’s part of the reason why Black and brown students lost the most ground during remote learning. We cannot increase equity for marginalized communities across the United States without ensuring universal access to the internet. Just as our society — the wealthiest nation on Earth — provides at least a minimal level of nutrition, education and health care, an internet connection, and the basic digital skills needed to use it, are also necessities in the information age.
As the Senate prepares to vote on a massive $65 billion broadband proposal, the road map for closing the digital divide is twofold: building out broadband infrastructure to reach the entire country, including rural America, which is 8.6 percent Latino and 7.8 percent Black; and making sure the broadband end product is affordable for all. We cannot “Build Back Better” or tackle our nation’s most odious and pressing inequities without first ensuring the most marginalized among us can connect to the internet at home — because digital rights are human rights.
[Brenda Castillo is President and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition.]
As Hurricane Ida pummeled New Orleans, officials told residents needing help to flag down a police officer or go to a fire station. The city’s 911 emergency calling service, served by AT&T, wasn’t working. The failure, rectified on August 30, is helping to fuel calls for Washington regulators to demand greater resiliency for mobile phone networks in the face of storms, fires and other natural disasters. Outages from past storms and wildfires have raised questions about mobile networks' resiliency. There is no requirement for cell sites to have backup power and the industry has resisted efforts to make that mandatory, arguing that would be burdensome, in part because it can be expensive to rent space for equipment and hard to get permits to store fuel in some places. In decades past, telephones at the end of copper lines could offer service, even during widespread electricity failures, if a nearby hub managed to have power, perhaps from a generator. Now mobile phones are ubiquitous, and often serve as home phones, leaving households vulnerable to outages.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration commented in response to the Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing federal earth stations, launch spectrum, and operation of a new federal environmental sensing satellite. These issues are connected by the principle that the responsibilities of the FCC and NTIA to manage our respective spheres of spectrum use require continued adjustment to reflect the realities of their interdependence. Here, it means:
- Federal use of non-federal commercial satellite services should be recognized to have the same rights to protection as other users of those services;
- Expectations to accommodate new non-federal use of federal launch spectrum must be tempered by recognition of the critical and growing uses of that spectrum by federal agencies in bands that are already congested, such that non-federal users should be encouraged to develop alternatives, particularly for in-orbit and payload communications; and
- Recognition of the long-standing plans for the launch of Argos-4 as a federal satellite.
SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission that Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own." Amazon urged the FCC to reject an update to SpaceX's Starlink plan because it "proposes two different configurations for the nearly 30,000 satellites of its Gen2 System, each of which arranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters." Amazon contends that SpaceX's plan violates a rule requiring applications to be complete and have no internal inconsistencies. In SpaceX's response, the company said that Amazon's own Kuiper satellite system plan is speculative. SpaceX concluded its filing by quoting Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. "As Amazon's former chief executive has said in the past, procedural maneuvers—like the ones Amazon now deploys—have 'become the bigger bottleneck than the technology,'" SpaceX told the FCC.
Dish Network’s Boost Mobile announced plans to acquire Gen Mobile, a Los Angeles (CA)-based prepaid mobile service provider specializing in serving “cost-conscious” consumers. Boost will be acquiring an undisclosed number of subscribers through the acquisition, but Stephen Stokols, who heads Boost and will oversee the Gen Mobile brand, said a key thing is the connection to bridging the digital divide. Dish is starting to move upmarket with Boost Mobile, but at the same time, “we don’t want to ignore the under-served market,” he said. According to Stokols, there’s an influx of money going into things like the federal government’s Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) program that are meant to bridge the digital divide. Gen Mobile, an MVNO using T-Mobile's network, is an established brand with distribution and the right team to more aggressively get into that space, and that’s an economic demographic that Dish wants to reach with lower priced plans – say with $10, $15 or $20 monthly plans.
There is broad consensus that American leadership in the 5G economy depends in part on smart spectrum policy. This includes a sharp focus on building a strong and competitive ecosystem in mid-band allocations, where wide bands can be coupled with capabilities such as edge computing and network slicing to enable 5G to act as a catalyst for transforming industries and economies. To begin a debate about how to build such an ecosystem, AT&T filed a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a separate spectrum screen for mid-band spectrum. Like the screens already established for high-and low-band spectrum, we believe that such a tool would assist the FCC in identifying spectrum aggregations that may cause competitive harm by allowing a licensee to hold so much mid-band spectrum in a given market that it becomes impossible for others to compete effectively.
[Joan Marsh is the Executive Vice President of Federal Regulatory Relations at AT&T.]
JD Power's new study finds 1 in 4 problems cited by car buyers in the first 90 days of ownership involves infotainment. For the first time in a decade, voice recognition is not the top problem; instead, it's Apple CarPlay/Android Auto connectivity, which worsened significantly, especially for those trying to connect wirelessly. About one-third of new cars now come with a built-in WiFi hub, which may or may not be compatible with a phone's operating system. Consumers want their digital lives to follow them seamlessly in the car, but if the wireless connection is glitchy such features don't work, leaving car owners unhappy. According to the vice president of auto quality at JD Power, Dave Sargent, it's a lack of software coordination between automakers and the tech giants who are often at odds over controlling the in-car experience. Instead of pointing fingers, he says, the two industries must work more closely together to optimize car connectivity features.
Apple announced a new concession for some App developers, giving apps such as Netflix and online publishers the ability to provide links to outside sign-up pages. Apple’s App Store rules currently prohibit all developers from notifying their customers about alternative payment options where Apple cannot collect a sales commission. The new rules will only apply to sharing links within “reader apps” that provide previously purchased content or subscriptions for content such as newspapers, books, music and video. The move, a concession to end a probe by the Japan Fair Trade Commission, is the latest sign that a global wave of investigations, litigation and legislation related to Apple’s allegedly anticompetitive behavior is beginning to chip away at some of the company’s long-held and lucrative business policies. The changes go into effect in early 2022.
Four Democratic members of Congress are calling for an investigation into whether an alleged secret 2018 agreement between Google and Facebook concerning digital advertising violated federal antitrust law. Sen Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Rep Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Rep Mondaire Jones (D-NY) wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Acting US Attorney General Nicholas Ganjei asking them to determine whether federal charges might be warranted. Attorneys General in ten states filed suit against Google in December 2020 over a program reportedly nicknamed “Jedi Blue." The Texas attorney general’s office led the suit, alleging that Facebook and Google worked to sabotage “header bidding,” which allows advertisers, including competitors, to bypass Google’s ad auctions. Both companies strenuously deny any wrongdoing, and have issued detailed rebuttals to the charges.
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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