Sacramento Bee

[Commentary] Some of you might recall that in Nov, Verizon announced it would make Sacramento the first city in the country to have 5G – or fifth-generation – residential wireless broadband service. We beat out at least two other cities for it, following a few months of being a test market. Now if all goes well, many more Sacramentans will be able to tap into the ultra-high-speed service with their smartphones, tablets and computers by the second half of 2018. The deal, in part, is the culmination of another one inked in June.

Entercom, the PA-based radio broadcasting company that owned KDND-FM (107.9 The End), will settle with a media watchdog group that had threatened to appeal the licenses of its other Sacramento stations. 107.9 The End was embroiled in controversy when the station sponsored a contest in 2007 called, “Hold Your Wee for a Wii,” resulting in the death of Jennifer Lea Strange, 28, from water intoxication. Her family eventually won a $16.6 million award during a jury trial, and media watchdogs petitioned the Federal Communications Commission seeking to deny the station’s license renewal. In Feb, Entercom announced it would voluntarily surrender the radio station’s license as part of a planned merger with CBS Corp.’s CBS Radio.

[Commentary] The opinion piece by Mike Montgomery needs a reality check (“In reforming the PUC, Brown should replace commissioners”; Forum, Oct. 16). Yes, Montgomery and friends at CALinnovates, the private sector has a deep interest in how regulators perform their essential function, and you might like to name a few more of your own to the California Public Utilities Commission. But we need to remember that consumers and the wider public interest must also be at the table.

Groups like TURN (The Utility Reform Network), the Greenlining Institute, Media Alliance and others provide a necessary voice for the social contract upon which utility network operators build, and these voices must be heard. The call for replacing the reformers on the PUC in order to advance reform is simply ludicrous. If you want transparent, accountable regulation made by informed ethical regulators, Sandoval is a star performer and California is lucky to have her service.

[Sean Taketa McLaughlin is executive director of Access Humboldt based in Eureka (CA), and a board member for the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition based in Washington, D.C.]

[Commentary] There is much to celebrate in the Field Poll’s annual survey on the “digital divide” in California. The percentage of Californians with high-speed Internet at home has risen to 84 percent in 2016 from 55 percent in 2008. But the divide between those who have broadband at home and those who do not is closing largely because of smartphones.

The 2016 survey found that among the 84 percent with home broadband, 14 percent are connecting only through their smartphones. This percentage is a near doubling of smartphone-only users since 2014. No doubt, smartphones are marvelous devices that provide access to information and online applications. But they are limited functionally for doing school homework, applying for jobs or college or taking online courses. The problem is that those who rely only on smartphones are the very people most in need of the upward economic mobility enhanced by Internet-connected computing devices.

[Sunne Wright McPeak is the president and CEO of the California Emerging Technology Fund and former secretary of the California Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.]

[Commentary] California, like the rest of the country, still has much work to do to close the digital divide. The divide is due to the cost of broadband for consumers and the expense involved in deploying infrastructure in rural and remote areas. Laying fiber optic cable in a state as large and geographically complex as California is expensive. Incentives have proved necessary to entice competitive internet service providers to make the required capital outlays and investments in infrastructure. This is why during our terms of government service, we conceptualized and helped found the California Advanced Services Fund program at the PUC.

Despite this success, the California Advanced Services Fund will soon be out of money. Per the program’s public records, there are currently 16 broadband infrastructure projects, totaling $154 million, pending approval, but only $100 million left in the account. And there are many other broadband infrastructure projects that need funding in the state that have yet to apply. If the California Advanced Services Fund is not re-funded, hundreds of thousands of California households will remain without high-speed internet access. California will remain a place where a fifth of the people face nearly insurmountable impediments to accessing the employment, educational, health and government resources the rest of us take for granted.

[Rachelle Chong, a Republican, is a former commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission and of the California Public Utilities Commission. She runs a consulting and law firm in San Francisco. Lloyd Levine, a Democrat, is a former California Assembly member and chair of the Assembly Utilities and Commerce Committee. He is the co-founder of the UC Riverside Center for Broadband Policy and Digital Literacy, and runs his own consulting firm specializing in technology policy.]