Researchers say they’re concerned that a massive influx of new federal grant money being redirected to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband company in Ohio will be thwarted by the simple fact that many targeted locations don’t have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky.

Tom Reid of Reid Consulting conducted a study earlier this year taking a closer look at the 30,000 locations in Ohio that are poised to receive subsidized service from Starlink, and found that as many as 70 percent of the target locations were covered by tree canopy preventing the minimum 110-degree field of view Starlink dishes require.

“Only about 30 percent of the households awarded in the state of Ohio have a clear enough view of the sky to get a good, stable Starlink signal,” Reid recently told local Ohio public media.

Ohio is slated to receive $793 million in federal Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grants to fund fiber expansion. But after the Trump NTIA last year changed the program to benefit Elon Musk, Starlink quickly became the biggest state beneficiary of public tax money, receiving more than $51.6 million in grants.

The Trump administration’s changes not only eliminated affordability and equitable deployment requirements, they directed millions of dollars away from higher-capacity future-proof fiber, and toward the back pocket of a billionaire who had already planned to deploy the LEO satellite network without subsidization.

Persistent attacks by the federal government on Internet affordability protections and social safety nets are directly resulting in a drop in overall broadband adoption, with large numbers of low-income Americans unable to afford modern connectivity — and the vast benefits it provides.

That was the message sent by local and national broadband researchers attending an informational meeting last month in Indiana, Pennsylvania before the Pennsylvania House Communications & Technology Committee.

Researchers noted that sustained efforts by the federal government across numerous fronts — from attacks on the social safety net to the Republican destruction of the FCC Affordable Connectivity Program (which provided $30 broadband discounts to more than 23 million households) are directly driving vulnerable populations away from Internet adoption.

Attendees noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) alone — which dramatically lowered taxes for U.S. corporations and the wealthy — is projected to reduce broadband connections by approximately 233,000 in Pennsylvania's lowest income quintile.

One attendee, Indiana County Commissioner Sherene Hess, pointed to 2024 data from public-benefit corporation Ready.net showing that Indiana County is among the least-connected counties in Pennsylvania, with 22 percent of county locations without broadband access.

According to notoriously unreliable FCC data (coverage and speed gaps are usually worse than the federal government claims), of the 103,986 “serviceable locations” in Indiana County, 23,049 locations are unserved and 3,927 locations are underserved — meaning they fail to meet FCC minimum broadband speed standards.

Hess combined data from the U.S. census and a 2022 United Way ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained, Employed) report to conclude that 46 percent of Indiana County was facing financial hardship, suggesting that $80 to $200 monthly Internet bills “create a choice between Internet service and other basic needs.”

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 changes were part of the Trump administration’s misleadingly-named “benefit of the bargain” modifications, which eliminated requirements that taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable to the public, removed efforts to ensure equitable broadband delivery, and doled out billions to Musk and Bezos for satellite service they’d already planned to deploy.

An email obtained by the Texas Tribune sent from the state broadband office to subgrantees says that a hold is being placed on all BEAD disbursements “until further notice.”

“No further action is required from subgrantees at this time,” the office said in the email. “The BDO will provide additional guidance and updates as they become available.”

The email does not provide a reason for the hold, and the Texas Broadband Office did not respond to a request for comment. But the hold comes just a week after Texas Comptroller Don Huffines announced a comprehensive internal review of his office, including the state broadband office, in part to address complaints of Musk favoritism.

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.

At the celebration, Hoopa Valley Tribal Vice Chairman Jordan Hailey hailed the milestone moment:

“This is truly a great day for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, for the department and for the Hoopa people. It makes me proud as a Hoopa Tribal member and a member of this community to see everything that they’ve accomplished.”

Though the new network operations headquarters is a storage and transport data center, General Manager of HVPUD Linnea Jackson made it clear that it is not a hyperscale/compute AI data center that have sparked controversy and protest in numerous local communities across the nation.

“The (data centers) that are sucking up all those resources — water, land, and energy — those are the AI data centers. Ours is a network hub, not a huge footprint,” Jackson tells ILSR. “We’re talking about servers and rack space for (Tribal) government operations and records, not a demand on our water resources — completely different from a large AI data center.”

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Establishing Data Sovereignty

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. 

The vote paves the way for the western Massachusetts town of about 16,000 to finally get the affordable and reliable town-wide Internet connectivity local leaders see as vital for its economic future and improved quality-of-life.

