Reporting

There’s nearly a billion dollars en route to Colorado to fix internet service issues like slow speeds, affordability or the complete lack of service, especially in rural areas.

This episode of The Divide features Brandy Reitter, executive director for Colorado's broadband office.

An unexpected volunteer, a geographic information system (GIS) mapping expert helped a rural community in Texas establish its broadband connection. Bernie South is the GIS volunteer who mapped the data using information from the Census, school district hotpost addresses and areas of growth in the county. South began volunteering with Bastrop County Cares during the pandemic to vaccinate people, he said.

Plumbing, welding, electrician work—these may be a few of the best-known trades needed to keep our modern world afloat. But there is a new infrastructure in place that has quickly become as common and important to everyday life: the internet. Despite how simple accessing the internet via your mobile phone may seem, a vast physical infrastructure is needed to sustain it.

Despite problems with the wider U.S. economy, demand for broadband and consumer take rates for increasing speeds has not slowed.

I realized some months ago that all those books piling up on my side table aren’t going to read themselves. All those places I’ve been wanting to visit aren’t going to visit themselves. And so on.

Generative AI makes things up. It can't distinguish between fact and fiction.

Breezeline, LICT Corporation, and Longmont Power & Communications are the latest broadband providers to offer an alternative to the federal government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which offered a $30 per month discount on internet service to low-income households and was terminated in May. The new programs from these companies offer discounted service to low-income households that were on the ACP and in two cases offer the lower-cost service to new households that meet the income eligibility requirements. Though each company’s discount offering is slightly different—both in

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has rejected a bid by AT&T to no longer be the “carrier of last resort” for phone service in California. The ruling is a win for people who still use landlines. Being a carrier of last resort requires the company to provide basic telephone service. That often means installing and maintaining old fashioned copper landlines for those who have nothing else, and the state’s biggest carrier of last resort is AT&T.

It looks like Congress will remain deadlocked over how to release spectrum for 5G.