News

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) says that it has placed Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grant money on hold to address continued claims that the program has been unfairly tilted to the direct benefit of billionaire Elon Musk. In July, the office faced widespread accusations that Trump administration changes made to the BEAD program deprioritized faster fiber technologies and gave an unfair advantage to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their slower, more congested low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite technologies.

The Hoopa Valley Tribe is celebrating the opening of its new fiber network operations center as the Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District (HVPUD) expands fiber-to-the-home Internet service throughout the Hoopa Valley Reservation and into neighboring communities just outside of its Tribal lands. To mark the occasion earlier this summer, more than 50 community members, Tribal leaders, HVPUD staff, and project partners attended the July 17 opening celebration.

New Mexico-based Penasco Valley Telephone Cooperative (PVT) is using a $1 million disaster relief grant from the New Mexico Office Of Broadband Access and Expansion (OBAE) to construct and expand reliable Internet access in numerous New Mexico communities that have historically been subjected to wildfires and flooding. According to cooperative leadership, PVT is building an alternate fiber broadband route to establish more resilient and redundant connectivity to inhabitants of areas like the Capitan Mountains Wilderness, where the Seven Cabins Fire recently burned 31,000 acres after the crash of a medical plane last June.

Three months after town meeting voters in Longmeadow, Massachusetts rejected an $8.6 million proposal to kickstart the construction of a municipal fiber network, Town Councilors in the neighboring town of East Longmeadow moved in a different direction, voting to take control of its digital future and provide its residents and businesses with next-generation Internet access. The move was formalized earlier this month when East Longmeadow Town Councilors unanimously approved issuing $43.5 million in bonds to finance the construction of a municipally-owned fiber network.

Officials for the volunteer-run nonprofit NYC Mesh have been been awarded a new $898,000 grant from New York State’s ConnectALL initiative that should help the project expand affordable wireless Internet access to the Big Apple’s most vulnerable populations. The grant is one of $8.3 million in new grants recently awarded by New York State providing much-needed financial assistance to community or municipally run broadband connectivity initiatives through the Connectivity Innovation – Business Model Awards, which support organizations using “novel financing strategies” to serve low-income and rural communities.

Cooperative officials say the six-year, $60 million project was the largest infrastructure investment in the cooperative's 88-year history. 7,000 of the co-op’s 14,000 electrical customers are now subscribed to broadband service after the deployment of 14,000 miles of fiber optic lines that have also streamlined maintenance and monitoring of the electrical grid.

HomeWorks Tri-County Electric Cooperative says it has acquired the cable and fiber broadband systems of private ISP Vogtmann Engineering (VEI) in order to expand its broadband footprint across central Michigan. According to Homeworks, the acquisition of VEI’s network assets includes 15 miles of cable in the neighboring villages of Nashville and Vermontville, passing just over 1,000 homes and businesses.

For years, Cleveland was labeled as one of the worst-connected cities in the nation despite the presence of AT&T and Charter Spectrum. But all of that is changing, thanks to DigitalC, an innovative nonprofit community network provider. The data-backed progress was enough to convince the Cleveland City Council to recently sign off on a $4.35 million “performance payment” to DigitalC after the nonprofit Internet provider blew past its 2025 goals for getting residents online and teaching them digital skills, a milestone city leaders are pointing to as proof that “The Cleveland Model” for closing the digital divide actually works.

Indiana Cooperatives are once again at the front of the pack as the state prepares to dramatically expand affordable fiber access on the back of $483 million in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grants. The first round of bead funding is expected to connect an estimated 123,000 Indiana households and businesses that currently have either substandard Internet access, or no access at all.

RiverStreet Networks has been removed from multiple broadband deployment projects by the Virginia Broadband Office after years of delays, leaving the state scrambling to find a replacement suitor for projects intended to bring affordable Internet access to more than 30,000 rural customers across The Old Dominion state. The company was stripped of its state contracts after it repeatedly failed to meet deadlines and struggled to find additional funding needed to complete promised state deployments. Most of the state contracts heavily subsidized RiverStreet via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

The California Public Utilities Commission says it has approved another $74 million in California Advanced Services Fund grants to expand affordable high-speed Internet infrastructure to underserved communities across the Golden State. According to the CPUC’s recent announcement, the funding will support six new Internet access infrastructure projects across Marin, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma counties, bringing reliable, high-speed Internet service to nearly 1,800 previously completely unserved homes and businesses.

Officials from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute and Community Broadband Networks America — an independently-owned fiber Internet service provider — gathered with dozens of residents at two Southbridge Housing Authority properties to celebrate the expansion of the state's Residential Retrofit Program. The event marked the latest milestone for a program that, more than two years after its launch, has grown from a $22 million pilot project into a $74 million initiative to rewire some of the Commonwealth's oldest affordable housing stock in order to allow residents living there faster and more reliable access to the Internet.

On Wednesday, August 19 at 3pm ET, just eight days before the anniversary of King’s most celebrated speech, Building for Digital Equity webinar series returns to pose a pointed question to the digital inclusion community: what is our dream for digital equity — and what kind of ecosystems do we need to, at last, build a “Beloved (connected) Community?” The live-streamed webinar — "Normalcy, Never Again" — takes its name from the spirit of King's August 28, 1963 address and will serve as a rallying point to reaffirm that the digital equity movement will not accept business as usual.

The Oregon Broadband Office has announced the preliminary awardees selected to assume BEAD projects that were voluntarily declined by their original awardees. The new awardees include a municipal broadband provider and an electric cooperative. According to an OBO announcement, four of the state’s original BEAD awardees declined a total of 15 projects prior to the state’s June 10 Notice of Intent to Award acceptance deadline.

Eight community and independently-owned networks are in the running for this year’s Broadband Provider of the Year Award. The winners will be revealed live during a special awards ceremony at the end of Day 1 at this year’s summit, which will be held on August 26 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas.

While the grant amounts are relatively small, they’re a big deal to the small independent providers and member-owned cooperatives who received them. The grant awards have been made possible by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), featuring $250,749 in new Internet access grants that will connect 63 new locations across 21 counties in The Hoosier State.

Christopher Mitchell, Director of the Community Broadband Networks initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), issues statement in response to yesterday’s federal court ruling that Digital Equity Act programs should resume.

California residents are engaged in a protracted, ugly battle with telecom giant AT&T over their ability to receive life-saving communications during an emergency. The battle comes as the telecom monopoly attempts to eliminate most meaningful oversight of the company’s communications networks, actively putting human lives – and state rights – at risk.

California and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) continue to heavily invest in state efforts to expand affordable Internet access, and bolster digital equity, inclusion, and education programs to ensure freshly-connected communities are able to make the most of it. According to a new announcement by the CPUC, the agency has freshly approved $14.7 million in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Broadband Infrastructure Grant Account funding for four fiber-optic broadband projects in rural Northern California.

Earlier this month rural electric and broadband cooperatives gathered in Washington, DC, for their fifth-annual Broadband Leadership Summit. The topic du jour was broadly unpopular changes made by the NTIA to the Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access program (BEAD) created by the 2021 infrastructure bill. Cooperatives attending the event expressed concerns at a number of cumbersome new bureaucratic hurdles imposed by the NTIA. Most prominently discussed was the NTIA’s decision to impose new pole attachment regulations on cooperatives that have historically been exempt.