October 2023

Lumos announced its expansion into Greenville County (SC) with nearly a $100 million investment to build out over 775 miles of its 100% fiber network throughout the county.  As a result of this expansion, Lumos will be the first fiber provider to families, households, and businesses throughout portions of the Greenville market, establishing underserved areas of South Carolina for economic success in the future. The expansion will bring fiber-optic internet to thousands of residents and businesses in the greater Greenville area.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued its latest report to Congress on protecting older adults, which highlights key trends based on fraud reports by older adults, and the FTC’s multi-pronged efforts to combat the problem through law enforcement actions, rulemaking, and outreach and education programs. The report finds that older adults reported losing more than $1.6 billion to fraud in 2022. The report’s analysis shows that older adults filed the largest number of reports about online frauds—where consumers were first exposed to the fraud via social media, the web, or online ads.

It’s my understanding that the annual Agriculture Reauthorization Bill includes new money for the ReConnect grant program that is administered by the Rural Utilities Service (RUS), which is part of the Department of Agriculture. The ReConnect grants only fund areas that are remote and include a test that gives priorities to grant areas that are the farthest distance from towns and cities. There have been changes in the broadband industry that have made it harder each year to define a ReConnect grant area. The RUS grant rules favor grant requests that cover large contiguous areas.