Joan Engebretson

When Executive Director for ConnectLA—Louisiana's broadband office—Veneeth Iyengar was asked if he was concerned that there might be areas of Louisiana that no broadband provider would want to serve, his response was, "We’re not concerned [because] it’s all in how you design the program.

GeoLinks has a lot going on with fixed wireless access (FWA), Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) deployments, gig+ speed offers, and spectrum bands. The company has more licenses in the 28 GHz band than any other license holder and "that will give us the opportunity to look into other states in the future,” said COO Ryan Adams. Investments from Rock Mountain Capital and JLC Infrastructure make GeoLinks' expansion plans possible and help GeoLinks build upon their signi

Charter Communications won close to $16 million in funding to cover some of the costs of making broadband available in seven North Carolina counties. The funding was part of a total of $22 million awarded through the Completing Access to Broadband (CAB) program. The awards were made by the North Carolina Department of Information Technology (NCDIT). According to the agency, the funding awarded in this round will connect 6,012 households and 164 businesses. Funding recipients must provide service at speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps, scalable to 100/100 Mbps. Projects must be completed by Dec.

Consolidated Communications will build a fiber network in Lamoille County (VT) that will be funded, in part, through the state. Consolidated will invest almost $10 million in the network and the Lamoille FiberNet communications union district (CUD) will invest $14.9 million.

Georgia has found a way to get bids for, and ultimately service to, its most unserved areas. Georgia’s Deputy State Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of the Georgia Broadband Program, Jessica Simmons, said the state's Capital Projects Fund (CPF) program, funded by the federal American Rescue Plan Act,  enabled its success.

Black Rock, AT&T, and Gigapower executives shared their vision for the joint venture and how they expect to change attitudes toward open access. Adam Waltz, Managing Director of Black Rock’s Global Infrastructure Fund was excited because the company sees the US as underpenetrated when it comes to fiber broadband. Gigapower CEO Bill Hogg said, “scale will be a differentiator” beacuse the network’s scale will appeal to service providers interested in offering service over the network because “you don’t want to make [them] invest over and over with a lot of small players.” Erin Scarborough

Cox Communications was the biggest winner in Florida broadband funding, and will get over $80 million for 11 projects. Fellow cable provider Comcast was the second biggest winner and will take home over $60 million for 34 projects, followed by Conexon, which will receive about $40 million. Other companies winning funding include Charter Communications, AT&T, CenturyLink, Suwanee Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC), Consolidated, TDS, IBT, and Myakka. The Florida broadband awards were made through the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Program, in which $247 million was funded through the f

The National Content & Technology Cooperative (NCTC), formerly known as the National Cable Television Cooperative, has completed the build of its Connectivity Exchange platform, which allows NCTC broadband provider members to compete for and win bids to provide services to commercial customers through a single unified network. Initially focused on negotiating video-related deals for smaller broadband and pay TV provider members, the NCTC's focus has expanded to include offerings such as a mobile virtual network operator offering through AT&T.

Dell’Oro Group recently raised its forecast for the next generation of passive optical network (PON) technology, known as 25G PON, and expects its revenues to triple between year-end 2023 and year-end 2025. As Stefaan Vanhastel, head of marketing and innovation for fixed networks for Nokia, explained most service providers are looking at 25G PON as an opportunity to generate additional revenue from business customers. Some businesses will prefer 25G PON because they are used to 10 Gbps symmetrical service and, with 13% overhead, XGS-PON doesn’t support full 10 Gbps speeds. The cost of 25G P

Winning funding in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband program will be “trickier than we were hoping for,” said Charter CEO Chris Winfrey. “We didn’t get all the guidelines and [National Telecommunications and Information Administration] instructions that we were hoping for,” Winfrey said. Instead, some of the guidelines that have been established are “unhelpful to private capital.” Although Winfrey didn’t elaborate, this may have been a reference to rules that favor public/private partnerships.