Supply chain disruption will likely speed the transition to new Wi-Fi technologies, panelists said on Parks Associates’ Thursday virtual Connections event. Legacy chips are based on older wafer technology that’s “impossible to use” during the current wafer crisis,” said Oz Yildirim, Airties general manager, so the transition to Wi-Fi 6, 6e and 7 “will just go faster.” At RF semiconductor company Qorvo, Wi-Fi 6 and 6e technology are well over 80% of shipments, said Marketing Director Tony Testa.

The 2022 NAB Show is projected to have about 55% of the attendance of the last in-person show in 2019, but broadcasters told us it feels like a step toward the industry getting back to where it was pre-COVID-19. The show runs April 23-27 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Keeping pace with China on standards-setting for 5G and telecom in general is becoming more challenging, with the U.S. failing to keep up with huge investments China is plowing into standards work, speakers said during an FCBA webinar Wednesday. Congress and the Joe Biden administration are focused on ensuring strong U.S. participation in standards-setting work, but the U.S. isn’t catching up, they said.

In his first shareholder letter since taking over the CEO role from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in July, Andy Jassy highlighted Thursday the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain disruption, growth in Amazon Web Services (AWS), delivery time challenges, fulfillment center worker conditions and Prime Video’s Thursday Night Football deal with the NFL.

Ohio justices asked why a city went to court rather than the legislature to collect franchise fees from over-the-top streaming video services, in Ohio Supreme Court oral argument Wednesday on litigation between Maple Heights, Ohio, and Netflix and Hulu (case 2021-0864). Some justices appeared skeptical that Netflix and Hulu are video service providers that must pay franchise fees under Ohio’s 2007 law.

Outsourcing, offshoring and insufficient investment in resilience rendered many supply chains “complex and fragile,” said the annual "Economic Report of the President," released Thursday by the White House Council of Economic Advisers. COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated widespread vulnerabilities in global supply chains, but the pandemic didn’t cause them, said the report.

Direct negotiations with China are, “at this point, unlikely to yield meaningful results” in curbing Beijing’s unfair trade practices, Emily Kilcrease, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in written testimony at a hearing Thursday. “China has little incentive to commit to binding rules that will require structural changes to a system they believe works for their economic and political objectives,” she said.

Development of an Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) to bolster U.S. economic relations in the Indo-Pacific region would be “a durable and sustainable forum for aligning the values of dynamic and growing economies in the Indo-Pacific region with those of the United States,” said CTA in comments posted Tuesday in docket ITA-2022-0001. Comments were due Monday to help the Commerce Department develop U.S. positions in the IPEF negotiations.

Daily average time spent with TV and digital video, including streaming, will drop next year to 333.6 minutes, about 10 minutes less a day than in 2021 when the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a bump in viewing, said a Wednesday eMarketer report. But viewing trends continue to shift "irrevocably" toward digital, it said.

Carriers large and small are feeling pressure to offer 5G to their customers, executives said at a Competitive Carriers Association conference, streamed from Tampa Tuesday. “All broadband is local,” said CCA President Steve Berry: “Broadband deployment, broadband build, is local.”