The Federal Communications Commission's plan for spurring 5G wireless deployment will prevent city and town governments from charging carriers about $2 billion worth of fees. The FCC proposal, to be voted on at its meeting on September 26, limits the amount that local governments may charge carriers for placing 5G equipment such as small cells on poles, traffic lights, and other government property in public rights-of-way.

Reports today show that a DC District Court judge has ordered the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to disclose previously-unreleased information that will assist the public in understanding how millions of fake comments were submitted to the FCC using stolen names and addresses during the agency’s 2017 proceeding to repeal net neutrality.

A report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has confirmed what others have reported for years: that official data on internet access across the country greatly over estimates availability and competition. The report [PDF] is focused specifically on tribal lands – small semi-autonomous areas of the United States governed by indigenous tribes – but its conclusions are directly applicable to the rest of the country.

Have you ever noticed web content performing poorly out of the blue? Video footage becomes blurry. Web pages take longer to load. If so, your internet service provider might be slowing down your data on purpose. It’s known as “throttling,” and it’s a way for a provider to ease congested network traffic. But when one type of network traffic—say, video streaming—is throttled more than another, this is called differentiation. And according to Dave Choffnes, assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern, differentiation is also “what most people would refer to as a net neutrality violation.”

After months of grueling committee proceedings, the California State Assembly on Thursday passed Senate Bill 822, all but ensuring that residents will soon enjoy the strongest net neutrality protections in the country. “Today’s vote is a huge win for Californians everywhere,” State Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s principal author, told Gizmodo. Having been amended considerably, S.B. 822 will now return to the Senate, where it is expected to pass for a second time before being sent to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for his signature or veto.

California’s legislature has approved a bill being called the strongest net neutrality law in the US. The bill would ban internet providers from blocking and throttling legal content and prioritizing some sites and services over others. It would apply these restrictions to both home and mobile connections.

Last year’s FCC decision to repeal net neutrality was arguably the most unpopular tech policy decision in the history of the modern internet. The repeal not only resulted in an unprecedented public backlash, but prompted numerous states to immediately begin exploring new state-level alternatives in the wake of the FCC’s retreat. Now, instead of one fight on the federal level, telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast face countless state-level efforts to keep their monopoly power in check.

We’ve repeatedly tried to make it clear that while everybody tends to focus on the death of net neutrality itself, the Pai FCC’s “Restoring Internet Freedom” order killing net neutrality had a farbroader impact than just killing net neutrality rules. As part of the repeal, Comcast, Verizon and AT&T also convinced FCC boss Ajit Pai to effectively neuter FCC authority over ISPs entirely, making it harder for the agency to hold giant ISPs accountable on a wide variety of issues ranging from privacy to transparency (the recent fire fighter kerfuffle being a prime example).

After a hearing that stripped California’s gold standard net neutrality bill of much of its protections, California legislators have negotiated new amendments that restore the vast majority of those protections to the bill. The big ISPs and their money did not defeat the voices of the many, many people who want and need a free and open Internet.

Villagers who could not download films because of slow broadband speeds take matters into their own hands.

We dismiss claims about mobiles being bad for our health – but is that because studies showing a link to cancer have been cast into doubt by the industry? On 28 March this year, the scientific peer review of a landmark United States government study concluded that there is “clear evidence” that radiation from mobile phones causes cancer, specifically, a heart tissue cancer in rats that is too rare to be explained as random occurrence.

Congress may soon vote on a new bill that would set net neutrality down as a matter of law rather than a set of rules to be changed every few years by the FCC. The “21st Century Internet Act,” introduced by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), would ban blocking, throttling, paid prioritization, and eliminates all questions of jurisdiction. The bill, announced online and at an event in Washington, DC today, would modify the Communications Act of 1934 (greatly built upon by the 1996 Telecommunications Act) and add a new “Title VIII” full of stipulations specific to internet providers.

Massachusetts is proposing a new bill that would name and shame internet service providers that ignore net neutrality or violate consumer privacy. In the wake of the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality, more than half the states in the union are considering their own, state-level net neutrality rules. Some states are tackling the problem with legislation (California, Oregon, Washington), while others (like Montana) are signing executive orders banning state agencies from doing business with ISPs that behave anti-competitively.

Comcast recently installed Wi-Fi equipment in public rights of way without permits in the city of Corvallis, Oregon. But instead of settling the matter locally, a cable lobby group that represents Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it should override municipal permitting processes such as the one in Corvallis. In doing so, the cable lobby group made "misleading and inaccurate" allegations about what actually happened in the Comcast/Corvallis dispute, according to city officials.

New York State voted to kick Charter Communications (which operates as Spectrum) out of the state for repeatedly failing to meet the modest conditions affixed to its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Charter Communications has long been the poster child for broadband industry dysfunction, with some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any industry in America.

Despite the ample hype over gigabit fiber and next-gen (5G) wireless, the reality is there are huge swaths of America where broadband competition is actually getting worse. In countless markets nationwide, phone companies like Frontier, Verizon, and CenturyLink have all but given up on upgrading aging DSL lines at any real scale, pivoting instead to business services or flinging video ads at Millennials. This apathy has gifted cable giants with a greater monopoly over broadband than ever in many areas, especially at faster speeds.

