The FCC is accepting data via an online form, where you can presumably talk about anything, whether it be slow speeds, lack of providers, data caps, or high costs. The FCC is asking you to describe the problem in three to five sentences, and provide your name, the state where you live, ZIP code, phone number, and any attachments you’d like to include.
The FCC has currently been using its own broadband maps
What Is Starlink? SpaceX’s Much-Hyped Satellite Internet Service Explained
Are you curious about Starlink and whether Elon Musk’s satellite internet technology is right for you? We answer the most pressing questions about the system that’s currently shaking up the ISP market.
Installing fiber in a city, and bringing Gigabit broadband to million of customers is certainly lucrative, but not so much in a rural area home to only a few hundred people.
The satellite internet system from SpaceX is capable of delivering 150Mbps internet speeds to theoretically any place on the planet. All the customer needs is a clear view of the sky.
Starlink currently costs $99 a month. You’ll also have to pay a one-time $499 fee for the Starlink satellite dish and Wi-Fi router, which the company will ship to your home.
Starlink is currently delivering 80Mbps to 150Mbps in download speeds and about 30Mbps in upload speeds, according to users. Meanwhile, latency comes in at around 30 milliseconds, which is on par with ground-based internet. Later this year, SpaceX plans on bumping up the download speeds to 300Mbps, while bringing down the latency to 20ms.
One pandemic-driven solution in Kentucky has been to put mobile hotspots in public school parking lots so kids without internet at home can keep up with schoolwork, but that isn’t without its own flaws https://t.co/Ne47p3SkS9
How faster internet is being blocked by politics and poverty throughout the eastern US
While FCC data holds that about 93% of Kentucky has broadband access, last September, Microsoft vice president Shelley McKinley said the portion of the state’s population actually using the internet at broadband speeds (defined as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up) is only about 31%. Those findings echo Microsoft’s 2016 estimates that 162.8 million Americans are not using the internet at broadband speeds compared to the FCC’s count of 24.7 million.
Rosenworcel said that Pai’s report obscures “the hard truth that the digital divide is very real and very big” and that “it confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
In 2019, Rosenworcel pressured telecom giants to come clean on their collection and sale of sensitive user location data to third parties, and consumer groups say she’s been a steady advocate of consumer rights throughout her tenure.
Roughly 42 million Americans—double official FCC estimates—lack access to any broadband connection whatsoever. Another 83 million only have the choice of one provider, usually Comcast or Charter. This lack of meaningful competition directly results in high US broadband prices, spotty coverage, and routinely terrible customer service.
Across the country, the FCC and internet service providers are pretending there’s competition in an unimaginable number of places where it doesn’t actually exist.
As FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel wrote for The Verge last March, as many as one in three US households doesn’t have broadband internet access, currently defined as just 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up — which feels like the bare minimum for a remote learning family these days.
The city Board of Estimate first decided back in 1965 to slice up the city into cable-TV franchise fiefdoms, a setup that has survived largely intact in the internet era. Today, Altice (aka Optimum) has exclusive cable rights to the Bronx and southeast Brooklyn, while Charter (aka Spectrum, formerly Time Warner) has the rest of the city; Verizon FiOS is also available in a slowly expanding patchwork of areas overlying those two. As a result, most city residents have at most one other option if they’re unhappy with their current service, and many have none at all.
Americans weren’t always beholden to their local cable and phone companies for internet access, notes Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative for the D.C.-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In the 1990s, thousands of internet service providers across the country offered dialup connections for relatively low prices, connecting via the copper wires of the phone system. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, he says, was initially designed to build on this by enabling multiple providers to use the new, faster networks that were then starting to be rolled out using higher-capacity coaxial and fiber-optic cable. It didn’t quite pan out.
“Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations dismantled that, under pressure from the big cable and telephone companies,” says Mitchell. “Most of those internet access providers went out of business, because they didn’t have access to the networks. If you have a policy that requires a company to pay $1,500 per home to get a subscriber, and it takes three to four years to earn that money back, you will not have much competition.”
The result has been a network of broadband services that are unaffordable or unavailable for a persistently high number of local households.
Torres noted that the city has spent nearly $300 million on renting otherwise-vacant hotels to house homeless New Yorkers during the pandemic, but hasn’t asked for the hotels to allow residents access to their broadband routers.
A significant Lifeline broadband benefit separate from the current Lifeline service, designed primarily to support phone service.
Financial support for community-based emergency efforts to help unconnected households find and makes use of the affordable internet access options available to them. These funds would need to go to local organizations who are already trusted by households who are not connected. Unconnected households tend to be low-income and/or older adults.
Evanston, Illinois, Public Library is one of a dozen or so libraries across the country to offer the public access to digital pop-up libraries.
Digital pop-up libraries seem to be especially geared to cellphone and tablet users… Research shows that 77 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, over double the 35 percent that owned one in 2011. This growth is reflected in almost all age groups and demographics in the U.S. And on top of that, an increasing number of Americans, particularly the younger generation, are getting their news on mobile devices.
cutting out the administrative burden of library cards, accounts, and fines. A “low-maintenance, high-impact” approach, according to Baker and Taylor.
Hotspots expand the reach of the library service and remove the barriers associated with a physical building.
School districts are more connected than ever. The latest Infrastructure Survey report from CoSN shows that over 90% of districts have sufficient broadband. So why isn’t everyone using it to generate measurable outcomes?
How technology can be used in the classroom to help support learning and productivity How school leaders can calculate the value of their tech investments
The importance of video when it comes to keeping students engaged (hint: video is key)
The most important metrics to consider when collecting data on your technology (it’s ok to start small)