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The Hollywood Reporter noted last week that "Serial" host Sarah Koenig will make two new seasons of the popular audio subscription story. The new seasons won't be sequels to the story of Adnan Syed's conviction for the Baltimore murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999, but "distinct new stories," "very different" from the first season. "Serial" was number one on iTunes for several weeks and won a Peabody Award in April 2015. Audio storytelling is having its moment with the "podcast" term that Apple sold the media being mentioned more then ever. New York non-commercial radio station WNYC expanding more in this area, and breaking its distribution ties with National Public Radio, Current reports. Instead, WNYC will self-distribute its radio shows "Radiolab" and "On the Media" starting Oct. 1. That's when it will also start self-distributing its new show with The New Yorker magazine. WNYC will just charge flat fees for "Radiolab" and "On the Media," and The New Yorker show will be free, at least at first.

Country Aircheck Weekly, a trade publication for country radio news, sparked a bit of controversy this week with an interview with music consultant Keith Hill in its May 26 edition. In one section of the short interview he says that country radio stations playing more than 20 percent female artists are going to lose ratings.

Finally, Hill cautions against playing too many females. And playing them back to back, he says, is a no-no. “If you want to make ratings in Country radio, take females out,” he asserts. “The reason is mainstream Country radio generates more quarter hours from female listeners at the rate of 70 to 75 percent, and women like male artists. I’m basing that not only on music tests from over the years, but more than 300 client radio stations. The expectation is we’re principally a male format with a smaller female component. I’ve got about 40 music databases in front of me and the percentage of females in the one with the most is 19 percent. Trust me, I play great female records and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

Country Aircheck Weekly's past reporting shows that 33 to 35 percent of the top 100 singles of the late 1990s were by female artists, but since then, that's dropped below 30 percent, falling to 18 percent last year. Martina McBride has been the most popular country musician to respond, writing on Facebook:

"Wow.....just wow. Just read this from a major country radio publication. How do you feel about this statement? I especially want to hear from the females. Do you not like to hear other women singing about what you are going through as women? I’m really curious. Because to me, country music is about relating. Someone relating to what you are really going through on a day to day basis in your life. Did you girls (core female listeners) know you were being “assessed” in this way? Is this how you really feel? Hmmm...."

Cyrus Farivar in ArsTechnica reports that the San Bernardino Sheriff has used a stingray cell tower impersonator hundreds of times without a warrant, "under questionable judicial authority." Wikipedia explains, "The StingRay is an IMSI-catcher (International Mobile Subscriber Identity), a controversial cellular phone surveillance device." The devices intercept thousands of calls within the vicinity of their use, and ArsTechnica reports that the template application it got from a public records request cites no legal authority for the wide sweeps. "This is astonishing because it suggests the absence of legal authorization (because if there were clear legal authorization you can bet the government would be citing it)," Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told ArsTechnica by e-mail. "Alternatively, it might suggest that the government just doesn’t care about legal authorization. Either interpretation is profoundly troubling," he said. The report also says the FBI non-disclosure agreement about the devices, "indicates that the agency will work with local prosecuting authority to dismiss cases rather than reveal information in court about stingrays." Many law enforcement officials attempt to keep the latest upgrades and capabilities of the devices secret. San Bernardino the 12th-most populous county in the United States, and the fifth-most populous in California. Earlier in the month, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors decided not to purchase of a cell-site simulator, despite a federal grant. "We were in negotiations with Harris, and we couldn't get them to agree to even the most basic criteria we have in terms of being responsive to public records requests," a county official there told Ars Technica. "After many hours of back and forth it became clear that they weren't going to consent to a contract in an attempt to keep everything secret and non-discoverable and that's not something we could live with as a public agency. The negotiations are going to be terminated and the grant money will go to other purposes." Read the full story at ArsTechnica.

