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  2. November 2023

November 2023

Who Had the Most Fun at the Oversight of President Biden's Broadband Takeover Hearing?

The House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a Federal Communications Commission oversight hearing that included testimony from each of the five (yes, there are five now) FCC commissioners. A partisan tone was set by the get-go as the title for the hearing was "Oversight of President Biden's Broadband Takeover." The key questions for the Republican Members of the panel going into the hearing were:

Electric co-op taps Ciena to bolster middle mile network in Virginia, North Carolina

Mecklenburg Electric Cooperative (MEC) is using Ciena tech to build middle mile backbone scalable from 100 Gigabit to 400 Gigabit. MEC serves 31,000 member accounts across nine Virginia counties and five North Carolina counties. It delivers broadband in its service territory through its subsidiary EMPOWER Broadband. Specifically, the co-op is leveraging Ciena’s 8114 Coherent Aggregation Router and 5160 Service Aggregation Switch for the middle mile network.

US stops helping Big Tech spot foreign meddling amid GOP legal threats

The US federal government has stopped warning some social networks about foreign disinformation campaigns on their platforms, reversing a years-long approach to preventing Russia and other actors from interfering in American politics less than a year before the US presidential elections. Meta no longer receives notifications of global influence campaigns from the Biden administration, halting a prolonged partnership between the federal government and the world’s largest social media company.

Alliant Credit Union Foundation Opens Million Dollar Challenge

The Alliant Credit Union Foundation requests grant applications for the Million Dollar Challenge. The Foundation will award $1,000,000 in grants to various organizations working to bridge the digital divide in the following ways:

Internet Exchange Points Move Beyond Big Metros: $5 Million Grant Supports One in Wichita

Kansas awarded a $5 million grant to nonprofit Connected Nation to construct a carrier-neutral internet exchange point (IXP) adjacent to Wichita State University’s Innovation Campus. Construction will be done through Connected Nation IXP, a joint venture between Connected Nation and Newby Ventures. The Wichita IXP will be the first carrier-neutral IXP in Kansas. One network that will connect to the Wichita IXP is the middle-mile network planned for the state that was funded, in part, through a June 2023, $42.5 million grant awarded to the Kansas Departments of Commerce and Transportation.

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