Pierre Landriau

In the world of rural broadband, all eyes are on the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program as individual states continue to assemble their plans. NTCA—The Rural Broadband Association CEO Shirley Bloomfield believes that BEAD has interesting potential for her members, while acknowledging that there are some wrinkles that need to be ironed out.

Amid slowing broadband subscriber growth, service providers are exploring ways to drive up overall revenues alongside average revenues per user with new services and applications. Some operators are pursuing that with premium whole-home Wi-Fi offerings, low-latency gaming tiers and home security or bundling in streaming services that take advantage of the high data speeds. Support of such strategies and initiatives is of growing importance at the Broadband Forum, an organization that works with standards that support the end-to-end broadband ecosystem.