Wireless Internet

Charter unveiled Spectrum Mobile, the cable company's mobile wireless service. The new Wi-Fi first mobile service looks to be closely following the Xfinity Mobile model, which was also expected. Spectrum Mobile offers two plans: an unlimited data option for $45/month, or a by-the-gig approach for $14 per gigabyte (GB) of data, per month. Spectrum mobile matches Comcast’s Xfinity Mobile pricing for unlimited, but does charge $2 more per gig than Xfinity’s $12 per gig model, at $14 per GB.

Sacramento (CA) expects to soon be the first city in the nation with commercially available 5G telecommunications networking. City officials see big promise in the emerging technology. “Smart city stuff, IoT, autonomous vehicles: We will use it for all of those things,” said CIO and IT Director Maria MacGunigal.  Yet MacGunigal isn’t primarily focused on the whiz-bang municipal impact of 5G. “The use cases will change 100 times,” she predicted. “What we do know is that we will need the infrastructure, so we want to build it and build it well.

Verizon and AT&T quickly rejected a proposal by Federal Communications Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to use San Jose’s (CA) approach to small cells as a template for similar deployments in other cities. Hovering over the issue is a continued push by the nation’s wireless network operators to get the FCC to issue guidelines for how cities and states should smooth the rollout of small cells—including how much local regulators can charge carriers for small cell deployments.

Hawaii’s legislators and governor have approved a bill aimed at more closely defining wireless broadband facilities while streamlining the application process for providers. The legislation acknowledges wireless broadband’s necessity and foundational significance to the island state’s economic and technological future.

T-Mobile and Sprint are small players in a wireless market where being small makes it hard to survive. One expert told me that if the deal is framed as a pairing of two of the four national wireless carriers, it has little chance of making it past the regulators. That’s why T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Sprint executive chairman Marcelo Claure have been trying to describe the combined company as a new kind of entity that sells not only wireless service, but potentially home broadband service and a host of media in the future.

AT&T has been offering free HBO to its unlimited data customers since 2017, and you might have expected that deal to continue unaltered now that AT&T owns HBO thanks to its acquisition of Time Warner. But AT&T revamped its two unlimited mobile plans this week, and in the process it raised the price for the entry-level plan by $5 a month while removing the free HBO perk.

An economic assessment of zero-rating offers in the context of mobile internet access services and draw six lessons:

Right now, policymakers across the country are focused on strengthening American infrastructure. That effort includes roads, bridges, and broadband networks that support 5G wireless services. That’s vital—because to be first to a 5G future, we need to focus as much on the ground as on the skies. But figuring out how to deploy 5G infrastructure—which puts a premium on small cells—is a big task. It means acknowledging that we have a legal tradition of local control in this country but also recognizing that more streamlined and uniform practices can help speed deployment.

Four years after embarking on a project to bring internet access to remote locations through the use of internet-beaming drones, Facebook is giving up on designing its own aircraft. Instead, the tech giant said that it will work with aerospace manufacturer Airbus and other partners.

The US is putting up relatively meager competition in a potent new global tech race that, combined with the wave of go-it-alone nationalism led by President Donald Trump, is reshaping global politics and may lead to war, according to a major new report.  In the late 1950s, the US, facing a similar momentous challenge in Sputnik, threw all its resources into a single-minded effort to dominate the future.