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"Amateur Radio Newsline" correspondent Skeeter Nash reports that host Bill Pasternak is in hospital, stable in the ICU. The weekly news survey of amateur radio is suspended while Pasternak recovers. This is the second recent trip to the hospital for Pasternak, and last time the show staff covered for his absence. This time, though, the staff cannot cover the show alone and is appealing for new volunteers to come forward to produced the weekly ham radio show. The all-volunteer 501(c)(3) non-profit service is based in Santa Clarita, California USA, and was founded in 1977 by Pasternak, WA6ITF. Pasternak has created a "Young Ham of the Year Award" sponsored by Yaesu USA, CQ Publishing, and Heil Sound Ltd. Email newsline@arnewsline.org for more information about the show.

The New York Times and other outlets reported that Tue., May 26 Charter Communications will announce a $55 billion deal to buy Time Warner Cable, and a $10 billion takeover of Bright House Networks. Last month, Comcast's attempt to buy Time Warner fell apart after regulatory scrutiny at the Federal Communications Commission about the number one and two cable and internet companies in the country. Charter is is not as larger, but several regulatory agencies would still have to approve the deal. "The two acquisitions will approximately quadruple Charter’s customer base to about 24 million, compared with Comcast’s 27 million," the story says. Last year AT&T bought the satellite television operator DirecTV for $48.5 billion. “It does not look to be nearly as big an antitrust concern as the Comcast deal was,” Gene Kimmelman, the chief executive of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, and a former antitrust official at the Justice Department, told the paper about the Charter deal. “In this instance, you’re combining the number two company with a smaller player that can be a bit of a counterweight to Comcast.” See the full story in The New York Times.

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If you bought something at a RadioShack store in the last decade or so, you may have noticed the firm was always persistent about getting all customer's email and physical addresses, and other information. If you visited a RadioShack store, or its website in recent years, you may have come across the electronics store's privacy policy. “The information you give us is treated with discretion and respect,” says the RadioShack website. “We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list. From time to time, we may send you information from our company or from select, responsible companies that may join with RadioShack to bring you special offers.” But now that the company has gone under, all things must go. The bankrupt firm is attempting to unload social security numbers, emails, home addresses, and telephone numbers from 67 million customers. But, PC World reports, RadioShack made an agreement May 20 with the 38 U.S. states that were suing the electronics outlet because of the data handover. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that credit or debit card account numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth or phone numbers will still be transferred to General Wireless Operations, the winner of both of RadioShack's bankruptcy auctions. But if you bought something from RadioShack more than two years ago, your data is being dumped, and you need not worry. General Wireless will give more recent customers, PC World reports, "an opportunity to opt out from having their information transferred to General Wireless within one week from being served a notice." And General Wireless says it will in the future honor RadioShack's old policy of not selling its customers' data. New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called that a victory for consumers’ privacy, and said it could serve as a model for future bankruptcies.

Rail officials say, if not for budgetary shortfalls, technical hurdles, and bureaucratic rules, the Amtrak train crash in Philadelpia last week could have been avoided. Radio spectrum is something of a scarce commodity in the Northeasten Corridor, and all sorts of commercial interests have been fighting over the frequencies the railroad needs since 2008 when Congress ordered the positive train control (PTC) systems, which can detect an out-of-control, speeding train and automatically slow it down using radio waves. The New York Times reported that "officials say [a working PTC system] could have prevented the wreck." Amtrack, according to their website, was using the 900MHz frequency for train control, but found during installation of PTC in Michigan that 220MHz transmitted information more quickly, offered better coverage, and more room for growth. "Between 2010 and 2014, litigation and regulatory proceedings obstructed Amtrak’s attempts to purchase bandwidth on the open market," their website claims, saying they tried and failed to get access to the FCC’s inventory of unused spectrum. The New York Times story blames Congress saying, "lawmakers failed to provide the railroads access to the wireless frequencies required to make the system work, Amtrak was forced to negotiate for airwaves owned by private companies that are often used in mobile broadband." The FCC approved Amtrak’s application for the purchase of wireless spectrum from Skybridge Spectrum Foundation on March 5 this year, and Amtrak took title in April, 2015, just before the accident. "Provided the FCC’s requirements are met, we intend to complete the system on the NEC by the end of 2015 and meet the federally mandated requirement," Amtrak's website says. If the system had been operational earlier, “there wouldn’t have been this accident,” said Representative Robert A. Brady, Democrat of Pennsylvania in The New York Times.

David Oxenford at the Broadcast Law Blog reports that the Federal Communications Commission is accepting preliminary comments on a new low-power FM proposal. The idea, from REC Networks, would raise the maximum power for LPFM stations from 100 watts to 250 watts, to put them at equivalent power levels with FM translator stations. If made into policy, low-power FM station signals would have much better building penetration, and some other interference issues would be improved. The FCC has only so far announced they have received the proposal and are taking preliminary comments for 30 days. If there seems to be interest in the proposal, a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, would ge announced, with another round of public comments. REC's proposal would not just expand LPFM coverage, but roll some back. "It also suggests limiting what it calls “Foothills” LPFM stations – those that are located in areas where their coverage in certain directions is helped by terrain factors to go beyond what is normally predicted for such stations," Oxenford writes. Other parts of the proposal:
• Allowing minor moves up to 11.1 km for LP-100 stations and up to 14.1 km for LP-250 stations.
• Removing the contour overlap requirement for LPFM commonly-owned FM translators.
• Add additional protections for LPFM stations in respect to FM translators.
• Relief for the local programming requirement for LPFM stations on time share agreements.
Comments on REC’s proposal RM-11749 can be filed through June 15 at the FCC's website.

U.S. President Barack Obama apologized April 23 to the families of kidnapped aid workers Warren Weinstein (an American) and Giovanni Lo Porto (from Italy), both kidnapped aid workers, killed by a U.S. radio-controlled drone in attack somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border against terrorists there. “One of the things that sets America apart from many other nations,” Obama said, “one of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.” Most conservative estimates guess that the U.S. has accidentallly killed at least 1,250 other civilians in its “drone war,” and now a coalition of human and civil rights groups are asking the administration honor the families of those victims in a similar way. The ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Columbia Law’s Human Rights Clinic, Human Rights First, and other groups wrote, “We write to urge your administration to adopt the same approach to all other U.S. counterterrorism strikes in which civilians have been injured or killed—regardless of their nationalities. To that end, your administration should establish a systematic and transparent mechanism for post-strike investigations, which are made public, and provide appropriate redress to civilian victims.” South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham would take a different approach if he were president, he said in a speech May 18. "If I'm president of the United States and you're thinking about joining al-Qaida or ISIL—anybody thinking about that? I'm not gonna call a judge. I'm gonna call a drone and we're gonna kill you," he said. So a warning to journalists, sociologists, political scientists and other who might visit websites of sworn enemies of the United States -- a President Graham administration wants to unleash the drones, just like in Pakistan. In Congressional testimony last year, Pakistani Zubair Rehman described the sound of drones overhead.

Whether one considers Facebook a force for good or evil it is everywhere. In the first quarter of 2015, the social media site had 1.44 billion monthly active users. Now the company's "Connectivity Lab" is building infrared lasers, Earth-orbiting satellites, and a fleet of solar-powered, radio-contnrolled drones to deliver the internet to the most remote places on earth, Wired reports. Facebook wants to connect the two-thirds of the world’s population not yet online. “We realized there wasn’t one technology that could connect everyone,” said Yael Maguire, a former MIT quantum computing researcher. “We needed a set of technologies.” The company wants to get more people to use Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, so they can see more ads. In Europe, meanwhile, activist Max Schrems is heading up a Europe-wide lawsuit against Facebook, according to Ars Technica. The Belgian Privacy Commission told Reuters, "Facebook tramples on European and Belgian privacy laws. Facebook has shown itself particularly miserly in giving precise answers." The Commission suggests users employ privacy software when using Facebook, to stop it from tracking web site usage, sometimes even on computers where Facebook isn't even open. Facebook, it is said in the lawsuit, is guilty of:
• Invalid privacy policies
• Illegal collection and forwarding of user data
• Surveillance of users via “like buttons” or “apps”
• Participation in the NSA “PRISM” program
Stay tuned for the court ruling.

