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A ruling against the agency would likely derail FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's signature policy objectives, including open-Internet rules and the reform of an $8 billion rural telephone fund to provide broadband access in underserved parts of the country.

Consumer advocates argue the opposite. They say that previous FCC moves to ease regulation of broadband providers are now undermining the agency's attempts to address problems in the Internet age. "The same lobbyists who purport to want 'Broadband for America' are now telling the FCC that the agency should not engage in rulemaking that would achieve it," said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a public-interest group. "The commission must have the authority to promote universal access to affordable broadband."

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.

little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at home is as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third of the population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

the overwhelming majority of people who have Internet access have broadband.

“Now we’re at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-Internet-users.”

Verizon Communications announced May 13 it would sell about 4.8 million access lines to Frontier Communications Corp., including those in West Virginia, in a move that could lead to expanded broadband Internet access throughout the state.

A relatively large percentage of West Virginia doesn’t have access to broadband Internet services compared to many other states. State officials have pushed for greater broadband access for the state’s rural areas, and the economic stimulus package recently passed by Congress includes $7.2 billion for expanding broadband throughout the country.

Various studies have shown that the major reasons people do not have broadband are: the cost of Internet services and the cost of computers; not knowing how to use a computer; and not understanding why the Internet is relevant.

Last week, Mr. Genachowski outlined a plan to transform the $8 billion Universal Service Fund, most of which comes from consumers’ telephone bills nationwide, from subsidizing telephone service in underserved areas to expanding broadband access in those areas. He said Tuesday that some of the money from this fund could be used to help expand computer classes in libraries.

$2.7 million grant to provide universal access to broadband for a seven county region in central West Virginia

proposes to bring a wireless broadband system to Braxton, Gilmer, Lewis, Upshur, Randolph, Tucker, and Barbour counties.

“The Zone was created to forge a link between counties and higher education to provide tax incentives and advantages in locating the infrastructure needed to deploy wireless broadband,”

it turns out that some powerful Republicans in some agricultural states have supporters who have been poaching into the spectrum LightSquared owns and intends to use for a new nationwide broadband network.

the LightSquared initiative is a game changer. It builds on the satellite network already familiar to boaters and first responders to create a national wireless network with no dead zones -- if you have access to the American sky, you have access to your phone and the Internet.

While LightSquared now says it has fixed most of the GPS interference problems, including issues with "high precision" GPS devices , the GPS industry said "no way," and -- finding that perhaps the FCC was not buying the story -- spent millions to expand the debate into Congress and anywhere else it could find, like the Department of Defense.

The $7.2 billion plan in the last stimulus package was approved without significant debate. The program is intended to extend broadband service to what is known as the “middle mile,” which can connect to institutions like schools and hospitals, and the “last mile” — homes and businesses — that big Internet providers have bypassed because the expected revenue was too small to justify the big investments needed.

For some of the beneficiaries, the program will mean the difference between isolation and being connected to the rest of the world.

The stimulus law requires that all the money in the program be allocated by Sept. 30.

There's 376 pages of dense policy to dig through, so it's going to take some time to completely digest the plan.

By mid-2010, there will be 6.8 billion humans on this planet. According to United Nations estimates, there also will be five billion cellphone subscriptions.