When He’s Not Busy Censoring Comedians, Brendan Carr Is Eliminating Free Wi-Fi For Poor Rural School Kids

Wireless

from the screwing-over-toddlers dept

Brendan Carr has received ample attention for his recent failed attempt to ban a comedian and trample the First Amendment, something he’s facing several fledgling investigations over.

But that disaster class in shitty governance shouldn’t overshadow all the other, terrible things Carr has been up to. Like last week, when Carr announced he’d be killing a popular, bipartisan program that provided free Wi-Fi to school kids at no additional cost to taxpayers.

Some background: last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring free Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses and libraries, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.

The FCC E-Rate budget was not increased, meaning the public didn’t have to pay a penny extra. It was a popular, no brainer, bipartisan effort to make internet access easier for the most disadvantaged, many of them living in areas that voted for Donald Trump in the belief he’d make their lives better.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Brendan Carr joined forces to try and destroy that effort. Big telecoms like AT&T don’t like the precedent of government offering free broadband when poor people might otherwise be forced to overpay for expensive cellular. AT&T also doesn’t want government Wi-Fi initiatives to imperil the company’s longstanding practice of defrauding school subsidy programs.

Killing this program is about protecting the interests of giant, shitty telecom monopolies. But Cruz and Carr couldn’t openly say that, so they lied and claimed the program was illegal (false), that they were looking to save taxpayers money (false), and the program “censored Conservative viewpoints” (insane and false, we debunked and explained this claim way back in January).

Carr’s facing some moderate blowback from a few Senators like Ed Markey, who fired off a polite letter. Carr’s also facing light pushback from advocacy groups including the American Library Association (ALA) and the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB). All of them say Carr’s dumb policy choices are making it harder for schoolkids (Republican and Democrat alike) to connect to the internet:

“Rolling back the E-Rate hotspot and school bus decisions would undercut some of the most effective tools for addressing inequities in home connectivity and would reverse progress in closing the ‘Homework Gap.’ For millions of students, especially those from low-income households, internet access outside of school walls is not a luxury but a prerequisite for academic success.”

Spoiler: Carr doesn’t care. Polite letters aren’t going to be enough to deter him from his plan to effectively butcher every last part of the FCC that doesn’t serve AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon’s quarterly revenue goals (his inevitable future employers). The press barely finds this stuff worth covering.

Carr’s claim that this program is illegal leans heavily on the Trump-stocked Supreme and appeals court belief that literally any regulatory action that Republicans and corporations don’t like is now illegal. They’ve had more luck on this front than most people understand; effectively turning most U.S. consumer protection and safety regulators into the legal equivalent of seasonal decorative gourds, especially if a regulator’s enforcement actions run into the MAGA 5th Circuit, 6th Circuit, or Supreme Court.

Again, this particular program was built with broad, bipartisan support. It helped children do their fucking homework. It wasn’t controversial. Carr and Cruz targeted not just because it imperiled incumbent telecom monopolies revenues, but because they’re inherently shameless; gleefully engaged in a scorched-Earth war against the very people they pretend to represent.

I think there’s a lot of “Libertarian free market” think tank guys, companies, and extraction-class folks who would very much like it if the focus remained exclusively on the aspects of Carr they don’t support (primarily free speech), but the harm he’s causing to issues like consumer protection, public safety, and affordable connectivity simply can’t be overstated.

Carr’s been busy taking an absolute hatchet to the entirety of FCC broadband consumer protection, robocall enforcement, and media consolidation limits. He’s derailing useful cybersecurity programs, and basic FCC efforts to prevent longstanding racism in broadband deployment. He’s destroying any efforts to police fraud by giants like Comcast. His approach is basically a napalm blend of corruption, regulatory capture, and radical right wing extremism, dressed up as measured de-regulatory efficiency.

It’s unlikely his rollback of a popular plan to help rural schoolkids do their homework will see much press coverage. And what coverage there is will likely either downplay the harm or parrot Carr’s false claims unskeptically. But it’s important to not let Carr’s terribleness on free speech overshadow his other, equally terrible, policies that will reverberate for decades to come.

