A research wireless network testbed for rural broadband and related use cases will soon cover roughly 600 miles of central Iowa, including half a dozen communities, multiple school districts and the University of Iowa campus in Ames, Iowa.
The fourth and only rural testbed...
Wireless carriers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile have seen growth in urban areas and cities for many years. Rural America has not been the primary focus, but that is starting to change. Going forward it looks like all three carriers are starting...
The need to invest in rural broadband infrastructure and bridge the digital divide isn’t a new ambition in the U.S. but the critical need for ubiquitous, reliable connectivity has been brought into sharp relief throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, federal officials made emergency...
"The business models are extremely complex and there is a lot of risk embedded in this," says Nsight's Brighid Riordan
Brighid Riordan is the CINO and VP of Emerging Services and Public Affairs for regional telecom company Nsight, which operates the Cellcom wireless brand serving...
The need to invest in rural broadband infrastructure and bridge the digital divide isn’t a new ambition in the U.S. but the critical need for ubiquitous, reliable connectivity has been brought into sharp relief throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, federal officials made emergency...
Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based Midco is a regional service provider that serves about 400,000 customers in five states. The company is a joint venture of Comcast and Midcontinent Media and provides cable, internet (including gigabit speeds) and telephone services in the Dakotas, Minnesota and...
The 5G mmWave trial utilized Nokia’s baseband and radios and Qualcomm’s FWA platform
Just weeks after pushing the limits of 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) by demonstrating sustained average downlink speeds of about 1 Gbps and peak speeds of more than 2 Gbps in its live...
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed inequality in our society — and how lack of Internet connectivity can exacerbate that divide. Across the country, as students were sent home to learn remotely and workers were asked to work from home, those without reliable access to...
Verizon offers LTE Home Internet in 189 primarily rural markets in 48 states
As part of its Citizen Verizon business plan, Verizon announced last week a $1 billion investment in the expansion of rural broadband, as well as new programs and initiatives to further help underserved communities bridge...
The initial Nokia, NewCore deployment will connect more than 15,000 tribal members
Nokia and NewCore Wireless are leveraging 117 megahertz of the Tribal Educational Broadband Service (EBS) spectrum to bring 5G broadband connectivity to rural, unserved and underserved Native American communities throughout the U.S....
Comcast serves more than 1.6 million residential, business customers throughout Washington
Comcast is investing $4.2 million over the next two years to expand its Xfinity and business services to 815 homes in the city of Sumas, a rural community of Whatcom County in Washington state.
Congresswoman...
WISPA exec called the infrastructure plan 'right on target'
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden introduced a monumental $2.3 trillion infrastructure and jobs package that aims to reshape the American economy. The infrastructure plan is far reaching, and includes, among many other things, $174 billion for electric vehicles,...
In the past 5 to 10 years, there have been several novel if not downright quirky communication solutions trying to address the needs of rural connectivity, especially in emerging markets. These have ranged from tethered and free-floating balloons to circling solar-powered high-altitude aircraft, but...
Orange has active plans to sell a 50% stake, along with co-control, of its new fixed fiber venture Orange Concessions to La Banque des Territoires, part of France’s state-owned bank Caisse des Dépôts, insurer CNP Assurances and EDF Invest consortium.
Orange Concessions has been deploying fiber networks...
Better rural broadband availability has "significant positive impacts on crop yields and other farm production metrics," the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Economics and Analytics found in a new working paper.
The report, by economist Katherine LoPiccalo (who previously worked at the FCC but...
The Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction has wrapped up, setting the stage for $9.23 billion in subsidies to be doled out over the next decade in support of high-speed rural broadband deployment.
That deployment will come as a combination of wireline, fixed wireless and...
Thanks to the broadband project, the village can now receive speeds of up to 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream
Copper Valley Telecom (CVT) has completed a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband deployment in Tatitlek, an off-grid indigenous village in Alaska, improving connectivity speeds from 10...
The Priority Access License auction was meant to be unlike anything the industry has seen before. The sheer number of licenses and their county-level size were designed to attract new types of companies to spectrum-holding and make it feasible for them to compete for...
Editor’s Note: RCR Wireless News goes all in for “Throwback Thursdays,” tapping into our archives to resuscitate the top headlines from the past. Fire up the time machine, put on the sepia-tinted shades, set the date for #TBT and enjoy the memories!
How to fund...
As the United States prepares to pour nearly $30 billion into rural broadband and 5G networks over the coming decade, the question arises of what type of network infrastructure (Fiber? Fixed or mobile wireless access? Traditional or LEO satellite?) should be prioritized for funding...
Closing the urban/rural digital divide and expanding broadband access has been a federal policy goal for decades, and there are multiple new and existing programs underway that attempt to address disparities in broadband access across the United States.
The United States is a country of...
Closing the urban/rural digital divide has been a telecom policy focus for years, and it has been part of the conversation around everything from Congressional funding to the merger of T-Mobile US and Sprint.
So what is the state of deployment? What programs are in...
Fiber network deployment is the "rural electrification of our generation", according to Conexon's Jonathan Chambers
As the Federal Communications Commission mulls exactly how it will distribute the proposed $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund over a decade to expand rural broadband deployments and narrow the...
What is the state of broadband deployment in the United States? The simple answer is that despite years of substantial funding and programs focused on broadband expansion, there is no single federal data source for an accurate answer to that question. The range of...
