Telecommunication

When senators return to Washington next week, one of the most pressing issues they’ll face is passing the National Defense Authorization Act, which has been pushed back much further than usual. Lawmakers have filed nearly 700 amendments to the annual defense bill, including several related to tech and telecom. Politico has compiled a list of major Democrat, Republican, and bipartisan amendments in these areas.

The Broadband Deployment Accuracy and Technological Availability (DATA) Act signed into law in March 2020 requires the development of a national “broadband serviceable location fabric (BSLF)” containing georeferenced information on all locations where fixed broadband could be installed. This represents a significant shift from prior datasets, where broadband availability was gauged from the estimated number of people/households in each Census Block (i.e., without geolocations).

Passage of the Infrastructure legislation on November 5 was truly historic—surely the biggest boost ever to bringing high-speed broadband to every American household. While we get about the job of building broadband, we need to take up other communications issues that have been of even longer gestation and which have just as much, maybe more, urgency for our country. High on my list is media reform.

Vodafone has stepped up its push into the UK broadband market after striking new deals with BT’s Openreach and challenger network CityFibre that hand the group the largest ultrafast broadband footprint in the country. The deals mean Vodafone will be able to offer the high-speed broadband product to 8 million homes by spring 2022 at steep discounts as it looks to grow its share of the market. The UK company is Europe’s largest broadband provider, with more than 25 million customers after acquiring cable networks in markets including Germany and Spain.

$48 billion of that funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal is being allocated to the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) through the following programs:

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.

Senate Republicans are planning a strong fight against President Biden's nomination of consumer advocate Gigi Sohn [Senior Fellow and Public Advocate at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society] to the Federal Communications Commission. "I will do everything in my power to convince colleagues on both sides of the aisle to reject this extreme nominee," said Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Sohn has a longtime career in government policy, having co-founded consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge in 2001.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo discussed the Commerce Department's role in implementing the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act's broadband initiatives. Of the $65 billion for broadband in the infrastructure package, $42.5 billion goes to the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to create the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program. "I will confess this is going to be a massive undertaking for the Department of Commerce, but we’re up for it, said Raimondo.

Senator Mike Braun (R-IN) introduced a bill designed to learn more about how rural broadband can be improved. Rural broadband providers have to make significant investments in order to carry data-intensive content delivered by “edge providers” such as Netflix, Facebook, and YouTube. The Rural Broadband Network Advancement Act would require the Federal Communications Commission to study the impact that intensive “edge provider data” has on the service costs of rural broadband providers.

Democrats’ partisan social spending package presently includes $300 million for the Emergency Connectivity Fund, a Federal Communications Commission pandemic relief program to help expand broadband access for students, library patrons and school staff, as well as $100 million for the FCC to promote its broadband affordability programs. It sets up various Commerce Department programs, such as a $280 million pilot program to improve broadband in cities and a $475 million program to help consumers purchase devices like computers and tablets.