Filed Under: brendan carr, classroom, e-rate, education, fcc, hotspots, libraries, schools, ted cruz, wifi, wireless

Trump’s Long Con Using Dish Network Collapses, Just As We Predicted Five Years Ago

Wireless

from the flimsy-cover-for-bad-choices dept

I generally try not to engage in “I told you so,” but I told you so. The Trump administration’s long-percolating plan to use Dish Network as flimsy cover for harmful wireless consolidation is dead, just as I predicted five years earlier. Dish will lumber forward as another lazy MVNO for a while longer, but the Trump administration’s promise of a serious fourth competitor in wireless is effectively over:

“With Dish Network owner EchoStar selling $23 billion in valuable spectrum to AT&T, any pretense that the TV provider will become a serious wireless competitor is dead. But the project was always doomed to fail, and despite plenty of assurances by the Trump administration and other companies involved, the very obvious writing was always on the wall..”

Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb plan to try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they’d pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out of vibes and twine. As I noted back in 2019, the entire gambit was doomed to failure for a long list of reasons.

Dish never had any real experience building wireless networks. The Trump administration had no real interest in overseeing companies or fostering competition (its “antitrust enforcer” at the time used his personal phone to help the companies dodge regulatory scrutiny). AT&T and Verizon wanted the spectrum Dish was hoarding, and nobody in wireless really wanted to have to seriously compete on price.

Fast forward to 2025 and Dish’s wireless ambitions have died, right on schedule. The Dish 5G network was already an embarrassing joke, with limited phone selection and footprint. But the project effectively ended last week with the news that Dish would be forced to sell $23 billion in valuable spectrum licenses to AT&T, after facing a bogus “investigation” by the Trump FCC (I wrote about the news over at The Verge).

It’s important to remember that the first Trump administration’s rubber stamping of the Sprint T-Mobile merger immediately resulted in more than 9,000 layoffs and less U.S. wireless price competition, precisely as most (objective) folks predicted.

That Dish would create a fourth wireless competitor to fix the damage caused by this deal’s approval was a long con born during the first Trump admin and now finalized by the second.

As part of its 2019 agreement, Dish agreed to adhere to certain wireless build out requirements monitored by the FCC. But it became very clear over the last few years that not only was Dish going to miss some of its targets, it was starting to run into financial problems and miss debt payments. So last year, hoping to maintain any hope of a 4th wireless carrier, the Biden FCC granted an extension.

But less than a year later, FCC boss Brendan Carr opened an investigation into Dish and its parent company Echostar to “ensure that the companies we regulate comply with the terms of
their federal spectrum licenses.” The move annoyed folks all across the political spectrum, from left wing consumer activists to right wing “free market” Libertarians, albeit for very different reasons.

Consumer groups tended to think (correctly, I believe) that Carr was abusing government power to redirect valuable spectrum to Trump allies like AT&T or Elon Musk (a recent lawsuit accuses Carr’s FCC of as much). More Libertarian-leaning folks were aghast that radical authoritarian zealots would bully a private company and force them to give up valuable property less than a year after striking an arrangement with the same agency.

But this was always how this was supposed to work.

Trump officials got media and policy cover for clearly harmful consolidation. Dish figured the worst-case scenario is that it would offload a half-built network and valuable spectrum after spending five years stringing regulators along and letting the spectrum value appreciate (it has some additional $30 billion in spectrum that analysts suspect will likely be sold off to other companies, likely including Elon Musk’s Starlink). Entrenched telecom giants wanted more valuable spectrum for themselves.

In the interim U.S. wireless competition took a major hit, resulting in some of the highest prices for wireless data in the developed world. Dish CEO Charlie Ergen walks off into the sunset with a giant bundle of cash. AT&T’s market power gets stronger. Consumers and healthy markets lose, a relatively small handful of rich assholes win. Same as it ever was, and not that hard to predict.

Filed Under: ajit pai, brendan carr, competition, consolidation, fcc, mergers, trump, wireless
Companies: dish network, echostar, sprint, t-mobil

DOJ Approves T-Mobile’s Latest Merger Despite Admitting It’s Terrible For Consumers And Competition

Wireless

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be “serious about antitrust,” and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You’d have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on insisting that fascists and authoritarians are not that different from folks like Lina Khan.

