A new study shows that the now expired Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which offered a $30/month discount for 23 million eligible households to pay for home Internet service, helped low-income Americans get better access to jobs, with particularly strong effects for women.

The ACP program ended in May 2024 – thanks to GOP Congressional leaders blocking efforts to allocate additional money when the fund was depleted. Still, the study remains relevant as affordability advocates continue to look for ways to fund a similar program in the future.

Led by Hernan Galperin, Professor and Director of Doctoral Studies at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the research combines ACP administrative records with data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). In doing so, the study’s authors found that access to affordable, high-speed Internet improves employment outcomes by enabling remote work and greater labor market participation.

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With millions of Americans who rely on remote work to balance jobs with caregiving responsibilities, the study indicates that the ACP appeared to be a key enabler.

Traverse City, Michigan’s public, community-owned utility, Traverse City Light and Power (TCL&P), is putting the finishing touches on its $14 million plan to deliver affordable fiber to the community of 15,424. With build out estimates significantly lower than initial projections, the utility is finalizing an additional $1 million in loans to fund the recently started expansion project.

Already named last month to the 2025 Broadband Communities Top 100 list, a recent update by the city notes that the utility is currently extending the network to the Base of Old Mission Peninsula, Hastings, Parsons, Munson, and Barlow. 

Complete citywide deployment is expected by the Spring of 2026, though the city says it maintains a “stretch goal” of completing the entirety of the “rapid deployment” by this fall.

In deployed markets, locals have three speed and pricing options: a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $90 a month; a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) option for $70 a month; and a symmetrical 200 Mbps option for $60 a month.

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None of the options come with long-term contracts, hidden fees, or usage caps. All three broadband tiers can be bundled with phone service for an additional $10 a month.

Like countless U.S. communities, Traverse City locals were tired by expensive, spotty, substandard broadband access being provided by regional telecom monopolies. In Traverse City that usually means a monopoly on broadband access by Charter Spectrum, peppered with some scattered Brightspeed (formerly Lumen and Centurylink) DSL and fiber lines.

Two city utility managers, an economist, and a fiber technologist walk into a virtual webinar …

And what followed was a deep dive into why delaying investment in smart city infrastructure is increasingly costly.

The hour-long livestream event  – co-hosted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks initiative and the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) – brought together municipal utility managers, an economist, and a leading fiber technologist to explore how cities can future-proof themselves with digital infrastructure.

Guests who appeared on “Building Smarter Cities and the Cost of Doing Nothing” today emphasized how “smart cities” are built on fiber networks and what city investments in the gold-standard of Internet connectivity can do to boost economic development while improving the quality of life for local residents and businesses.

They highlighted the real costs of inaction, pointing to slower economic growth and lost municipal revenue opportunities as something many cities or towns overlook when thinking about local infrastructure.

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The webinar featured Huntsville Utilities VP of Engineering Stacy Cantrell who provided key insights into the public-private partnership Huntsville Utilities struck with Google Fiber and what it has meant to “Rocket City.”

Another virtual case study was provided by Brieana Reed-Harmel, Broadband Manager for Pulse Fiber, discussing how the city’s fiber network is propelling economic revitalization efforts in Loveland and how the success of the network is now being extended into neighboring communities.

Decorah, Iowa has struck a public private partnership with West Union Trenching to deploy a modern fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that passes every household in the city.

The project is the culmination of decades of planning and frustration at the lack of affordable, next-generation broadband in the city of 7,500.

According to the city, the Decorah 2025 Fiber to the Home Project will finally begin construction early next year.

The city has also struck a deal with Minnesota-based AcenTek to operate the system and provide retail internet service to residents. Network equipment and construction is being financed by a $13.7 million loan approved last month by the city’s Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board of Trustees.

“The fiber plant and electronics will be city owned, our operations side of it is being handled by Acentek,” Chopper Albert, Decorah IT Director told ISLR.

The first subscribers are expected to come online sometime in early 2027. The project’s origins extend back more than a decade after locals struggled to gain access to affordable, fast, and reliable broadband access.

“This is a unique start-up arrangement for Iowa,” said Travis Goedken, City Manager of the City of Decorah.  “After reviewing multiple business plan options since the successful election by Decorah residents in 2015 to establish a Board-governed municipal telecommunications utility, this was the most favorable option.

"City staff and the Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board have been working diligently the last two years to organize and execute the necessary steps to make this a reality.”

Last year the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, a new study indicates that many ISPs aren’t doing a great job adhering to the rules. The Trump FCC has also announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections.

The new academic study (first reported on by Broadband Breakfast) by York University researchers Jonathan A. Obar and Boxi Chen gave 35 different U.S. ISPs a ten-star based grade on how well they are adhering to the FCC broadband label requirements, including label placement, standardized formatting, machine-readable data files, and required policy links.

