Most households in the U.S. today would consider internet service to be a necessity—and like many household expenses, it's gotten more expensive lately, at least in some areas. At U.S. News & World Report, we’ve been surveying Americans about their Internet Service Provider (ISP) experiences throughout the year. This time, we aimed to get feedback specifically related to costs for consumers living in the most populous states. Here's what we found, starting with some overall takeaways based on responses from across all five states:

• The average internet bill at sign-up among the most populous states was $81. That’s a bit higher than what we found in our April 2024 survey report, which showed the average initial internet bill nationwide was $77.
• The average internet bill today among the most populous states is $98, which again is a slight increase over the average current internet bill nationwide of $89 identified in our April 2024 survey report.
• When asked what download speed people are currently paying their ISP for, about one-third (32%) of respondents from the most populous states didn't know. That’s a bit better than our most recent ISP cost and speed survey report, where we found that 38% of Americans nationwide didn’t know what internet speed they pay for. 

A group in Vermont got so fed up with the lack of high-speed broadband in small towns and rural areas—and the complete lack of interest by incumbent telephone and cable companies—that it went to the Vermont legislature for permission to create a communications union district (CUD). There are now nine CUDs successfully operating in Vermont, and these groups are poised to garner the lion’s share of Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) awards in the state. The trailblazing CUD was ECFiber, which has been so successful that it doesn’t plan to apply for BEAD funds because it’s already reached all the unserved and underserved areas in the 31 towns that it covers. However, some of the other CUDs definitely do plan to apply for BEAD grants, and they’re likely to have friendly treatment from the state’s broadband office.

Building on the Defeating the Digital Divide series, Kids First Chicago presents new findings from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS) data, released in December 2023, and makes three key recommendations: 

1. Expand and Establish Chicago Connected as a Permanent Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Program: Chicago Connected should be made a permanent CPS program and expanded to include newly eligible families, ensuring all students continue to have free high-speed internet access.
2. Re-engage Community-Based Organizations in Chicago Connected: Community-based organizations, proven to be effective at connecting CPS’s neediest students, should be re-engaged as partners to support program enrollment.
3. Close the Device Gap for CPS Students: To address the shortage of devices among CPS students, we must redouble partnerships with nonprofit refurbishment companies and increase donations from government and businesses.

Elon Musk made an explicitly future-forward pitch to Pennsylvania voters—arguing that a vote for former President Donald Trump (R-FL) was a vote for the progress of humanity itself. Musk has spoken at length about his desire for humanity to become a “spacefaring civilization” and colonize Earth’s moon or Mars, even specifying which type of government he thinks would fit an off-world colony (direct democracy). He’s been equally specific about what kind of government he thinks is necessary on Earth to enable that future, namely, one that will ease up on regulating his vast business empire. What Musk doesn’t often address is why humanity should do this in the first place. His most commonly articulated reason is that it’s a hedge against existential risks on Earth, but the lack of a more affirmative case reflects the core of his and some tech-world brethren’s increasing mind-meld with the former president: their belief that a kind of restless change, absent any inherent quality, goal or direction, is a virtue in its own right.

Telecommunications companies are sitting on thousands of old central office (CO) facilities sprinkled across the U.S. that could be just right for serving latency-sensitive artificial intelligence (AI) applications. And it seems they’re waking up to this fact as they continue efforts to retire the old copper network gear previously housed in these structures. AT&T, Lumen Technologies, Frontier Communications and Ziply Fiber are among the operators which have started using their old COs for colocation and other cloud deployments. Lumen, meanwhile, is using COs for enterprise colocation. How did operators end up in this position in the first place? Demand for legacy copper and DSL services—which relied on active electronics housed in these central offices—has plummeted with the rise of higher speed fiber and fixed wireless access broadband offerings.