As it turns out, that was all bullshit. Trump’s second term has taken an absolute hatchet to federal regulatory autonomy via court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators. His “antitrust enforcers” make companies grovel for merger approval by promising to be more racist and sexist, or pledging to take a giant steaming dump on U.S. journalism and the First Amendment (waves at CBS).

There are still some actual populists buried within the Trump administration who might care about this stuff, but corruption ensures they have no actual power. For example, the Trump FCC and DOJ just rubber stamped T-Mobile’s $5 billion acquisition of most of U.S. Cellular, all-but guaranteeing the U.S. wireless industry gets even more consolidated, and less competitive.

Even the Trump DOJ’s approval statement clearly acknowledges that the added consolidation will be harmful:

“Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, a Trump nominee who was confirmed by the Senate in March, said in a 900-word statement that the deal and two related transactions “will consolidate yet more spectrum in the Big 3’s oligopoly, which controls more than 80 percent of the mobile wireless spectrum in the country.” She said the top three carriers—T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon—control more than 90 percent of the mobile subscriptions in the United States.”

You might recall that the appointment of Slater to the DOJ antitrust division was heralded as a super important sign that Trump was going to be serious about antitrust, according to statements made by guys like Matt Stoller not six months ago:

“This is a very powerful statement that Trump wants to take on Big Tech,” wrote Matt Stoller of Trump’s pick of Slater in a post on X. Stoller, who runs an anti-monopoly podcast and is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project, added in his newsletter, “while it won’t be like Joe Biden’s, it seems [Trump] is going to continue some significant parts of the anti-monopoly revival.“

In this case, U.S. Cellular’s spectrum is being carved up between the three major U.S. wireless companies, with T-Mobile getting the lion’s share. Slater’s own DOJ statement clearly indicates the DOJ investigation into the deal found ample things to be worried about:

“The investigation nevertheless raised concerns about competition in the relevant markets for mobile wireless services and the availability of wireless spectrum needed to fuel competition and entry.”

Yet when push comes to shove, Slater either lacks the courage or the ability to actually stop additional mergers in U.S. telecom, which is the poster child for the very real-world harms of such mindless consolidation. As usual, the deal is dressed up as “necessary” to save the acquired company from irrelevance; the same lie the first Trump admin used to approve the T-Mobile Sprint merger.

The result of that deal was the U.S. wireless market immediately stopping all price competition among the remaining three major providers. There’s a lot of effort put into pretending that the U.S. wireless market is vibrant and competitive, but it only takes a trip overseas — where 5G is faster and prices are lower — to realize that the whole thing is an elaborate con that’s been normalized.

With the other hand, the Trump administration has lobotomized all regulatory authority, ensuring that it’s impossible to hold wireless giants accountable for ripping customers off or violating their privacy. This is the grand Trump 2.0 antitrust renaissance we were promised; much more of the same cronyism and corruption, while supposed antitrust pseudo-populist enablers stand around with a silly look on their face.

MAGA authoritarians aren’t real populists. They’re not serious about anything beyond their own wealth, power, and bigotry. Trump authoritarianism is the textbook definition of corruption, any deal with the regime is destined to go badly for people who live in the real world, and any official or policy expert who couldn’t see all of this coming a mile away should never be taken seriously again.

Filed Under: 5g, antitrust, authoritarian, competition, consolidation, doj, fcc, gail slater, matt stoller, mobile, telecom, wireless

Verizon Wants Trump To Kill Phone Unlocking. Consumer Groups Say That Will Drag U.S. Wireless Back To The Stone Age

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept

With the Trump administration openly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It’s asking the Trump FCC to roll back longstanding phone unlocking requirements, something consumer groups say will drag America back to the dark ages of cell phone enshittification.

Longtime BestNetTech readers probably recall that Verizon used to be utterly obnoxious when it came to absolutely everything about using your mobile phone. Just the clumsiest, lamest, ham-fisted bullshit.

For example, the company used to ban customers from using third-party apps (including basics like GPS), forcing you to use extremely shitty Verizon VCast alternatives that rarely worked. It also used to be absolutely horrendous when it came to unlocking phones, switching carriers, and using the device of your choice on the Verizon network.

The goal was always to limit your choice, hamper open competition, and dominate the app, hardware, and software markets, which Verizon couldn’t do organically or competently because, as a giant shitty government-pampered telecom monopoly, it was incapable of innovating. The result was just a parade of hot garbage, shitty apps, its own terrible app store, and a mountain of weird restrictions and fees.

Two things changed all that. One, back in 2008 when Verizon acquired spectrum with requirements that users be allowed to use the devices of their choice. And two, as part of merger conditions affixed to its 2021 acquisition of Tracfone. Thanks to those two events Verizon was dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new era of openness that was of huge benefit to the public.

Now, it’s much easier to use pretty much any app of your choice (within the admitted confines of sometimes erratic app store approval policies). It’s often trivial to bring the phone of your choice to the Verizon network, and to swap your phone and number whenever you’d like, usually with minimal penalty or annoying long-term contracts.

But the golden age of Trump corruption offers a chance for Verizon to roll back the clock. Verizon recently issued a filing with the FCC falsely claiming that they simply must be allowed to unfairly lock down mobile devices, because doing anything else harms competition and helps dastardly criminals:

“The Unlocking Rule applies only to particular providers—mainly Verizon—and distorts the marketplace in a critical US industry. The rule has resulted in unintended consequences that harm consumers, competition, and Verizon, while propping up international criminal organizations that profit from fraud, including device trafficking of subsidized devices from the United States“

Verizon, which quickly folded to Trump administration demands that it wasn’t sexist or racist enough in exchange for Frontier merger approval, has a long history of being completely full of shit on issues relating to consumer rights. And they’re particularly full of shit here.

Consumer group Public Knowledge filed a reply at the FCC debunking Verizon’s claims this week, noting that phone unlocking has been a massive boon to cell phone and app innovation, and that the company’s claims of rampant fraud are completely baseless:

“Fraud already exists across the industry regardless of lock duration. The only argument Verizon can make is that the risk of fraud is marginally greater because unlocked
devices are more valuable in the trafficking market. But it presents no data showing how much more profitable it is for traffickers to target Verizon over other providers, or that the delta in device value resulting from unlock status is large enough to drive targeting decisions.”

And while Verizon is right that U.S. unlocking requirements are inconsistent across carriers, that’s an argument for greater FCC oversight, not less. The Biden FCC was just finalizing a new proposal that would have required that all wireless providers unlock devices within 60 days of purchase. Everybody but major wireless carriers supported the change.

Not only is that effort dead now thanks to Trump’s election and Verizon lobbying, but Verizon’s pushing to eliminate all such requirements, driving progress violently backward. Verizon’s hoping that such rollbacks can be part of FCC boss Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” deregulatory bonanza, in which he’s destroying consumer protection standards under the pretense of government efficiency.

As Public Knowledge notes, Verizon’s interest here is entirely self-serving, and the impact would be terrible for the wireless market, customers, and the environment:

“Phone locking distorts market competition, raises switching costs, and contributes to
unnecessary e-waste. It impedes consumers’ ability to take full advantage of the devices they
already own, forces them to purchase new phones unnecessarily, and reduces their freedom to choose more affordable or higher-quality service options.”

It’s not clear if Verizon will get what it wants. Verizon lobbyists have won every other major consumer rights battle in the modern cell phone era (FCC autonomy, net neutrality, privacy oversight, broadband discrimination reforms) so it’s not any sort of stretch to believe they’ll win this fight as well. Still, you can always reach out to FCC boss Brendan Carr to see if he’s going to wimp out here as well.

Filed Under: 5g, consumers, corruption, deregulation, mobile, open, spectrum, unlocking, wireless

The Trump Org Sort Of Launches A New Half-Assed Wireless Phone Company, Trump Mobile

Overhype

from the lazy-garbage-for-rubes dept

Never one to miss an opportunity to exploit the presidency for a quick and tacky buck, the Trump administration is getting into the cell phone business.

Well, sort of: the Trump administration is launching a lazy new MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) that piggybacks on existing wireless networks with an added perk: a fake-gold $500 “T1” phone celebrating everyone’s favorite reality TV star turned incoherent authoritarian zealot.

The phone image appears to be a lazy Photoshop of a phone without a flash, suggesting this device is probably nowhere close to actually existing yet:

The new Trump Mobile service launches in September, and will offer a $47.45-per-month plan that includes unlimited talk, text and data, as well as roadside assistance and a “Telehealth and Pharmacy Benefit.” The Trump org claims the phone was “made in the USA,” which pretty much guarantees stories around six to eight months from now revealing the phones were all made in China (from Trump family press appearances there are already indications this is probably a lie).

The Verge notices that the press release for the gambit has a bunch of lazy errors, including RAM that’s described as storage, and the promise of a “5000mAh long life camera”; terminology that actually refers to battery capacity. The Trump Mobile terms of use say the network is really just a rebranding of another MAGA-friendly MVNO, Liberty Mobile, which runs on the (also Trump friendly) T-Mobile network.

These MVNOs have become a dime a dozen. Such networks (increasingly owned by celebrities), usually spend a few years pretending to be a serious pro-consumer venture, offering lower-cost cell phone plans with limited device options and a bunch of weird network restrictions and caveats buried in the fine print.

Once (if) the brand becomes valuable, it’s usually sold off to one of the major three carriers, who then steadily make the service shittier and shittier before sunsetting the brand. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There have been a lot of these half-assed MAGA MVNOs. Like Patriot Mobile, which you might recall was supposed to be a MAGA-friendly wireless phone service that claimed to be sticking it to AT&T — because AT&T briefly refused to carry right wing propaganda channel OAN (despite AT&T coming up with the idea for OAN and funding its creation!). Which network did the service run on? AT&T.

There’s occasionally an exception, but generally these kinds of MVNOs are a silly pump-and-dump gambit that helps prop up the idea that U.S. telecom is more competitive than it is, which of course makes it perfect for the Trump administration.

This one seems particularly lazy. Scratch at the surface, and Trump Mobile winds up being little more than a brand and a license agreement, according to the Trump Mobile website fine print:

“Trump Mobile, its products and services are not designed, developed, manufactured, distributed or sold by The Trump Organization or any of their respective affiliates or principals.”

From Trump high tops to Trump bibles, there’s no shortage of low-quality Trump cack attempting to exploit the presidency for a quick and lazy buck (the admin made $8 million in such agreements in 2024). But in between destroying the rule of law and teeing up race riots, Trump’s underlings have been busy significantly ramping up such deals in 2025, including a looming new line of Trump home goods.

In many ways Trump continues to be the perfect reflection of this country’s obsession with artifice. We built a giant golem out of trash, garbage and the shallowest, tackiest bullshit imaginable, and it’s now eating us alive. With any luck the entire violent experiment will be available for pennies on the shelves of your local Good Will before too long.

Filed Under: competition, mobile, telecom, wireless
Companies: liberty mobile, t-mobile, trump mobile, trump organization

Ted Cruz Proudly Makes Broadband Shittier And Homework Harder For U.S. School Kids

Broadband

from the making-life-harder-on-children dept

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule providing portable Wi-Fi hotspots to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online. The E-Rate budget was not increased.

Enter the Taco-Bell-fart-in-a-suit known as Ted Cruz, who last January introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) to kill the effort. Why? The effort upset companies like AT&T, which would obviously prefer it if the poor, rural families’ in question had to pay them for an expensive and unreliable rural wireless line. The CRA can be used to reverse rulings done within a set amount of time (usually 6 months).

So this week, that program quietly took another step toward destruction thanks to Ted Cruz’s idiotic efforts and the Republican-controlled Senate:

“The Senate approved a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to nullify the hotspot rule, which was issued by the Federal Communications Commission in July 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The program would be eliminated if the House version passes and President Trump signs the joint resolution of disapproval.”

This sort of thing (helping kids with shitty home broadband do their homework) used to not be partisan, and it’s another example of how radical the modern GOP has become. And how our broken media has normalized that radicalization in really harmful ways.

Again, the destruction of this program comes at the direct request of telecom giants which didn’t like government access eroding their wireless revenues. But the sort of ignorant justifications the GOP threw out to justify the vote were just utterly unhinged gibberish.

Cruz’s original press release announcing his plan teeters in and out of typical far right nonsense, including completely false claims that this free hotspot program somehow “censored kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints.” Again, just complete nonsense by absolute weirdos, and part of a much broader effort to make sure U.S. broadband remains shitty and expensive to the benefit of big telecom.

