Internet/Broadband

This report summarizes information about Internet access connections in the United States as of June 30, 2017 as collected by FCC Form 477. For purposes of this report, Internet access connections are those in service, over 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction, and reported to the FCC through Form 477. Total Internet connections increased by about 3% between June 2016 and June 2017 to 409 million. Mobile Internet connections increased about 4% year-over-year to 303 million in June 2017, while fixed connections grew to 106 million – up about 2% from June 2016.

A new proposal spearheaded by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai aims to eliminate the ability of certain carriers to provide Lifeline services, disproportionately affecting rural areas. Kansas would be hit hard by the harsh new Lifeline rules. It is estimated that about 70 percent of the state’s 45,131 Lifeline households would lose service, including veterans and seniors.

A new report from Cisco forecasts an alarmingly slow internet traffic growth rate for Latin America, especially when compared to the other lagging regions, like the Middle East and Africa. When it comes to internet speed, Latin America is far behind all other regions and will continue to lag over the next five years, per the report.

There’s a lot more behind the news that the Federal Communications Commission plans to increase the minimum broadband speed target in rural areas that wasn’t detailed in FCC Chairman Pai’s recent blog post about current commission initiatives. The plan to increase the minimum broadband speed is just one aspect of a 125-page order that the FCC will consider next month. Also detailed in the order: a plan to make new offers of model-based A-CAM broadband support to rural rate-of-return (ROR) carriers.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”), the US Treasury Department agency which serves as the Federal regulator for many of the nation’s banks, to allow those banks to seek Community Reinvestment Act credit for their financial support of community digital inclusion programs serving low and moderate income (LMI) households in their lending areas. In the comments, NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer said:

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the following items are tentatively on the agenda for the Open Commission Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, December 12, 2018:

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to raise the rural broadband standard from 10Mbps to 25Mbps in a move that would require faster Internet speeds in certain government-subsidized networks. The FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF) distributes more than $1.5 billion a year to AT&T, CenturyLink, and other carriers to bring broadband to sparsely populated areas. Carriers that use CAF money to build networks must provide speeds of at least 10Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads. The minimum speed requirement was last raised in Dec 2014.

What will wake America up from its Thanksgiving day food coma? Here's the Federal Communications Commission’s December 2018 open meeting agenda: