Posts Tagged: "broadband"

This week, both houses of Congress sit silent during scheduled work periods, although the House Infrastructure Subcommittee will host a hearing on rural broadband Internet access in Minnesota. Back in Washington, D.C., tech and innovation think tanks kick off the week with an event on bridging the STEM education gap hosted by the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes. Later in the week, the American Enterprise Institute explores issues in promoting security in 5G networks, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation meets at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg to discuss standards setting for artificial intelligence tech, and the Brookings Institution focuses on the CIA’s efforts to police online channels to identify threats while balancing those activities with Americans’ civil liberties.

This week on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives will host almost every hearing that will relate to technology and innovation, including three hearings originally scheduled for last week but moved due to the national day of mourning for former President George H. W. Bush. Hearings in the House will focus on topics including advanced fuels for next generation engines, efforts to speed the development of innovative medical treatments, legislation for freeing up broadband Internet spectrum for public use and government IT acquisition processes. Over in the Senate, there will be a hearing in the middle of the week on Chinese espionage that will explore how entities in that country have been involved in cyberattacks and Internet piracy against American targets.

This week in Capitol Hill hearings focuses solely on meetings happening at the U.S. Senate. The one hearing scheduled at the U.S. House of Representatives, which was to explore whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was addressing small business concerns regarding 21st century telecom systems, has been postponed to a later date. In the Senate, the Commerce Committee will hold hearings on automated system for rail vehicles and challenges in the creation of rural infrastructure for broadband Internet. The Indian Affairs Committee is also exploring broadband challenges and the Superfund Subcommittee will discuss the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) implementation of science transparency rules.

Last week the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing to conduct oversight of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Although there was the typical overblown bickering over the FCC’s action on net neutrality rules taken in recent months under FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that one might expect, much of the day’s hearing focused on the poor quality of current broadband coverage maps employed by the FCC in distributing subsidies as well as the need to improve broadband deployment to reach millions of Americans living in rural communities.

Overland Park, KS-based telecom firm Sprint Corporation (NYSE:S) and Atlanta, GA-based broadband provider Cox Communications announced a multi-year business agreement resulting from the settlement of a patent infringement case between the two companies. The settlement, which is “designed to strengthen each company,” provides a brief glimpse into how a patent squabble can be resolved for the betterment of all parties involved in the case.

On Thursday, December 14th, the commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will convene an open meeting to discuss several subjects, one of which is titled Restoring Internet Freedom. According to news reports, the FCC is likely to approve this order in a 3-2 vote along party lines to return the classification of broadband Internet access service to its prior classification as information service… Despite the high likelihood that the order will be passed by the FCC’s commissioners, or maybe more because of that likelihood, there has been a lot of recent press on how the FCC under current Chairman Ajit Pai has drawn the ire of net neutrality supporters.

Lost in all of this rhetoric over Chairman Pai’s supposed interest in limiting Internet access for Americans are the activities being overseen by Pai which are in the service of restoring Internet access to victims of natural disasters. On October 3rd, the day after Pai was confirmed for his second term, the FCC announced that it would make up to $76.9 million in funding available to aid in repairing wireline and wireless communication networks to restore communications services in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, two U.S. territories which have seen incredible infrastructure damage caused by two major hurricanes in recent weeks. The tech media world’s desire to cast FCC Chairman Pai in the least favorable light possible means that, while the net neutrality issue gets a great deal of coverage from the likes of Ars Technica, The Verge and CNET, the announcement on funding hurricane repairs to restore Internet access barely gets any coverage because it doesn’t fit a narrative. Outside of Reuters and Engadget, American news consumers would be hard-pressed to find details of that initiative.

Facebook is not the only company seeking to provide content to consumers via their own Internet-based platforms. In early May, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) announced a deal with San Francisco-based social media firm Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) to livestream 20 games per year over multiple seasons on the social media platform. The first WNBA game livestreamed on Twitter on Sunday, May 14th, earned 1.1 million viewers, nearly one-third the average audience watching National Football League (NFL) games streamed on Twitter during the 2016-17 season. Seattle-based Internet e-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) will livestream Thursday night NFL games during the 2017-18 season for $50 million, a sum which is reportedly about five times what Twitter paid to broadcast NFL games last year. Twitter’s WNBA deal and Amazon’s NFL deal both include promotional efforts on behalf of the Internet companies to promote either sports league.

Between 2014 and 2016, Pai said that the country’s 12 largest ISPs have decreased their spending by $3.6 billion, a drop of 5.6 percent in investment. Pai also cited a letter sent to the FCC from a collection of 22 ISPs, each serving about 1,000 customers or fewer, who argue that the Title II common carrier regulations have affected their ability to obtain financing and have at least slowed the development and deployment of new infrastructure and services… Pai believes that the return to a light-touch framework would benefit Americans in a variety of ways. The lighter regulatory framework should spur broadband deployment towards better Internet service, create jobs for Americans to deploy those networks, boost marketplace competition, end government micromanagement and secure Internet privacy by returning authority to the FTC.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has moved to block broadband privacy rules drafted by the previous administration and set to go into effect in early March… FCC commissioners voted 3-2 last October to adopt broadband privacy rules which limit the amount of data which can be collected by ISPs from their consumers. The rules created an opt-in/opt-out model in which broadband customers must intentionally opt-in to any data collection programs developed by ISPs to collect data considered by the FCC to be sensitive, including geo-location, family size, browsing history or app usage history. Pai was one of two dissenting votes in last October’s decision on the broadband privacy rules, and his dissent reflected his views on harmonizing the FCC’s privacy regime with the FTC.

ISPs have increasingly come under the focus of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the agency’s chairman, Tom Wheeler. The FCC is fresh from a major victory on its net neutrality rules which were recently upheld by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. That victory has now placed some momentum on data privacy rules proposed this March by the FCC, rules which would further protect ISP consumers by ensuring that their ISP sees as little of their data as possible. Some industry analysts believe that the FCC will continue to take action, the proposed broadband privacy rules being one part of that action. Other rules proposed by the FCC would open up set-top boxes to third-party cable providers as well as prevent zero-rating of data services, which allows consumers to access dedicated apps without being charged for data.

The incentive auction being conducted by the FCC is a two-part process. First, at the end of May, the agency began conducting a reverse auction which sought 126 MHz of relinquished broadcast spectrum rights. In this auction, the FCC offered payment to multiple sellers for relinquishing spectrum and reduced its offer incrementally. A selling price in such an auction is reached when enough prospective sellers drop out as the offered payment is dropped. The second phase of the spectrum auction is a forward auction offering new 600 MHz band flexible-use licenses to broadband providers.

The nature of broadband has been changing in a way that Wheeler believes will spur even more robust data services in the near future. The FCC is taking a number of steps to try and promote competition among broadband service providers, one of the most highly anticipated of which is the incentive auction of broadcast television airwave spectrum which is currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2016. The auction is an attempt to purchase spectrum from TV broadcasters so that it can be resold in a later auction to wireless service providers.