Filed Under: broadband, education, fcc, hotspots, ted cruz, telecom, wifi, wireless

After 5G Was Idiotically Overhyped And Fell Flat, 6G Appears To Be A Nervous Mess

Overhype

from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept

We’ve long noted how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.

But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. Both routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true (I enjoyed talking to one medical professional who basically laughed in my face about the cancer claim).

When 5G did arrive, it didn’t even live up to its basic promise, really. U.S. implementations were decidedly slower, spottier, and way more expensive than many overseas networks, thanks to the usual industry consolidation and U.S. regulatory fecklessness. The end result: wireless carriers associated a promising but not world-changing technological improvement with hype and bluster in the mind of consumers.

Telecoms have tried to goose interest and revenues by pretending that AI changes the equation somehow, but it hasn’t worked. Some telecoms have learned absolutely nothing from any of this and have charged face first into overhyping the sixth generation of wireless (6G), despite the fact it’s still in development.

Ericsson, for example, for a while there tried to proclaim 6G will create an “Internet of the senses” allowing consumers to “digitally transport themselves” all over the world (their rhetoric has quieted down over the last year or so). Samsung insists 6G will create “hyper connected AI experiences,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

With economic challenges afoot, many telecom execs are now running the other direction of 6G, annoyed that they couldn’t overbill customers for a modest evolution in connection quality and their 5G hype didn’t work. But there does seem to be growing caution, and some some fleeting awareness that they need to approach 6G more carefully as a modest evolution instead of a revolution:

“Ericsson, notably, did not even bother referring to 6G at its pre-MWC event in London last week. Much like its customers, the Swedish vendor is desperate to earn money from its 5G investments before it stakes a big sum on 6G. The latest message from Börje Ekholm, its boss throughout the 5G era, is that 6G, far from being a “new type of generation,” will appear in 2030 or so as an “evolution of 5G.” In other words, you won’t reach 6G without investing in 5G first.”

If you recall, people talked endlessly about how we needed to give telecom giants everything they wanted (merger approvals, less oversight, more subsidies) because we were in a “race to 5G” with China. None of those folks mentioned that China generally won that race (yes, state-owned infrastructure didn’t make for a fair fight) offering faster, much cheaper 5G.

For a while there, there was an effort to get all U.S. wireless on one unified standard. But with increasing international hostilities and less U.S. government coherence, there are growing concerns that 6G could actually split into two completely different 6G standards in use by the U.S. and China. On the plus side, the fractured disagreements on what 6G should look like means at the very least, we’ll be spared the same kind of mindless hype that plagued 5G. Maybe.

Filed Under: 5g, 6g, ai, china, hype, race to 5g, telecom, wireless

Ted Cruz Blocks FCC Plan To Bring Mobile Wi-Fi To School Kids For A Very Very Stupid Reason

Wireless

from the taco-bell-fart-in-a-suit dept

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online. The E-Rate budget was not increased.

Enter the Taco-Bell-fart-in-a-suit known as Ted Cruz, who has introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) that would eliminate the FCC’s rule. Why? The effort likely upset companies like AT&T, which would obviously prefer it if the poor families’ in question had to pay them for an expensive wireless line. The CRA can be used to reverse rulings done within a set amount of time (usually 6 months).

Cruz’s press release announcing his change teeters in and out of typical far right weird stuff, including false claims that the kids using these services are “unmonitored” (in most states these options come with parental controls and monitoring). But this was the fun bit:

“The order also heightens the risk of censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints—a trend recently already seen in many districts.”

This idea that you must be exposed to MAGA race-baiting lies and bullshit to consider yourself well rounded has increasingly become a cornerstone of MAGA authoritarian ideology. The movement increasingly relies on propaganda to befuddle the public, because their actual policies (giving rich people tax breaks, letting corporations mercilessly fuck people over) aren’t all that popular.

The “proof” that Cruz points to is the recent kerfuffles surrounding NewsGuard, the company that tries to rate news organizations according to partisan and reliability bias. Trumplings are mad because NewGuard sometimes points out that right wing propaganda isn’t reliable or factual (though it has a long history of sometimes giving high marks to that very same right wing propaganda).

