Illinois released its revised draft Tuesday for its final BEAD plan under NTIA's "Benefit of the Bargain" round. The state received 66% more applications than previous rounds, with an average cost of about $6,100 per location, wrote Office of Broadband Director Devon Braunstein. That's 21% less per location than the state's previous round, she noted.
The U.S. Secret Service stopped an "imminent telecommunications threat" near the United Nations and throughout the surrounding New York area, the agency said Tuesday. The threats targeted senior U.S. government officials and were capable of potentially disabling cell towers, initiating denial-of-service attacks and "facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises."
T-Mobile asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Monday to rehear en banc the August decision by a three-judge panel upholding the FCC’s data fines against it and Sprint, which it subsequently purchased (see 2508150044). The 2nd Circuit recently upheld a similar fine against Verizon, while the 5th Circuit rejected one against AT&T (see 2509100056).
Cloud communications company Bandwidth opposed AT&T’s petition at the FCC to stop accepting applications for special access DS3 services wherever they’re still offered to new customers throughout the company’s 21-state legacy wireline footprint (see 2508180039). Bandwidth said that if the service ends, there’s “no reasonable substitute available” for time-division multiplexing, particularly for 911 call centers. Comments on the application were due Friday, and Bandwidth was the only company to file.
The 5G download and upload speeds of EchoStar's Boost Mobile network are slightly slower than those of its wireless rivals, Ookla said last week. Citing its Speedtest and RootMetrics data, Ookla said Boost "relies heavily" on AT&T's wireless network, often connecting to it in U.S. metro areas and using it the majority of the time along rural state routes. Boost also hasn't yet launched its network in some major California cities, it noted.
MVPDs looking to replace their in-house pay-TV business with a virtual MVPD partnership need to be concerned about integration, flexibility and availability of local partners, Analysys Mason's Martin Scott wrote Wednesday. Multiple U.S. MVPDs have gone this route, including Frontier, WideOpenWest and Google Fiber, as operators are putting a greater priority on broadband access in their business models, he said. Partnerships can cut the costs and complexity of running a pay-TV service while letting operators keep the value of a bundled offer, Scott noted. But, he added, drawbacks include a dependence on third‑party partners for pricing and channel lineup, as well as the complexity of integrating billing and support.
NextNav countered the arguments that RFID company Avery Dennison made in its challenge to NextNav’s proposal to offer a terrestrial complement to GPS using 900 MHz spectrum (see 2507280039). Avery Dennison said in a filing last month that NextNav’s proposal “presents a significant threat to the continued effective operation of the RFID ecosystem, which plays a vital role across multiple industries, including logistics, retail, airline, consumer goods, and healthcare.”
As policymakers look at reforms to the USF, they need to examine why so many people who are eligible for support don’t enroll in Lifeline and other programs, experts said Monday during an event hosted by Georgetown University's Center for Business and Public Policy. The session coincided with Monday's deadline for responding to the congressional USF working group's request for comments and proposals on USF reform.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned Wednesday that a provision in the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (S-2296) would give the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman authority to veto commercial use of the lower 3 and 7/8 GHz bands. Cruz told an NTIA spectrum symposium (see 2509100051) that he will fight that provision in Section 1564 of the bill. “To be clear, this is not consultation or collaboration on spectrum management,” Cruz said.
Cord-cutting will see the most widely distributed cable networks, like C-SPAN and Food Network, lose 15 million to 20 million subscribers by 2029, S&P Global said in an analysis Friday. The average cable network will likely lose subscribers at an average annual rate of 5.4%, it said, with numbers dropping from 29.8 million this year to 23.8 million in 2029. It noted that only six cable networks grew year-end subscriber numbers between 2023 and 2024. Basic cable networks in the U.S. averaged a 7.1% decline in subscribers last year, marking the ninth consecutive year of declining subscribers for the industry due to cord-cutting, S&P added.