Skip to main content

White House: Broadband is now a ‘core utility’ for everyone

2016 state of the union comes to amazon video president obama
CreativeCommons
Broadband is now considered a “core utility” by the White House and is just as essential as sewer, water, and electricity infrastructure.

A Monday report from the White House said that while innovation in broadband speed has been plentiful in the U.S., income and geography remain major barriers for widespread access.

Recommended Videos

“Broadband has steadily shifted from an optional amenity to a core utility for households, businesses, and community institutions,” the report said. However, equal access to the Internet is still not as strong as the Administration would hope. A Pew study from July, for example, found that about 15 percent of American adults aren’t using the Internet. Federal programs are not fully responding to this, the report added.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Obama has celebrated his administration’s efforts to get people online, claiming that since he took office over 45 million more people have gotten online, but there’s still much more work to do. This week’s report calls for a greater governmentwide effort to improve broadband availability and accessibility across the country.

The report recommends expanding more federal programs to support broadband investments and improvements on data collection and research into broadband.

To accomplish this, the White House has set out its strategy, which includes modernizing federal programs like the Department of Agriculture’s community facilities program to bring broadband to health clinics and recreation centers; the creation of an online inventory of data on federal assets to increase the pace and quality of broadband deployments to remote areas; streamlining the applications for programs and broadband permitting processes to increase competition; and creating a new Web portal for communities to access information on broadband funding and loan programs.

The report further recommends that the U.S. promote “dig once” programs for the laying of fiber cables and reducing the costs of roadwork. It will also implement outreach programs to Native American tribal lands to improve broadband connectivity in these areas.

The report says it will aim to carry out these changes within the next two years.

Jonathan Keane
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jonathan is a freelance technology journalist living in Dublin, Ireland. He's previously written for publications and sites…
Apple eyes AI push on the Vision Pro. What it needs is a health pivot
A man wears an Apple Vision Pro headset.

Apple’s ambitions in the immersive world of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) are off to a rough start. The $3,500 Vision Pro failed to kick off a market storm. Then came reports of Apple cancelling its AR smart glasses project.

The company, however, is not done yet. As per Bloomberg, Apple is bringing its suite of AI tools called Apple Intelligence to the visionOS platform. That means AI tricks such as Writing Tools, Genmoji, and Image Playground are coming to the headset.

Read more
Apple’s upcoming Studio Display could mean worrying news for pro users
A person uses an Apple Mac Pro alongside three monitors and an editing console in a darkened room.

Just a few days ago, we found out that Apple is working on a new Studio Display with a mini-LED screen. Now, that idea seems to be confirmed, with highly accurate Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman stating that this monitor should launch “by 2026.”

The Studio Display first saw the light of day in 2022, meaning there’s been a lengthy wait for updates. But that delay just highlights the problems with an even older Apple monitor: 2019’s Pro Display XDR.

Read more
Nvidia RTX 5080 vs. RTX 4080 Super
Fans on the RTX 5080.

The RTX 5080 didn't blow us away in our testing, but there's no denying that it's the second fast graphics card in the world, behind Nvidia's ludicrously-priced RTX 5090 halo card. Still, if you are sitting on a last-generation RTX 4080 Super, or found one at a good price second hand and are weighing up the pros and cons, it's useful to know how these cards compare.

So, let's take a look at the RTX 5080 and RTX 4080 Super, to see how the measure up.

Read more