NewsGuard apparently partnered with The American Federation of Teachers to allow members to get the NewsGuard browser extension for free, but which has nothing to do with WiFi in schools, or any monitoring or blocking. Still, this agreement to offer free access to the browser extension seems to be causing Cruz to apparently suffer some sort of cognitive embolism.*

*Updated this paragraph to clarify NewsGuard’s partnership with AFT which is even less directly involved with school WiFi (i.e., not at all) than we originally reported. We regret the error of thinking that even Cruz’s ridiculous justification had a least some basis in truth.

This is all very very stupid for many reasons. One being that NewsGuard doesn’t even do that good of a job criticizing right wing bullshit and propaganda pretending to be real news. The other being that MAGA knobs keep trying to claim that any effort to call them on their bullshit is somehow “censorship.” It’s all part of an exhausting victimization complex that’s getting very, very old.

Again, some local telecom lobbyist very likely got Republicans to try and kill the measure thinking it hurts local wireless revenues. Cruz and other Republican sponsors of this effort quickly got to work dressing it up with some weird “we’re being censored” bullshit to distract everybody from their corruption. Now kids can’t do their homework. Typical MAGA stuff. Hooray for “populism.”

Filed Under: broadband, e-rate, fcc, schools, ted cruz, wifi, wireless

AT&T Pouts, Pulls Home 5G Service From NY State Over Law Requiring It Provide $15 To Poor People

Broadband

from the taking-my-ball-and-go-home dept

To be clear up front, AT&T is a predatory telecom monopolist. It works tirelessly to lobby (and sometimes bribe) government for favorable treatment as it works tirelessly to undermine competition and eliminate state and federal oversight. It then miraculously exploits that lack of competition and oversight in the form of shoddy, sluggish, and very expensive service,

Should anybody in government then attempt to do absolutely anything about this problem, they’re then framed as radical extremists looking to kill “free market innovation.”

Case in point: the telecommuting and home education booms during peak COVID lockdowns demonstrated to everybody (once again) that U.S. broadband is overpriced and generally shitty. In response, New York in 2021 passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15.

It’s not a big ask. That kind of bandwidth is incredibly inexpensive to provision. But big ISPs like AT&T immediately sued. Telecoms hoped the case would wind its way to the Supreme Court where a MAGA-heavy judgeship would reverse the law. But the Supreme Court (too busy making presidents kings) recently declined to hear the case, allowing the law to go into effect.

I’m not entirely sure New York State (which I’m sure is quite busy with all manner of chaos under Trump 2.0) will even bother to enforce it. Actually holding big telecom accountable historically hasn’t been the U.S.’ strong suit. But in response AT&T has decided to pout like a full diapered toddler, and pull the company’s home 5G service out of New York State entirely.

AT&T’s home 5G “Internet Air” service is generally more affordable than the company’s fiber or traditional wireless offerings, because AT&T is trying to leverage 5G to make inroads against traditional cable companies. Once they’ve grabbed a bigger market share, they’ll ultimately get back to steadily raising rates on that service as well. Worth noting: FCC broadband maps (which tend to overstate coverage) suggest AT&T’s home 5G service already isn’t available across the majority of New York State.

In a statement, AT&T falsely claims that being forced to make broadband affordable to a small segment of poor people makes doing business in the state impossible:

“While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable internet service to customers across the country, New York’s broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state.”

Again, providing 25 Mbps broadband in the multi-gigabit era costs telecoms very little to actually provide. And this is all assuming New York State actually enforces the law, which isn’t clear.

Since AT&T couldn’t get the MAGA Supreme Court to kill New York State’s law, they’re pulling this little stunt to try and scare other states away from following NY’s lead. Do anything about our predatory pricing, AT&T warns, and we’ll make your state even less competitive.

Its a threat that will probably work. This is a familiar pattern in the U.S. Big telecom works overtime to monopolize broadband access and kill government oversight, resulting in high prices and muted competition. Somebody (usually Democrats) comes along proposing a band aid fix, and it’s immediately portrayed as radical extremism in a bid to scuttle it. Usually, telecom wins these fights.

Ultimately, most of the efforts to fix U.S. telecom are somewhat performative band aids. Neither state nor federal policymakers have the spine to go after the heart of the problem: consolidated monopoly power.

