The BEAD Program is on course to ensuring that every location in the U.S. has fast, reliable, and affordable internet access over networks that can be easily upgraded to keep up with the connectivity demands of Americans for decades to come. Secretary Lutnick's reported meddling is likely to leave millions of Americans with broadband that is slower, less reliable, and more expensive—while at the same time surrendering US leadership in the global race for high-speed broadband. Americans deserve better. Like a healthy diet, we need more fiber, not less. Studies show that consumers overwhelmingly prefer fiber broadband due to its superior performance and reliability. Fiber broadband is widely understood to be better than other internet options—like Starlink's satellites—because it delivers significantly faster speeds, is more reliable due to its resistance to interference (from weather, foliage, terrain, etc), has higher bandwidth capacity, and offers symmetrical upload and download speeds, making it ideal for activities like telehealth, online learning, streaming, and gaming that require consistent high performance. Moreover, investment in terrestrial infrastructure, such as fiber, pays economic dividends in any state by creating a local infrastructure platform for economic activity and by stimulating direct, indirect, and induced job creation. In contrast, paying Starlink for a network that already exists, and that has almost no terrestrial infrastructure, has no discernible economic benefit for any state or community. Secretary Lutnick may wish BEAD to be 'technology-neutral,' but we shouldn't be technology-blind. American broadband should be the best broadband in the world.

The Healey-Driscoll administration and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s Massachusetts Broadband Institute debuted their Launchpad Program, a new initiative to expand Wi-Fi access, device distribution, digital literacy training, and internet adoption across Massachusetts. The Program will provide financial support to organizations that are interested in addressing digital access gaps. This includes non-profits, community-based organizations, and municipalities. The Launchpad Program will build on the success of the six focus areas of the Digital Equity Partnerships Program, including connectivity for economic hardship (providing ‘hot spots’ to low-income/housing insecure individuals), device distribution and refurbishment, digital literacy, education, outreach and adoption support, public space internet modernization, and Wi-Fi access. Selected applicants will have two years to implement their proposed projects. Proposals may not exceed a $1,000,000 budget. Only the most impactful proposals will be considered for awards at the maximum amount.

Stephen Cox was enjoying retirement in Florida when the opportunity to become Indiana’s broadband director arose. Like Michael Jordan, Cox is back better than ever after his initial retirement. Unlike Michael Jordan, he did not have big shoes to fill—when he came back to Indiana, the state broadband office was just Cox and one other person. Cox said the $868 million Indiana received for their Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program broadband expansion is “right in the ballpark” of what the state wanted. After seeing the news from Arkansas that 98 percent of that state’s unserved and underserved locations would be covered after just one round of BEAD applications, Cox and his team think they will be in good shape. It also helps, Cox said, that the Indiana broadband expansion plans are supported by state and other federal funds. The state legislature allocated about $250 million for broadband after the Capital Projects Funds from the U.S. Treasury became available. Indiana has already reached 110,000 addresses with broadband service through state-funded programs. This has allowed Indiana Broadband to take some of their unserved and underserved locations off their BEAD list.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has cagily created a new and coercive technique for operating outside the agency’s established statutes and procedures to attack corporate decisions he and Donald Trump do not like. That technique is to use its powers—or the threat thereof—to micromanage the activities of companies without needing to follow the niceties of commission votes and judicial review. Prime targets are media company editorial decisions and open opportunity—or diversity, equity, and inclusion—initiatives. The Project 2025 chapter on the FCC, written by its new chairman, Brendan Carr, concludes, “The Commission should focus its efforts on creating a market-friendly regulatory environment that fosters innovation and competition.” In a flurry of early activity, Chairman Carr has chosen instead to achieve political goals by increasing the regulatory reach of the agency to intrude into corporate decisions to achieve political goals.

Rep Tom Kean (R-NJ-7) introduced the Promoting United States Wireless Leadership Act of 2025, a bipartisan bill that would bolster American technological leadership by bringing key trusted leaders together and encourage U.S. participation in global standards-setting for 5G networks and for future generations of wireless communications networks. This bill would direct the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to:  

• Encourage participation by trusted companies and relevant stakeholders   
• Offer technical assistance to such trusted companies and relevant stakeholders. 

There is a new network tool that’s starting to be eased into networks that can significantly lower latency. The new standard L4S (Low Latency, Low Loss, Scalable Throughput) was released in January 2023. Comcast has started to work L4S into their networks in some of its major markets. They report that the technology can cut load latency at least in half, in some cases bringing the latency under load to close to the ping latency. The real key to making this work is to have the largest content providers build L4S into their networks. For example, a gaming app would need to make sure L4S is enabled at their serving data center to take advantage of the improved latency. If the Comcast trials are successful, it seems likely that a lot of the industry will adopt L4S, and savvy users will avoid applications that don’t use it. There will be an interesting shift in the industry if use of L4S become widespread. A lot of customers have upgraded broadband speeds to get better performance but found that they didn’t see a big improvement. It a lot of cases, the real culprit in bad performance is buffer bloat. If this gets introduced everywhere, customers might find they are satisfied with slower broadband speeds.

It’s been a strange year for internet performance in the United States. Data from the HighSpeedInternet.com speed test indicates the overall improvement of internet speed in the country has slowed by more than 50%, an unexpected development as both cable and fiber internet have seen substantial technological advances. Are internet service providers dragging their feet with the next wave of internet tech? Thankfully, the disappointing trend isn’t present in the data for all providers. Brightspeed, the youngest ISP in the performance analysis, shattered 2024’s fastest speed and ran laps around every other major ISP except one. Since the company’s launch in 2022, Brightspeed’s all-star leadership team has been transparent with its fiber expansion build, which has included some unconventional decisions that may set the template for fiber builds going forward if the success continues.