telecompetitor

WeLink, a service provider founded in 2018, has rolled out fixed wireless service offering symmetrical speeds up to a gigabit per second in metro Las Vegas (NV) and Phoenix (AZ). WeLink founder and CEO Kevin Ross said the company plans to be in a total of 10 major metros in the next 18 to 24 months. The company will use 5G millimeter wave technology and 60 GHz wireless technology that it developed, according to Ross. The latter frequency will be used for backhaul and access. Ross also noted that the access equipment uses a mesh approach.

Private wireless networks are poised to play an important role on the nation’s farms, potentially creating opportunities for rural network operators. A deal between computing provider Trilogy Networks and Inland Cellular aims to provide farm-wide coverage and address connectivity as an obstacle to the adoption of precision agriculture. It calls for Inland Cellular to offer private wireless to farms in its service area in the northwestern US to blanket the farm with wireless coverage.

In the latest round of Rural Digital Opportunity Fund awards, the Federal Communications Commission said it is ready to authorize funding for Windstream and 11 other companies. Windstream winning bids fill more than 60 of the 80 total pages that comprise the list. The FCC said it is ready to authorize Windstream winning bids in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio. LTD Broadband is not among them and the company got some bad RDOF news from the FCC.

Startup internet company Underline, which focuses on community infrastructure, is now hoping to disrupt the telecommunications industry by building open access fiber networks across 2,500 underserved communities. The company says its first full-scale deployment will break ground October 19 in Colorado Springs (CO) — where 10 percent of all households have no internet access. In an open access model, a city or a private company like Underline builds and maintains the physical infrastructure, and invites multiple independent providers to run services on the network.

According to advocates of the Convergence Apocalypse theory, telecommunications companies’ increasingly ambitious fiber deployments pose a big threat to major cable companies at the same time that cable companies’ increasing success in offering mobile service poses a big threat to the major telcos. Both threats are real, researchers argue, but they don’t see the threats as symmetrical. Instead, they see cable companies having the advantage. MoffettNathanson offers several data points to illustrate the threat that telco fiber deployments pose to cable companies.

Cable operator Charter is participating in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) clean-up and notifying the Federal Communications Commission of census blocks it intends to remove from its RDOF plans. The FCC notified 197 winning bidders about concerns with their RDOF applications, suggesting there were numerous census blocks in those bids that shouldn’t qualify for the RDOF program.