Internet/Broadband

It was worth the wait. The third round of the US Department of Agriculture's ReConnect Loan and Grant Program closed in 2022, after awarding $759 million in rural broadband grants and loans to 49 deployers, mostly small local exchange carriers (LECs). The average cost of passing each home, farm, other business, or school was just over $4,500, compared to $4,100 in 2019 and almost $6,000 in 2020. All awardees in this round, and almost all in previous rounds, told USDA they were deploying fiber to the premises.

If you zoom into Pine Bluff, Arkansas, on the Federal Communication Commission’s broadband map, it doesn’t take long to realize something doesn’t look right.

Significant increases in consumption and speeds, spurred in part by government incentives, powered broadband toward or past major milestones at the end of 2022.

The wireless industry is out with a new paper that claims, “The bias [towards fiber to the home] ‘could increase costs by upwards of $30 to $60 billion depending on the distribution of fiber deployment costs for the unserved locations.’” It also says “[excluding unlicensed fixed wireless] ‘unambiguously adds’ at least 1.9 million new locations calling for government-funded overbuilding with [Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment] BEAD funds”. As both my 

To make sure that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act's Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program funding is used efficiently and not misallocated, it is important that National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) rules for allocating those funds be based on sound economic and policy principles. Unfortunately, that is not the case presently. As framed, the BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is heavily biased to favor and fund Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) projects.

The proportion of US urban populations declined slightly from 2010 to 2020, while the proportion of US rural populations increased during the same period. Yet while the narrative is good news, the changes seem to be less about people moving in or out of rural and urban places and more about how the Census Bureau defines “rural.” Specifically, the Census Bureau:

A lot of smaller broadband providers are currently expanding their service footprints. They are often using grant funding to add more service areas and customers, while others are expanding using the more traditional route of borrowing to build new networks. But not all small providers are expanding, or are only expanding in small increments. The reasons why they aren't expanding:

• Fear of Being Able to Compete
• Fear of New Debt
• Staff Can’t Handle Change
• Reluctance to Change Habits
• Lack of Creativity/Innovation

Northern Virginia is home to about 275 data centers, handling at least a third of the world’s online use, with dozens more of the massive structures either under construction or planned as local officials seek to tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue generated by an industry that requires few government services in return.

Dozens between government officials and executives at Facebook, Google, Twitter and other social media companies that have spilled into public are at the heart of a partisan legal battle that could disrupt the Biden administration’s already struggling efforts to combat disinformation. The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans, have sued the White House and dozens of officials, accusing them of forcing the platforms to stifle the voices of its political critics in violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech.

The committee's oversight plan for the 118th Congress. Concerning "Communications and Technology Issues," the committee will focus on the following: