Community Broadband Bits (archived)

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Tamarah Holmes, Director at the Office of Broadband at Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development. Virginia is ahead of the game compared to a lot of the states in terms of its planning and proactive work with providers to achieve universal access in historically unserved and underserved areas. Holmes joins to share how it happened.

This week on the podcast, ILSR Senior Reporter and Editor Sean Gonsalves joins the show for another installment of Crazy Talk. Today's topic is fiber, with the two breaking down a recent op-ed in The Hill by Technology Policy Institute President Scott Wallsten. Christopher and Sean inject a much-needed reality check, as well as some nuance, to Wallsten's performative anxiety that public broadband subsidies supporting fiber optic deployments will leave rural America behind.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Dustin Loup, Project Manager of the National Broadband Mapping Coalition, housed at the Marconi Society. Dustin joins us to talk about the new national Federal Communications Commission broadband maps, currently under construction and intended to replace the current and hopelessly broken one to prepare for tens of billion in federal broadband funding.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge. Feld is a staple of the field, and has been a consistent voice not only for consumers but broadband advocates of all types for more than two decades.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge. The show takes on a reflective nature, as they talk about theories of change in the context of doing broadband policy today.

In this episode of the podcast, Christopher is joined by William Sullivan, a resident of the city of Baltimore who works as part of the Digital Equity Leadership Lab. He shares his work in the city in recent years in getting students engaged in building digital skills and computer literacy. By pairing gaming with learning programs, Sullivan and his colleagues not only got students interested in computer hardware, but incented them to build new digital skills that would aid them in college and on the job market later in life. It also, he shares, fostered interest in taking on additional new learning challenges, as well as building new social spaces with people they had not known before.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Aaron Meyerson, former Deputy CTO for the city of New York. Christopher and Aaron dig into New York City's Internet Master Plan, which launched in the spring of 2021 and gained steam before being put on hold by the Adam's administration in January of 2022.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Ben Matranga, co-founder and managing partner of Connectivity Capital, and Jane Coffin, chief community officer at Connect Humanity. The conversation this week takes on a bit of international flavor as the three of them discuss a recent report “Financing Mechanisms for Locally Owned Internet Infrastructure,” authored collaboratively by Connectivity Capital, Connect Humanity, The Internet Society, and the Association for Progressive Communications.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Shayna Englin, Director of the Digital Equity Initiative at the California Community Foundation (CCF) to talk about a new report by CCF and its partners that reveals the systematic broadband cost inequities perpetuated in LA County by Charter Spectrum, the region's monopoly provider. "Sounding the Alarm," a pricing and policy impact study, shows not only that economically vulnerable households in Charter Spectrum territory pay more for slower service than those in wealthy neighborhoods, but that they are also saddled with worse contracts and regularly see fewer advertisements for the monopoly provider's lowest cost plans.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Jessica Engle, Director of Community Outreach at Althea to talk about the Affordable Connectivity Program, the $14-billion fund that provides a $30 monthly service benefit ($75 on Tribal lands) to help defray the cost of Internet access to qualifying families around the country. It's a large and complicated program, and Jessica and Christopher talk about some of the bottlenecks that are causing friction both for households and for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This includes verifying eligibility in a timely fashion, modifying administrative and accounting systems, a lack of information transparency from USAC and the FCC, and the seeming lack of mechanisms for an audit should it become necessary down the road.