• Like AT&T and Verizon (see This Week in Telecom March 19 and April 2 editions), Sprint is also facing a shareholder vote on imposing net neutrality principles on its wireless network. Although stating that consumers are “well served by an open Internet,” Sprint opposes the proposal because it “would undermine Sprint’s ability to manage its network, ensure acceptable levels of performance for its customers, and develop new products and services.” The vote will take place May 15, 2012. Information on the proposal may be found here.
  • On April 11, 2012, Calix, Inc. released a report on rural broadband entitled the “Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report.” In the report, which studies data from October to December of 2011, Calix states that rural broadband is used most often for video streaming, composing 67 percent of downstream Internet traffic and 13 percent of upstream traffic in the studied networks. The report also finds that 5 percent of subscribers accounted for approximately 50 percent of Internet traffic. Calix plans to release an updated report every quarter. More information about the report may be found here.
  • On April 2, 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced April 30, 2012 as its target date to release the list of applications for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) which will specify who has applied for which gTLDs. The application window closes April 12, 2012. If ICANN receives an “overwhelming number of applications,” it may postpone publication of the list of strings. ICANN’s announcement is available here.
  • On April 4, 2012, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) requested comment on its proposal “to add 12 questions to the U.S. Census Bureau’s October 2012 Current Population Survey (CPS) in order to gather reliable data on broadband (also known as high-speed Internet) use by U.S. households.” The questions are intended to gauge progress on President Obama’s goal of universal, affordable broadband access for all Americans and to identify problem areas. Comments are due June 4, 2012. The Federal Register notice is available here.