Local government organizations are voicing their strong opposition to the American Broadband Deployment Act, an industry friendly proposal being cooked up in the House that would take public rights of way management and property decisions away from state, local, and tribal governments through federal preemption and industry-friendly defaults.

The American Broadband Deployment Act (HR 2289) saw initial approval by the US House Energy and Commerce Committee last January. It’s being presented by telecom companies as a way to dramatically streamline government broadband permitting and regulation.

With bill proponents insisting it will speed up the deployment of fast, affordable broadband access, the massive 100-page omnibus bill integrates more than 20 different permitting and preemption changes that would impact cellular tower siting, wireline broadband deployment, cable franchising, and federal review processes in ways favorable to industry.

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But organizations representing local governments say the sales pitch for the bill is the latest in a long line of misleading gambits by industry, designed to eliminate oversight of heavily-taxpayer subsidized providers at the cost of state, local, and tribal autonomy and public safety.

The remote islands of San Juan County, Washington are increasingly being served with next-generation fiber and wireless thanks to Rock Island Communications (RIC), a locally-owned Internet subsidiary of the Orcas Power & Light Cooperative (OPALCO).

Part of a member-owned, cooperative utility that’s been providing electricity to the county since 1937 – RIC is celebrating a decade of what it calls “remarkable growth” for the tall task of remote island deployments to the county of 18,000.

The subsidiary says it just reached 7,000 subscribers across San Juan County, and that its annual revenue has grown dramatically during the last decade – from approximately $1.8 million in 2015 to more than $12.3 million in 2025.

“Over the past decade, Rock Island has also achieved several important financial milestones that demonstrate the success of OPALCO’s long-term vision,” OPALCO’s Krista Bouchey says of the expansion. “The company became cash-flow positive in 2020, and in 2023 and 2024 achieved positive net income, marking a major turning point after years of investing in infrastructure and growing its subscriber base.”

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The San Juan Islands are clustered in the most northwest tip of Washington state, off the coast of the cities of Bellingham and Anacortes, not far from the Canadian border. A little more than a third of the residents of the 20 islands are seasonal, and the lion’s share of the territory is only accessible by ferry.

The first time Belinda Parker-Mendoza set foot on the campus of San Antonio College was to get her cap and gown for graduation, having earned her Associate’s Degree in Business Administration.

It was not only a first for her. She was the first person in her entire family to earn a diploma of any kind.

The gateway to that moment, the 45-year-old mother says, came in 2022, when she signed up for a digital skills training course offered through AmeriCorps VISTA at one of the city’s Opportunity Home apartment complexes where she lives on San Antonio’s cultural and historic East Side.

“If I didn’t have a laptop and the Internet, none of that would’ve happened,” she explains, sitting in her fourth-floor apartment before diving into a writing assignment for one of her classes as she works towards her bachelor’s degree.

She does her school work on a laptop – a refurbished Dell computer she earned through the digital skills training program. Before that, she didn’t have a computer or Internet access at home. The class provided her a laptop and through the Americorps program, she was able to enroll in the now-expired Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which allowed her to get home Internet service for the first time.

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“Thank God,” she says. “Because when the ACP ended, I was working in the (Americorps) program – and getting paid – so it worked out.”

For millions of others, it did not.

The Illinois Legislature has taken several major legal steps to not only improve broadband affordability in The Prairie State, but empower local cooperatives to expand affordable, reliable fiber access to state residents long trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Illinois State Sen. Rachel Ventura (D-Joliet) recently introduced Senate Bill 3612, which would amend the state’s Utilities Act to require that large private telecoms in the state provide affordable, fast broadband access to low-income state residents.

More specifically the updated law, which would take effect at the beginning of 2027, would require ISPs to provide minimum broadband download speeds of 25 megabits per second (Mbps) for no more than $15 per month and $20 per month for high-speed service of at least 200 Mbps, including all recurring taxes and equipment fees, to qualifying households.

As with other proposals of its kind, recipients would need to already participate in existing low-income assistant programs.

“Investments in broadband are essential for all Illinoisans, regardless of whether they live in a rural, suburban or urban community,” Ventura said of the proposal. “We’ve entered a new age where broadband is no longer a luxury, but an essential amenity, driving economic activity, improving education, expanding health care access and enhancing public services for all.”

The Trump administration continues to give muddled guidance in terms of the whopping $21 billion in “non-deployment” funds states should have at their disposal from the “savings” created by unwelcome changes to the federal BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment) program.

As we noted last month, dramatic, unpopular, and unlawful changes to BEAD by the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) have resulted in infighting and delays, after the Trump administration tried to steer billions in taxpayer funds to slower and more congested satellite broadband networks owned by the President’s biggest donors.

The broadly-criticized shift was sold as a new “benefit of the bargain” program necessary to “cut costs.” The change required that all 56 BEAD eligible states and territories complete a “benefit of the bargain” round of subgrantee selection and completely retool their broadband deployment plans – often at significant cost to states.

Lenoir City, Tennessee officials say they’re making steady progress on their goal to deliver affordable fiber well beyond the Southern city of 12,998. 

