US Congress has finally acted on the scourge of robocalls, with the House of Representative passing the TRACED Act on Wednesday morning by 417 votes to 3 (with 11 not voting). Senators earlier passed the linked Senate Bill 151, meaning both halves of Congress have approved the anti-robocall law. The legislation will now head …

America's broadband watchdog has told telcos they cannot use government subsidies to buy any more Huawei or ZTE equipment. The FCC is also mulling extending this ultimatum to include the continued use of the Chinese manufacturers' gear, meaning cellular and internet providers will have to replace their installed Huawei and ZTE …

The shares of satellite operators continued to plummet today after it became clear that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was going to seize valuable spectrum off them and resell it to mobile phone companies. On Monday, FCC chair Ajit Pai tweeted that he was going to back a public auction of the so-called C-Band …

It’s been 18 months since it emerged that US mobile companies were selling the location data to their tens of millions of users with little or no oversight, and Congress wants to know what the hell the FCC is doing about it. In a letter sent on Friday, all Democratic members of the House of Representatives’ Energy and Commerce …

AnalysisThe FCC today ushered in a new era of reduced competition in America's mobile market by approving a merger between the third and fourth largest operators, T-Mobile US and Sprint. Exhausted over having to choose between different mobile operators, folks in the Land of the Free will now only have to pick one of three: AT&T, …

Ajit Pai, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), has devised a two-part scheme to erase Chinese hardware from American telecoms networks. Firstly under the proposal, telcos would be forbidden from using any money from Universal Service Funds (USF) – a system of telco subsidies and fees overseen by the FCC …

CommentOne of the key arguments behind the Federal Communications Commission's decision to repeal net neutrality was the number of supportive emails it had received for its proposals. But an investigation has shown that a huge number of these were faked by lobbyists. What's more, the company responsible – LCX Digital – used a dataset …

The Washington DC appeals court has upheld the decision by federal regulator FCC to reverse net neutrality rules but said it does not have the right to stop US states from adopting their own rules. The mixed decision [PDF], released on Tuesday morning, has provoked a familiar response, with both sides claiming victory while …

Three ISPs will be fined $25,000 apiece by America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, for interfering with weather signals in Puerto Rico. Boom Solutions, Integra Wireless, and WinPR were all found to be using devices for their point-to-point broadband that were “misconfigured,” according to the regulator this week. This caused …

The Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have pushed back against US President Trump's proposal to put them in charge of policing social media firms he claims are biased against right-wingers. The draft executive order, titled "Protecting Americans from Online Censorship", aims to restrict the ability …

A handful of bad network packets triggered a massive chain reaction that crippled the entire network of US telco CenturyLink for roughly a day and a half. This is according to the FCC's official probe [PDF] into the December 2018 super-outage, during which CenturyLink's broadband internet and VoIP services fell over and stayed …

Uncle Sam is testing a system that uses high-altitude balloons to conduct surveillance over American soil. Government contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation – the aerospace company, not the brewery – has released balloons that will drift over a large area in the United States' Midwest, and form a network capable of monitoring …

Uncle Sam's legal eagles have cleared Sprint and T-Mobile US to go ahead with a $26bn merger the two cellular networks have been planning for years. The US Dept of Justice on Friday said it, along with five state attorneys general, has agreed to a settlement package with the two telcos that will allow them to ultimately clear …

CommentAmerican internet users are, seemingly, getting a quarter of the internet speed they are paying for. That's the upshot of yet another survey, this time in the US state of Georgia, that demonstrates that American consumers are being institutionally lied to about their broadband. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution hired a data …

AnalysisAmerica's communications watchdog, the FCC, has come good on its promise to boost broadband adoption through competition by… blocking a law that ensures broadband competition. This week, the federal regulator's triumvirate of Republican commissioners, led by the chairman Ajit Pai, actively voted down a city ordinance …

Special reportA growing inter-agency row over America's use of particular radio frequency bands for 5G phones has burst into the open – with a senior US Department of Commerce adviser fingered as the main source of problems. In a letter [PDF] to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross this week, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) broke an unwritten …

A telecoms CEO and one-time adviser to FCC boss Ajit Pai will spend as much as the next half-decade behind bars after being convicted of wire fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft. Judge Edgardo Ramos, of the US federal district court of Manhattan, this month handed down the 60-month sentence to Elizabeth Pierce …

AnalysisThe weather forecasters responsible for letting millions knowing about weather patterns, including hurricanes and tornadoes, have warned yet again that plans to auction off radio spectrum for 5G mobile networks could have a dangerous impact on their efforts. The American Geophysical Union (AGU), American Meteorological Society …