Paul Riismandel at Radio Survivor reports that Art Bell is returning to the airwaves this July, just not AM or FM. The 69-year-old radio star entertained conspiracy theorists for years, hosting "Coast to Coast AM" from 1988 to until 2003. Bell, who played "Eve of Destruction" and other anti-war songs on his pirate radio station at Amarillo Air Force Base during the Vietnam War, eventually was syndicated on more than 500 radio stations with 15 million listeners nightly during the 1990s. In 2003 George Noory took over the show, with Bell hosting on weekends only. After 2007, he's been off and on the radio several times, including a six-week stint on subscription-only satellite radio in 2013. On July 20 Bell will be live on "Midnight in the Desert," airing midnight to 3 a.m. Eastern Time on the internet station Dark Matter Radio, and simulcast on the Tennessee-based Christian shortwave station WTWW.

Nepal has been rocked by two devasting earthquakes, with major infrastructure destroyed, and the most mountainous landscape in the world making it difficult for relief or information to get delivered. The first quake, at 7.8-magnitude, killed 8,000 people, the second frightened the victims there, with many sleeping outdoors in its aftermath. With many phone lines down and electricity out, battery-operated radio receivers are the only link to the outside world in some towns and valleys. There were 263 operational community radio stations in Nepal when the earthquake struck; 20 were destroyed in the first earthquake according to Shivam Vij in Scroll.in. The World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) reports, "Our staff from the Asia Pacific office are on the ground and hard at work, in collaboration with the Association of Community Radio Broadcasters Nepal (ACORAB), assessing the status of community radios that have been damaged by the earthquake. Teams have been deployed in the field and are visiting some of the most severely impacted districts. More than a hundred radio stations in 30 districts have been affected and are in need of urgent help," the group wrote in an online appeal for help. AMARC is raising funds to repair studios and broadcasting equipment; repair or rebuild antennas, towers, power generation sources; buy computers and broadcasting equipment; and buy portable audio recorders and cameras for stations in Nepal. To help, one can click on http://www.amarc.org/?q=nepal. Next-door neighbor India isn't suffering from a natural disaster, but its community radio stations need help just the same. Mayank Jain at Scroll.in reports India only has 179 community radio stations instead of the 4,000 the government promised in 2007. While Nepal has 263 community radio stations, India has only 245 commercial radio stations in a much larger country. "More than 70 percent of [the] Indian population lives in villages and a vast majority of them have little to no connectivity to Internet, electricity, or telephone lines making radio the only feasible medium for mass communication," Jain writes. One radio organizer, Shubhranshu Choudhary, the founder of CGNet Swara, an organisation involved with setting up community radio and call centres to relay citizen news in Chhattisgarh says, "Community radio is a joke.... It’s not meant for communities but for the rich and powerful who funnily enough, don’t threaten the government, but common people do.”

The Federal Communications Commission has a $388 million proposed budget, up 13 million from this year's, and up nearly 30 million from two years ago. The new budget is the largest ever, and Wheeler explained why May 12 at a Senate Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee hearing about the FCC's budget. Wheeler is being criticized for spending too much and also not enough, as the proposal would close a number of FCC Field Offices and reduce by half the number of enforcement agents. The Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) sent Wheeler a letter May 12 saying, "It is SBE’s view that the draconian cuts proposed now will have a substantially adverse effect on compliance in virtually all radio services." Click here to hear a quote from Wheeler at the hearing.

May 12 is the Federal Communications Commission's deadline for public comments on a few large broadcasters’ proposal to legalize payola, pay-to-play "advertisements" for new music on the radio. Currently payola is legal -- record companies are allowed to pay radio stations to play certain songs as long as the radio station identifies immediately that the song was paid for by the record company. The big broadcasters from iHeartMedia (formely Clear Channel), Entercom, and Cumulus Media want to change the rules so that, eventually, a station would air a single announcement, probably very, very early in the morning, saying that some of the songs were paid for by a few companies. The broadcasters provided this example announcement:

“Some of the music [and/or] sports programming that you hear on this station is sponsored [or paid for] by Interscope, Sony, Universal Records, or the Washington Nationals. For additional information, please visit our website at http://www.WXYZ.com or contact the station at 12345 Main Street, Washington, DC 20036, info@wxyz.com, or 202-555-1234.”

Comments can be made at the FCC website under FCC Media Bureau docket #15-52.

Harry Cole at the Comm Law Blog reports that, though the Federal Communications Commission approved net netutrality in February and published the Report and Order last month, there are challenges from opponents, at the FCC and some U.S. Court of Appeals to be determined. First, petitions for review (filed with the courts) need to be filed by those opposed by June 12, and petitions for reconsideration have to be filed by May 13. As of May 9, Cole reports, the FCC’s ECFS system was not showing any petitions for reconsideration on file. In the courts, a number of appeals have already been filed against net neutrality, all jockeying for different courts. So far the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation pulled the D.C. Circuit ping pong ball out of the Official Lottery Drum, so the court that ruled against previous versions of net neutrality may be hearing the case again. There may be a second drawing, though, after 10 more petitions for review were filed. The FCC believes that the net neutrality appeal will eventually be heard in the D.C. Circuit. Cole writes, "Why would the FCC prefer D.C.? Perhaps because, even though the Commission’s net neutrality efforts did not fare well there the first two times, the FCC’s most recent “Open Internet” effort was ostensibly designed to follow directions implicit in the D.C. Circuit’s last net neutrality decision. The Commission may therefore be figuring that, if it can convince the D.C. Circuit that the FCC’s latest iteration tracks the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision closely enough, that may do the trick." So net neutrality remains the law of the land at least until the courts can decide where the lawsuits will play out. Read the full story in the Comm Law Blog.

Politico [dot] com is reporting a federal appeals court Thu., May 7, ruled the National Security Agency program to collect information on billions of telephone calls made or received is illegal. A three-judge panel from the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York unanimously ruled a law Congress passed permitting the collection of information relevant to terrorism investigations does not authorize the so-called "bulk collection" of phone records on the scale of the NSA program. The judges did not address whether the program violated the Constitution. The 2nd Circuit, which acted in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first appeals court to rule on the legality of the telephone metadata program. The program was first discovered in leaks from Edward Snowden in 2013. In a 97-page ruling, the court held that a provision of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, known as Section 215, cannot be interpreted to allow the bulk collection of domestic calling records. Section 215, and the Patriot Act run out June 1, and Congress is currently debating renewal or changes. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has advocating for renewing the program, while other senators want to curtail some NSA programs, The New York Times reports. Previously, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), the court that who hears arguments only from the government, interpreted Section 215 to allow the government wide latitude in the searches. Now, Congress, and the President, are forced to act on the issue.

Since the days of Thomas Edison, humans have made audio programs of variable lengths -- usually 28- or 58-minutes-long -- and listeners -- usually through radios -- have listened. Now, though, many people listen to audio programs through other, digital means, subscribing with an RSS feed, or purchasing the sounds from the iTunes store. The term "podcast," if one's short-term memory has failed, is a proprietary term for a piece of hardware that barely still exists. Still, the term was bandied about a lot in the past year with the popularity and media chatter about "Serial," the first program to reach five million streams or downloads in iTunes history. The Pew Research Center reports that in 2014 three new "podcast" networks were launched by public radio groups: Radiotopia by PRX, SoundWorks by PRI, and Infinite Guest by APM. Now The New Yorker and WNYC are working together to produce a new national radio show and podcast set to premiere in the fall. In 2015, a Pew Research study indicates, 17 percent of Americans listened to a podcast in the past month, up from 9 percent in 2008. But, on the other hand, only one-third of all Americans have ever listened to an entire "podcast," so we aren't talking about the penetration of television or radio yet. But now "podcasting" is being marketed to advertisers, through giant radio networks such as iHeartMedia. Mark Ramsey wrote that, "Last week, iHeartMedia launched its first 'SoundFront,' where they debuted a slate of new original programs that were widely misinterpreted by the media. For example, the headline in Ad Age read 'IHeartMedia Shows Off Original Podcasts at "Soundfront".' While that is technically accurate, what’s much more accurate is the deeper reality of iHeartMedia’s strategy which few outside iHeartMedia and their advertisers seem to understand.... It’s a platform strategy – as in, content across every platform. Every piece of content iHeartMedia creates will live in some form or another across all of its platforms, thus magnifying the reach and engagement for that content and also magnifying the opportunities for advertisers." So the typical internet story is playing out, as the DIY ethos of "podcasting" gets the throw-everything-at-it corporate approach.

