Balancing Access and Affordability in Rhode Island
Friday, September 27, 2024
September 2024
Weekly Digest
Weekly Digest
Social media warning labels come to Washington
An idea percolating all summer in the big national argument about social media—warning labels to help reduce the harms of online platforms to kids—has suddenly landed in Congress. Sens. Katie Britt (R-AL) and John Fetterman (D-PA) introduced a bill requiring platforms to add those labels.
Podcast | How AI is changing not just the network, but the culture inside telecommunications companies (Fierce)
Submitted by zwalker@benton.org on Thu, 09/26/2024 - 15:59Knox County to see $17 million investment in fiber-optic rural broadband
High-speed, fiber-optic broadband internet is coming to more than 1,300 unserved and underserved locations in rural Knox County (IL). The expansion is the result of investments by the Knox County board that led to more than $12 million in state grants and a total investment of $17 million, including what local and national internet providers will contribute. The county board allocated $2.4 million of American Rescue Plan Act funds to the broadband initiative in March 2022 and a broadband steering team was convened.
New mentorship program aims to help communities build public broadband
As public broadband networks expand across the US, so too does the body of knowledge on how to launch and run them successfully.
Why It’s Time To Get Over The Broadband Affordability Fixation
Is broadband service in the U.S. affordable? This question has dominated public discourse in recent years as policymakers have focused on, and allocated significant resources towards, closing the country’s digital divide once and for all. But determining the “affordability” of something is highly subjective and thus not amenable to a neat one-size-fits-all definition arrived at by central planners.
Consolidated, Windstream, Five Others Slated to Share Millions in Nebraska Broadband Funding
Seven network operators are slated to share millions of dollars in Nebraska broadband deployment funding through the state’s Universal Service Fund program. Awardees must file certain additional information, which must be approved by the state, before the awards will be finalized. If all awards are approved, deployments will be made to 1,258 locations. The program has a total budget of over $19 million in this round. The seven funding winners are:
Improving the Permitting Process for Fiber Network Stakeholders
As states gear up to allocate Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) money, the challenges of permitting are top-of-mind for all parties involved in the process. To ensure that local governments and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can reduce broadband network construction challenges, The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, in partnership with the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy, the American Association for Public Broadband, Fiber Broadband Association, Brightspeed, and GFiber, held a summit earlier to discuss the issues and recommend solutions
6 reasons why electric co-ops might not apply for BEAD
Electric co-ops are uniquely positioned to apply for, and win, Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds because they already reach most of the homes in the U.S. that are currently unserved with broadband. But the question is: do co-ops even want to apply for BEAD? Cliff Johnson, head of the Rural Broadband Initiative with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) says electric co-ops are uniquely positioned to serve broadband to remote and rural customers.