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With pent up frustration of the high cost and unreliable service under the monopoly of Charter Spectrum, the Council also voted to enter into an agreement with Westfield Gas & Electric to build the network, as the municipally-owned fiber provider has done for nearly two dozen other towns in western Massachusetts — with the utility’s subsidiary, Whip City Fiber, to operate as the Internet service provider.

Construction is expected to start in January of 2027 with the first connections lit up for service later that year in the northwest corner of town where the “initially designated (and most dense) neighborhoods” are located.

Six Years in the Making

Officials for the volunteer-run nonprofit NYC Mesh have 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.

“It's mostly fixed wireless, though we'll rent dark fiber in a couple places if necessary,” NYC Mesh’s Ash Wolfson tells ILSR, adding that the expanded wireless links will leverage equipment from Ubiquiti (Airfiber and Wave), with hardware from Mikrotik (RB5009 and CCR2116) or Netpower (16P and CRS317) for routing and switching.

According to NYC Mesh officials, NYC Housing Preservation & Development will help the volunteer-run nonprofit in identifying priority neighborhoods underserved by traditional commercial ISPs, ultimately connecting at least 500 additional low income households to its affordable, community-run network.

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“Our agency is excited to partner with NYC Mesh on expanding our Neighborhood Internet program model to Central Brooklyn, where nearly 25 percent of households lack Internet access,” Dave Seliger, NYC Housing Preservation & Development Chief Digital Equity Officer says of the expansion.

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 an innovative nonprofit community network provider.

Even without getting a cent from the federal government’s flagship $42.5 billion dollar BEAD program, Cleveland is no longer just home to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s now also the home of skyrocketing connectivity rates as DigitalC transforms the city’s digital landscape.

The data-backed progress was enough to convince the Cleveland City Council to recently sign off on a $4.35 million “performance payment” — part of an overall $20 million earmark from the city's coffers — 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.

Under its performance-based contract with the city, DigitalC was on the hook to add 4,700 new household Internet subscriptions and deliver digital skills training to 10,000 residents in 2025 or miss out on the multi-million dollar infusion of city cash.

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).

But state officials say RiverStreet repeatedly failed to deliver promised connectivity to counties all across the state.

In Patrick, Henry, and Franklin counties, for example, RiverStreet was selected in 2022 and 2023 by the West Piedmont Planning District to bring fiber Internet access to 14,547 households. But according to local news outlet Cardinal News, the ISP had delivered just 40 total connections across all three counties.

“Well, it’s certainly been frustrating, and I have dedicated a tremendous amount of my time to this project,” Henry County Administrator Dale Wagoner told the outlet. “I’ve served as lead [on the project] since day one and the first grant application. It’s most frustrating for our residents who we’ve been promising broadband to for many years now.”

Late last month, officials from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute (MBI) and Community Broadband Networks America (CBN 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.

For the roughly 150 residents at the two Southbridge properties — many of them elderly, on fixed incomes, or living with disabilities — the occasion really hit home. 

Diane Servant, board chair of the Southbridge Housing Authority and a resident herself, told the crowd gathered for the celebration what the upgraded wiring will mean for broadband-hungry residents.

“It's going to save you money, and that's always a plus for all of us on very fixed incomes,” Servant said. “Some of the perks are you will be able to do telehealth, talk with your children, talk with your grandchildren. It's just going to be fabulous.”

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CBN America is handling the fiber build-out at the Southbridge properties, part of a broader push by the provider into southern Worcester County. In total, CBN was awarded $5.7 million in grant program funds to upgrade wiring in buildings across six different communities in the region, bringing all-fiber connections to 1,820 units, MBI officials tell ILSR.

Sixty-three years ago this August, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered one of the most memorable speeches in American history. 

At the heart of King’s “dream” speech — "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" – was a vision for a society built, not on making peace with inequality, but on its structural dismantling, where equity is not just aspirational, but foundational.

On Wednesday, August 19 at 3pm ET, just eight days before the anniversary of King’s speech, the on-going webinar series hosted by the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) 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?”

Registration is now open here.

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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 or be managed into irrelevance, even if the face of a federal government actively dismantling the programs and protections that were supposed to close the digital divide.

It will bring together a roster of voices from the front lines of the digital equity fight — including advocates, educators, librarians, healthcare providers, and community broadband builders doing the unglamorous, essential work of getting people connected.