The American Civil Liberties Union last week unveiled the California version of their app that lets users record interactions with the police and automatically upload them to the ACLU's servers. The civil rights group has released similar apps in New York, New Jersey, Mississippi, Oregon, Nebraska, and Missouri. The reason they are released on a state-by-state basis, Tim Cushing reports at Techdirt, is to align with slightly-different local laws. The “Mobile Justice CA" app is for iPhones or Android, and is in English and Spanish. It does just a few important things:
• When the large red “Record” button in the middle of the screen is pressed, video is recorded on the phone and a copy transmitted simultaneously to the ACLU server.
• When the “stop” button is pressed, a “Report” screen appears, where one can type in details.
The video and the information are reviewed by ACLU staff members, with the reports treated as confidential and privileged legal communications. The videos, though, may be shared with the news media, community organizations, or the general public.

Karl Bode of Techdirt tweeted last week:

So in the last two years AT&T has been fined for defrauding the IP Relay system (which helps the deaf)......fined for profiting handsomely off of scamming and cramming, and for actually hiding those practices......sued for deceptive throttling of unlimited data customers...And now for effectively defrauding the Lifeline program, designed to help the poor.

Bode explained more in Techdirt about AT&T's recent missteps. On April 29, the FCC announced that AT&T and its former subsidiary Southern New England Telephone (SNET) will pay $10.9 million in penalties for overbilling the FCC’s Lifeline program, a program which helps ensure low income consumers have access to a phone line. But AT&T has several other recent bouts with regulators. Last year the Federal Trade Commission sued AT&T for slowing down customr data speeds after they've used up a certain amount of data in a single month. ‘Unlimited’ means unlimited," said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez at the time. Also last year, the FTC fined the company $105 million because AT&T Mobility, LLC allegedly charged consumers’ mobile phone bills for third-party subscriptions or services that they never ordered or authorized. In 2012 the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against AT&T for bilking taxpayers out of millions of dollars by abusing IP Relay subsidies. An IP Relay allows the hearing impaired to send text-based messages to phone numbers, which are then read by operators. Since 2004, scammers realized that this was an opportunity to make almost totally anonymous calls paid for by taxpayers. The FCC pays telcos $1.50 per minute on IP Relay calls. Bode says companies have started grumbling that Travis LeBlanc, Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau, "is being too hard on industry," with a major profile in The National Journal. Brendan Sasso notes there that LeBlanc has also had T-Mobile pay $90 million for placing charges on consumers bills, that Marriott Hotels paid $600,000 for blocking its customers' Wi-Fi hotspots, and CenturyLink and Verizon were fined millions for a software glitch that blocked 911 calls for six hours. Sasso writes:

"Two telecom-industry advocates complained that LeBlanc has been successful at grabbing headlines, but less effective at actually curbing bad behavior. By not being lenient on companies that self-report violations, he is discouraging future companies from coming forward, they said. "The FCC's new approach will discourage cooperation and self-disclosure, and it's going to force regulatees to beef up on litigation instead of compliance with the rules," one industry lobbyist said. "Ultimately, that's a poor use of resources for taxpayers, and it will lead to a worse result for consumers."

John Eggerton in Broadcasting & Cable reports the FCC last week announced $1.7 billion in subsidies to the largest telecom providers in the U.S., hoping to bring broadband to 8.5 million Americans in rural locations. "The offer to the rural operations of the largest telecom providers — known as price cap carriers — would provide ongoing support for networks that can deliver broadband at speeds of at least 10 Mbps for downloads and 1 Mbps uploads to nearly nine million rural residents nationwide," said the FCC's press release about the subsidies. "The funding represents a 71 percent increase from current funding for these areas, but is accomplished without increasing the size of the Universal Service Fund — or increasing ratepayer fees." The funds are meant for census tracts where the cost of providing broadband exceeds $52.50 a month, and that are not served by unsubsidized competitors offering at least 4 Mbps downloads/1 Mbps uploads. According to the FCC, nearly one in three rural Americans lack access to 10 Mbps downloads/1 Mbps uploads, compared to only one in 100 urban Americans that lack such service.