Reporting

Oregon faces a range of challenges on the route to making broadband available throughout the state, said Nick Batz, director of the Oregon Broadband Office (OBO). “Our biggest challenge is the size of the state,” he said. “We’re roughly the size of the United Kingdom but have six percent of the population.

The city of Bountiful, Utah, with a population of around 45,000, plans to begin construction of a new municipal broadband network in August 2023. Bountiful has partnered with Utopia Fiber to install and operate the open-access network. The city-owned fiber network will provide gigabit speeds to residents and businesses who elect to participate.

Declaration Networks deploys fixed wireless access (FWA) to unserved and underserved areas. But as CEO Bob Nichols said, “Most of our networks moving forward will be fiber-to-the-home.” Declaration Networks was one of the first companies to deploy FWA using TV white spaces (TVWS) spectrum and as a participant in Microsoft’s Airband rural broadband deployment program.

Big telecommunications companies are working to reassure investors about two burdens: toxic lead and heavy debt. Questions about the latter are lingering in the background as AT&T and Verizon use their quarterly earnings reports to address more immediate questions about lead-lined cables.

As an end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) funding looms, a congressional briefing was held to discuss what an end to the program could mean and its importance for achieving digital equity. Estimates from the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation predict th

Residents of a St. Landry Parish (LA) town say they were recently left without internet for five days while getting no answers from the service provider after a line was inadvertently cut. On July 11, some Sunset residents noticed they weren't receiving emails and web pages refused to load. Residents took to Facebook to find out that all Brightspeed customers in their community were without internet. Customers were not notified about the outage, several residents said, and calls to Brightspeed’s customer service yielded little in the way of information.

Land O'Lakes (yes, the butter company) is bridging the digital divide in the rural US. During the height of COVID, Land O’Lakes expedited its budding plans to help close the broadband access gap in rural America, said Vice President of rural services Tina May. As a cooperative owned by around 1,700 farmers, Land O’Lakes is situated in over 10,000 rural communities in the US, touching about half of the harvested acres in the country. In 2020 Land O’Lakes collaborated with local partners in rural, low-access areas to set up free Wi-Fi in parking lots.

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society hosted an "Ask Me Anything" webinar on our Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) Enrollment Performance Tool. During the webinar, Revati Prasad, Benton Institute Director of Research and Fellowships, John Horrigan, Benton Senior Fellow and developer of the ACP Tool, and Elena Saltzman, Civic Nation's Director of Campaigns, talked about program performance, how to best focus ACP outreach and enrollment efforts, and fielded questions by those in the virtual room.

If telecommunications providers are required to remove decades-old lead-sheathed cable from their networks, the total bill is likely to be in the range of $4.4 billion to $21 billion, according to a new estimate from New Street Research.

Fastwyre Broadband is aiming to expand fiber access in Western Alaska, with the help of two new US Department of Agriculture (USDA) grants totaling nearly $70 million. The funds came from the USDA’s recent round of ReConnect Round Four awards, in which the agency dished out $714 million to cover 33 buildouts in 19 states. In Fastwyre’s case, it’s using the money to deliver fiber to around 3,000 people and 75 businesses in several communities across Alaska’s Nome Census Area.