It’s worth noting that telecoms are about to get a whopping $42.5 BILLION in taxpayer subsidies courtesy of the 2021 infrastructure bill. And despite the fact these networks are taxpayer subsidized, AT&T and friends are also fighting tooth and nail against requirements they make these services actually affordable. Republicans also recently killed a COVID-era law providing a $30 broadband discount to poor Americans.

There’s a sustained effort to ensure telecoms can rip you off without pesky regulatory intervention. This is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

Filed Under: 5g, affordability, broadband, low income, new york state, satellite, wireless
Companies: at&t

Telecoms Glom Onto ‘AI’ Hype Cycle In A Fruitless Bid To Make 5G Seem Interesting

Overhype

from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept

We’ve noted for several years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution.

But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. Both routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true (I enjoyed talking to one medical professional who basically laughed in my face about the cancer claim).

When 5G did arrive, it didn’t even live up to its basic promise, really. U.S. implementations were decidedly slower, spottier, and more expensive than many overseas networks, thanks to the usual industry consolidation and U.S. regulatory fecklessness. The end result: wireless carriers associated a promising but not world-changing technological improvement with hype and bluster in the mind of consumers.

With the ink barely dry on the disappointment, telecom providers are now trying to suggest that “AI” (read: language learning models and machine learning) is just the ticket to “rescue” 5G from irrelevance in dramatic fashion. Verizon, for example, has struck a new partnership with NVIDIA it claims will supercharge excitement over 5G and stalled telecom edge computing efforts all at once:

“Our ongoing investment in our network infrastructure means we’re uniquely positioned to deliver these powerful AI services at scale, driving the digital transformation and fueling the future growth of businesses worldwide.”

Telecom analysts have noted that deploying some additional AI compute resources in the radio network (AI-RAN) might bring about some efficiency improvements, but just like 5G itself it’s more iterative than transformative. As always, innovation-stifled telecoms want to be seen as innovative, key players in the AI and edge computing markets, but they’re usually not, notes Dean Bubley:

“Telcos have demonstrated only a minimal role in edge computing services, either as localised low-latency cloud computing suppliers, or even in terms of just offering colocation space in exchanges, or mobile towers / aggregation sites.”

AT&T’s tried similar things, like this 2023 announcement of a partnership with NVDIA the companies promised would “supercharge operations,” “enhance experiences for both our employees and customers,” and “build, customize and deploy interactive avatars that see, perceive, intelligently converse and provide recommendations to enhance the customer service experience.”

In the same announcement, AT&T pat itself on the back for the company’s climate change and energy efficiency initiatives, ignoring (or trying to pre-empt criticism of) the massive power costs of AI.

The press coverage of these announcements always winds up rather bubbly and unskepctical. AT&T, it should be noted, continues to have some of the worst customer service ratings of any company or industry in America, which is no small feat when you consider that health insurance, medical care, and airlines exist. U.S. 5G is still among the slowest in all developed nations.

Telecoms operate in a market that doesn’t get much hype or press attention in the “Big Tech,” crypto, and AI era. In part because network management isn’t all that sexy or hugely profitable. But also because they largely operate in minimally competitive fields rife with regulatory capture where they’re not really incentivized to truly innovate.

So to drive some market and press interest they’ll desperately try to offer “me too” -esque services and shallowly jump on board of hype trains to latch on to some of the money in other fields they’re envious of (it’s really how the net neutrality fight started after AT&T declared it would double dip on Google way back in 2002).

South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom, for example, was all about the Metaverse when it was the hyped new hot thing. Now it’s pivoting seamlessly pivoted to trying to pretend it’s a cutting edge AI company. Once the AI hype dies down some they’re inevitably glom on to some other technology they’ll pretend they’re at the cutting edge of. It’s just how this pattern goes.

Which wouldn’t be quite so bad for telecoms here in the States if their core competencies weren’t so shaky, with U.S. broadband and wireless still some of the spottiest, slowest and expensive in the developed world, with shaky customer service to match. You hear endless chatter about technological innovations in telecom, but the actual consumer experience always winds up a yard short.

Filed Under: 5g, ai, crypto, edge compute, hype, networking, telecom
Companies: at&t, nvidia, sk telecom, verizon