When John Oliver urged viewers of "Last Week Tonight" on May 7, 2017, to file net neutrality comments to the FCC's website, the system was soon overwhelmed. Traffic, in fact, increased by 3,116%. But the next day, the FCC issued a press release blaming the slowdown of the system on denial of service attacks -- or "deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC's comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host."

Political divisions may be fierce, but there is at least one issue that most Americans agree on: net neutrality. That’s the simple idea that internet service providers should not control or influence what we do online. Net neutrality rules ensure an equal playing field on the web for everyone, from the start-up to the tech giant.

Broadband providers have spent years lobbying against utility-style regulations that protect consumers from high prices and bad service. But now, broadband lobby groups are arguing that Internet service is similar to utilities such as electricity, gas distribution, roads, and water and sewer networks. In the providers' view, the essential nature of broadband doesn't require more regulation to protect consumers. Instead, they argue that broadband's utility-like status is reason for the government to give ISPs more money.

Verizon officials were contrite and apologetic during a California State Assembly committee hearing that was convened Friday to examine mobile Internet throttling experienced by firefighters during recent blazes. "We all make mistakes from time to time, the true measure of leadership is how soon we admit it, own it," Rudy Reyes told the Select Committee on Natural Disaster, Response, Recovery, and Rebuilding after reading from a statement that the company released hours earlier.

With all the headlines about the lack of broadband in rural America, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all small towns are stuck in the dark age of dial-up internet. The untold story of rural broadband is that over the past seven years, independent broadband networks have proliferated. Today, some of the fastest, most affordable internet in the country can be found in communities like Oskaloosa, Iowa (population:11,500); Powell, Wyoming (6,400); Red Wing, Minnesota (16,500); and Springfield, Vermont (9,000). According to a 2016 Federal Communications Commission data release, more than 1,100 rural fiber broadband...

Two proposals by California legislators would establish the strongest net neutrality rules in the country, preventing internet service providers doing business in the state from blocking, speeding up or slowing down websites and video streams, or charging websites for faster speeds.

For years, the key rationale given by broadband providers for implementing data caps was that it was the only way they could deal with "congestion." Of course, for years, independent researchers showed that this was bogus, and there was no data crunch coming. If you actually caught a technologist from a broadband provider, rather than a business person or lobbyist, they'd quietly admit that there was no congestion problem.

The nature of the telecommunications industry is obviously changing, and it's perhaps best illustrated with a look at these statistics that show the steep decline of the home landline. With a smartphone in your pocket that replaces a landline's capabilities and then some, it's no surprise to see that fewer and fewer people feel the need to hang on to an old-fashioned wire to ferry their communications back and forth.

Never before had an American telephone company employed this signal, says Roger Conklin, a telephone collector and historian. Until then, the leading telephone provider, the Bell System, relied on its corps of “hello girls” to connect lines at central switchboards so no dial tone was necessary.

Somali rebel group (and US-designated terrorist organization) Al Shabaab has reportedly banned the use of the Internet through mobile handsets and fiber optic cables throughout Somalia, giving telecommunications companies 15 days to comply with the order.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show extravaganza started off with a big announcement from AT&T: Customers of their wireless service can get around onerous caps on data usage if the company supplying, say, video, pays extra to AT&T for the privilege.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is nothing new, of course, but so far it's been regarded merely as an add-on to America's regular, analog-based copper and cellular voice networks - networks that are currently maintained as a matter of legal requirement. The FCC isn't necessarily such a stickler for tradition, however, as it is now encouraging phone networks to explore what would happen if VoIP replaced everything else.

Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband services to residents and would perhaps even outlaw public-private partnerships like the one that brought Google Fiber to Kansas City.

A scam that repeats itself in modified forms every few years is once again spreading throughout the United Sates. Don’t be a victim! Criminals target people simply by calling them. Intended victims receive a call on their phones from area code 473 which rings once and then disconnects, thereby arousing the call-recipient’s natural curiosity – “who just called me and from where?”

Robbo sez, "Dave Raphael of Dave's Blog has an interesting post about a conversation he recently had with Verizon support and discovered some uncomfortable - yet wholly unsurprising - truths about how Verizon is selectively limiting bandwidth to AWS services and adversely affecting the quality of Netflix. The open admission of this by Verizon support was unexpected - but the fact it is happening should be of no surprise to anyone but the ignorant and naive."

Move over, Republic Wireless: there's a new super-cheap cell phone carrier in town, although it has a huge catch. UppWireless, launching today in the U.S., offers 1GB of data plus unlimited calls and texts for only $15/month - but all of those calls and texts have to go through voice-over-IP apps.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, announced Wednesday that there would be new rules written to guarantee net neutrality. It’s a good thing any website can reach any person unimpeded by tolls, and it’s good that Wheeler still wants to make this possible. The Internet service providers will first work to dilute the new rules, of course, and then sue to overturn them.

A Northern California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree.

A rash of consumer-friendliness has broken out across the mobile data industry. Over the last year, the four major carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile — have cut prices and offered greater flexibility in how they sell their voice, text and broadband services. The industry could be on the verge of an all-out price war. Who is responsible for this blessed state of affairs?