Under the collaborative umbrella of the Lenoir City Utilities Board (LCUB) and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), officials say they’re leveraging century-old experience in rural electrification to help bridge the digital divide across Knox and Loudon counties.

“We’re now in our fourth year of construction on our community broadband network, and we have 37,676 passings available at this time,” Allen Rollings, Director of Broadband at LCUB told ILSR. 

“LCUB will continue to build until our entire electric service territory is able to access our broadband service.”

LCUB’s history dates back to 1938, when Lenoir City signed a contract with the TVA to provide public power. As with many municipalities and cooperatives, this foundational "public utility" mindset helped pave the way for eventually treating broadband as a 21st-century necessity rather than a luxury.

LCUB is the eighth largest utility among the 153 Tennessee Valley Authority distributors, serving over 96,000 electricity customers.

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In 2016, LCUB built an 80-85 mile perimeter fiber ring designed to aid SCADA systems that monitor the electrical grid. Such upgrades improved the utilities’ automated metering, remote fault detection, substation monitoring and overall efficiency.

A new speed analysis published by Ookla finds that municipal broadband providers consistently leave their private Internet service provider (ISP) competition in the dust.

“Small Towns, Big Speeds: How Some Municipal Broadband Providers Outperform Their ISP Peers” examined speed test data that included some of the largest municipal networks in the U.S. from December 2024 through December 2025 and compared their performance to each other and to their privately-owned ISP competitors.

Though it wasn’t in-depth study on other aspects of performance (or business models) – but a more narrowly-focused comparison of speed among 14 municipal providers – still the analysis shines a light on a leading performance indicator: “eight municipal providers in the U.S. that we monitored using Ookla Speedtest data beat their broadband competitors in median upload speeds and one municipal provider, Sherwood Broadband, outpaced the competition in median download speeds.”

Here are some of the report’s topline takeaways:

• Fort Collins, Colorado’s Connexion was the leader in median upload speed, delivering an average median upload speed of more than 300 (Megabits per second) Mbps for the entire 13-month period from December 2024 to December 2025.
• Sherwood Broadband in Sherwood, Oregon, was the top provider in median download speeds, delivering an average median download speed that surpassed 400 Mbps eight months out of a 13-month period from December 2024 to December 2025.
• UTOPIA Fiber in Utah is a standout in latency, delivering the lowest latency of all 14 municipal broadband providers with a multi-server latency consistently in the low 6 milliseconds (ms) to 8 ms range.

The Problem With 'Unfair Competition'

As Americans file their taxes this Tax Day, digital equity leaders across the nation will gather for a timely exploration of how public dollars are being used to strengthen communities – and how local advocates can negotiate better deals as AI data centers rapidly expand, lured with tax breaks.

Co-hosted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance Community Broadband Networks Initiative and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), the next Building for Digital Equity (B4DE) livestream promises to offer insights from frontline forces working to ensure broadband and technology investments serve public needs rather than distant corporate interests.

With the series sponsored by UTOPIA Fiber, the upcoming B4DE livestream – “Local Dollars, Local Solutions: Digital Equity Tax Money & How to Negotiate Better AI Data Center Deals” – is slated for April 15 at 3 p.m. ET and will bring together national policy experts, local leaders, and community advocates working in the trenches of digital inclusion.

Registration is now open here.

“Tax day should serve as a reminder that public money should work for the public,” organizers said. 

“Communities are asking how to use their tax dollars to expand access to the Internet, digital skills, and devices – and how to effectively negotiate, or in some cases, stop data center developers from harming or extracting wealth from cities and towns without public benefit.”

The agenda for the free event will include a brief framing conversation before kicking things off with a creative segment highlighting the power of artistic collaboration and community storytelling, underscoring how digital access supports cultural expression and civic life.

Broadband ISPs should be held to a higher public interest standard and regulated like traditional utilities in California, a new joint study by nonprofit state policy news outlet Cal Matters and UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab argues. State governments should also vocally support community broadband networks as a direct challenge to monopoly power, the authors state.

The study specifically looked at the broadband sector in California, where 15 percent of California households – predominately in low income and minority communities – lack broadband access. It concludes that dramatic federal and state policy failures have resulted in unchecked monopolies and muted competition that directly harms the public interest.

While the study lauds California’s dramatic $6 billion “Broadband For All” initiative, which is driving historic new investment into last and middle mile network upgrades, it also states that the state’s full vision for equitable access cannot be achieved without rate controls, universal access requirements, and strict reliability standards for large incumbent ISPs.

The study also urges state leaders to aggressively embrace municipal broadband cooperatives to address regionalized market failure and improve overall accountability.

“California should actively encourage and support the formation of municipal broadband
cooperatives across the state, particularly in underserved rural and suburban communities
where incumbent providers have failed to deliver adequate service,” the study observes.

Monopoly Dysfunction, Muted Competition

Like most U.S. states, California communities are dominated by a handful of cable and phone giants that have leveraged their immense political power to box out local competition creating dominant regional monopolies and duopolies.