There has been a lot of chatter in the broadband industry recently, particularly as the election approaches, about whether the speed with which Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding is rolling out is too slow. But Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, said the timeline doesn’t bother her too much. “There’s been enough money flowing into the system that I’m not concerned that it’s taken three years.” Bloomfield named two primary reasons why the BEAD funding process so far has been worth the time spent. The first is the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) mapping process. In addition to appreciating the complexity of the FCC’s mapping process—even while identifying its problems—Bloomfield thinks fiscal responsibility is another reason it’s reasonable for the speed of BEAD funding to be slower.

Copper Valley Telecom (CVT) plans to deploy gigabit fiber-to-the-home broadband service to the village of Tatitlek (AK) and surrounding communities of the Chugach Census Area of Alaska. The project on the southern coast of the state in the Prince William Sound area is being financed with a $16.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ReConnect program. CVT will build on a project that brought 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload service to Tatitlek in 2020; the current project will extend a subsea fiber cable from Valdez to the remote community of Ellamar (AK). The fiber broadband service will provide symmetrical 1 Gbps service to communities in Alaska. CVT has provided telecommunications and broadband services to the Valdez and Copper River Basis areas of Alaska for 60 years.

New X users with interests in topics such as crafts, sports and cooking are being blanketed with political content and fed a steady diet of posts that lean toward Donald Trump and that sow doubt about the integrity of the Nov. 5 election, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The Journal created accounts on the social-media platform that only signaled an affinity for nonpolitical subjects, but a majority of the posts in their For You feed were partisan or related to the election. Kamala Harris’s campaign topped the list of most-seen accounts, with one post mocking pro-Trump hecklers at her rally in Wisconsin reaching all the Journal’s accounts. Ten of the other top 14 most-seen leaned right, including Trump’s, and overall, pro-Trump content appeared about twice as frequently as pro-Harris material. X has faced tumult since Elon Musk’s 2022 takeover but remains a place where tens of millions of Americans congregate and take in information. X has said that politics accounts for only a small percentage of what users see, but the Journal’s analysis found that, at least for new users, political content is hard to escape.