The results weren’t pretty: only sixteen ISPs properly placed labels at the point of sale as required, and not a single ISP received full marks for completely adhering to the FCC’s requirements. Only six ISPs received a full ten star ranking for proper formatting.

Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NTIA administrator Arielle Roth said last week that the agency she oversees will withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation similar to New York’s Affordable Broadband Act.

As the assistant secretary overseeing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, Roth’s legal reasoning is striking.

All the more so given that the New York Affordable Broadband Act that requires Internet service providers in the Empire State to offer a low-cost broadband service plan to income-eligible households has been upheld as Constitutional – a case in which the Supreme Court twice declined to intervene and overturn.

Yet, last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment. During her speech, Roth said:

“Consistent with the law, which explicitly prohibits regulating the rates charged for broadband service, NTIA is making clear that states cannot impose rate regulation on the BEAD program. To protect the BEAD investment, we are clarifying that BEAD providers must be protected throughout their service area in a state, while the provider is still within its BEAD period of performance. Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”

The stakes are high for broadband affordability advocates across the nation. 

Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000.

When we last checked in with Superior back in April, the city was working with Nokia for final configuration and testing before launch. Now, the municipal broadband network says its ConnectSuperior fiber network is live in its first two target neighborhoods in the northern part of the city (see the city’s latest deployment map).

The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure. Historically such a model helps boost competition and drive down costs for both consumers and competitors. That’s already the case in Superior, where the city’s website lists two providers – Advanced Stream and Superion Networks – with more on the way.

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Advanced Stream is offering locals three tiers of service: a symmetrical 300 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical one gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $83 a month.

Superion is offering three tiers of service as well: a symmetrical 300 Mbps tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical 1 Gbps tier for $85 a month. Both companies offer phone bundles for a modest additional surcharge.

Studies consistently show that the primary reason millions of households do not have home Internet service boils down to affordability.

Research by EducationSuperHighway indicates that of the estimated 28.2 million households in the U.S. that do not have high-speed Internet service, 18 million of those households (home to 48 million Americans) are not online because the cost of service is simply too expensive.

But now, thanks to a recently published study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, broadband affordability advocates may be able to more accurately measure the elusive nature of affordable broadband costs.

The study also examines how to better pinpoint contributing factors like the state of local infrastructure and how lower-performing broadband access technologies powerfully influence low-income households' decision to sometimes choose cellular service-only over home Internet service.

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“Broadband Affordability: Assessing the Cost of Broadband for Low-and-Moderate Income Communities in Cities” provides a research-driven lens on how to measure broadband affordability neighborhood by neighborhood, city to city.

“While national and state-level analyses have helped highlight the digital divide,” the study’s author Ambika Nair writes, “measures of broadband affordability at the community level are limited.”

The Trump administration's illegal “termination” of the 2021 Digital Equity Act continues to have devastating real world impacts on everything from affordable broadband access to protecting Americans from skyrocketing online scams.

The $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act was passed by Congress as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It mandated the creation of three different major grant programs intended to shore up equitable, widespread access to affordable Internet, while providing the tools and digital literacy education needed to help neglected U.S. communities get online.

But last May the Trump administration unceremoniously demolished the Act, froze all program funding, and left countless states, programs and organizations – many on the cusp of major new efforts – high and dry.

At the time, President Trump and GOP leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz disingenuously attacked the Act’s programs as “racist” and "unconstitutional,” – part of a broader effort to dismantle programs deemed as “DEI,” even in instances where the programs had little to nothing to do with race or gender. Many of the “covered populations” covered by the bill included rural residents, veterans, and elderly Americans from all walks of life.

Funding Freeze Puts Most Vulnerable Americans at Risk

The sudden "termination" of the popular law resulted in dozens of states having to abruptly cancel major broadband expansion plans. But the freeze has also been a massive problem for state programs that were taking aim at a U.S. online fraud epidemic proving particularly harmful to the U.S. elderly and marginalized communities.

After years of neglect by regional broadband giants, five years ago the town of Arrowsic, Maine decided to build their own broadband network on the back of federal grants and loans. 

Now regional broadband provider Fidium has targeted the small town of 477 with broadband expansion, after previously rejecting calls for better, more affordable service.

Critics say Fidium’s goal isn’t honest competition, but a bid to try to put the popular local municipal broadband network on shaky financial ground.

We first wrote about Arrowsic back in February of 2020, shortly after Governor Janet Mills announced that the town would be building its own fiber network after decades of frustration with spotty, expensive, or nonexistent service from large telecom giants like Consolidated Communications, which recently fully rebranded as Fidium.

The project was a partnership between a new Arrowsic Broadband Authority (ABA) and Axiom Technologies, heavily driven by a combined $1.2 million in grant and loan funding from the USDA's ReConnect Pilot Program. The goal: connect 237 households, 20 businesses, and four farms with symmetrical fiber optic service of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).