Small rural and urban wireless carriers join forces to compete with AT&T and Verizon's near-duopoly

Urban and rural wireless carriers are banding together to take on the two largest carriers in the U.S., AT&T and Verizon. The Rural Cellular Association, a Washington lobbying group, is rebranding itself as the Competitive Carrier Association as more small urban, regional and smaller national carriers join the organization.

"AT&T and Verizon Wireless have gotten so big so fast," CEO Steven Berry told Marguerite Reardon of CNET. "The newly branded organization reflects the policy issues that have developed as the market has turned into a duopoly. Whether they are rural carriers or bigger nationwide carriers, they all share some of the same policy concerns around spectrum allocation, data roaming, and device interoperability."

AT&T and Verizon "have managed to gobble up nearly every tier-two carrier that had been operating," Reardon reports. The two companies control more than 70 percent of the wireless market, reporting a combined 216.5 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter of 2012, more than the combined total number of subscribers from Sprint, T-Mobile and every other competitive carrier in the U.S. Smaller carriers are primarily concerned about the control the big two have over the wireless spectrum, roaming arrangements and device interoperability. (Read more)

Effort is on to use 'white spaces' of TV channels to bring wireless broadband to rural colleges

A new partnership plans to bring wireless broadband to rural college communities over the unused spectrum between television channels that are known as "white spaces," reports Adam Masmanian of National Journal. It's called AIR.U, short for Advanced Internet Regions. “University communities will be able to significantly expand the coverage and capacity of high speed wireless communities, both on- and off-campus,” said Michael Calabrese of the New America Foundation, which is helping to lead the effort. The plan grew out of an effort led by former FCC official Blair Levin to bring super high-speed broadband to research universities. His project, called Gig.U, had attracted the interest of rural colleges that didn’t qualify to join.

Rural communities are seen as ideal for the use of white spaces for wireless broadband Internet connectivity, often called Super Wi-Fi, because they tend to have fewer licensed TV stations, and therefore more vacant spectrum in the white spaces. Further, the low frequency range of Super Wi-Fi means that a single base station can cover a radius of about 6 miles with high-speed broadband, according to Apurva Mody, Chair of the White Space Alliance.

The Federal Communications Commission authorized the use of unlicensed white space spectrum for broadband services and other applications, in September 2010. AIR.U hopes to have the first pilot networks up and running in the first quarter of 2013.

Rural schools struggle to bridge the digital divide

Rural schools have long been leaders in distance-learning and online education. "To offer a full slate of courses to their students, they’ve had to be. Some states, fearing a divide between rural and urban communities, have developed statewide initiatives to provide technology to rural schools," Sarah Butrymowicz writes in The Hechinger Report. Maine, she points out, gives every student a laptop, and Alabama requires all school districts "to offer advanced placement courses through distance-learning technology, where students video-conference with teachers. (Edison School in Yoder, Colo.; Butrymowicz photo)

In 2010, only 57 percent of rural households had broadband Internet access, compared to 72 percent in urban areas, according to a November 2011 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Teachers in rural settings don't require students to go online to complete assignments and have to be flexible about staying after school so students can work on the computers. “The Internet can give them library resources that they might otherwise not have,” said Aimee Howley, senior associate dean in the College of Education at Ohio University, who studies technology integration in rural schools. Technology can also be used for simulations of things, she said, that “you just can’t do on site."

For schools facing shrinking budgets and consolidation, technology could be rural schools’ saving grace, said Bob Wise, a former governor of West Virginia who now serves as president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., that has studied the challenges facing rural schools. “We’re encouraging every district to develop a systematic strategy for employing technology,” he said. “My guess is you will see a number of rural schools actually saved and renewed as learning centers.”