Telecommunication

The Federal Communications Commission's "rip and replace" program, formalized in June 2021 as the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, is designed to reimburse small carriers so they can tear out network equipment from Chinese vendors like Huawei and ZTE that the US government has deemed insecure. The program's goal is to finance the replacement of that equipment with gear from "trusted" vendors.

City officials in Tupelo (MS) allowed an electronic cooperative the option to use its utility poles to provide broadband services more efficiently to some Tupelo residents. The Tupelo City Council voted to accept a pole attachment agreement between the city and Tombigbee Fiber, which will allow the organization to place attachments on city-owned utility poles for broadband services. A small portion of city residents are customers of Tombigbee, but the organization does not offer broadband internet services citywide.

Democratic aides have been fleeing the Hill for lobbying gigs with major tech and telecom companies — just as lawmakers are preparing to tighten regulations on those same companies. More than a dozen senior Democratic tech and telecom policy staffers have left the Hill this year, many of them heading to the likes of Facebook, Apple, Verizon and Charter Communications. Others have left for Biden administration posts. They’re taking with them specialized knowledge on issues like artificial intelligence, data privacy and broadband.

The 2021 BKD Rural Telecommunications Benchmark Study is unique in that it has data from 170 rural telecommunications companies in 18 states. Every year the BKD study provides an in-depth look at how the rural telecommunications industry has performed. This year we look at the impact of 20 years of broadband services. The biggest takeaways from the 2021 Rural Telecommunications Benchmark Study are:

Facebook-led Terragraph is a technology designed to bridge the last mile gap between the subscriber and the service provider’s closest fiber node. Terragraph's fixed wireless service delivers multi-gigabit-speed data using 60 GHz unlicensed millimeter wave spectrum. The technology works by using its transmitters, which are typically deployed on street lights or rooftops, to create a distributed network. It can extend a fiber network wirelessly through these nodes to provide last-mile connectivity.

Facebook Connectivity thinks it has developed a cheaper and faster way to deploy fiber that doesn’t involve digging up streets. Instead, the company has created Bombyx, an aerial fiber-deploying robot that crawls along power lines and wraps fiber around those lines. The company envisions Bombyx being used as a middle-mile fiber solution, meaning it can bring fiber capacity to a pole mount and from there a service provider would either have to use underground fiber or wireless for the last-mile connection.

The owner of a New York City barbershop has filed a $20 million class-action lawsuit against Altice, claiming that Altice reneged on its Keep Americans Connected pledge during the pandemic. Artem Shalomayev, owner of 3715 Barber Shop in the Bronx, is suing on behalf of potentially thousands of other similarly-situated small business owners, according to the plaintiff's lawyer Jon Norinsberg.

Facing heightened scrutiny for its social media policies and relentless quest for growth, Facebook is now turning its attention to getting more people high-speed internet access in hard-to-reach places. The move comes with some irony, as it comes on the heels of Facebook’s own massive outage, which temporarily took down all of the apps in its empire.

AT&T will work with Frontier Communications to bring fiber-optic connectivity to large enterprise customers outside AT&T’s current footprint. The two companies signed multi-year strategic agreements that will also support the deployment of AT&T’s 5G mobility network. As the demand for edge computing and 5G networks grows, so too does the need for resilient fiber pathways for a connected society. Enterprises need more bandwidth to keep data moving fast.

Facebook’s October 4 outages across its platforms and the company’s handling of it raise a far-reaching question: Should we simply rest content with a complete shutdown of service across four platforms, which underpin much of the planet’s economic and cultural interaction and one of which, WhatsApp, has become an essential and free substitute for phone calling and many other communications?