West Virginia's plan for Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program funds aims to ensure that every resident has access to reliable, affordable, and high-speed broadband and the ability to use it effectively. The cost of high-speed broadband internet service in West Virginia remains a significant barrier to adoption. According to the West Virginia Department of Economic Development's (WVDED) 2023 Five-Year Action Plan, up to 57 percent of West Virginians may find broadband internet access unaffordable. West Virginia’s affordability gap is particularly pronounced in rural areas, where high deployment costs and limited competition have driven prices beyond affordability for the area’s lower-than-average income households. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act’s BEAD provisions are premised on Congress’s determination that “[a]ccess to affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband is essential to full participation in modern life in the United States,” and that “[t]he persistent ‘digital divide’ in the United States is a barrier to” the nation’s “economic competitiveness [and the] equitable distribution of essential public services, including health care and education.” While broadband is a necessary condition to connect all West Virginians, WVDED recognizes that increased broadband infrastructure alone is not sufficient. Digital equity has been a key consideration throughout the broadband planning process to ensure that West Virginians who have been on the wrong side of the digital divide have the tools and support they need to use the internet in a way that allows them to reach their fullest potential. So the state's primary digital equity goal is to "Ensure broadband access is available and affordable for all West Virginians."

Recently participants gathered in a home movie theater on Matthew Rantanen’s ranch in Southern California to shine a beam of light through more than 55,000 feet (17 kilometers) of fiber optic cable coiled up in the corner. The demonstration took place during a hands-on broadband training for tribal nations where participants handled fiber made up of strands of glass as thin as human hair that transmit energy through pulses of light. The session was part of an initiative founded in 2021 by Rantanen and his business partner, Christopher Mitchell, to help shore up historic disparities in connectivity in Indian Country. If broadband expansion is to succeed on tribal lands, it will happen because people understand how to make it work in their communities, and that’s where nuts-and-bolts training sessions like this come into play. Tribal nations have struggled to connect to the web for a variety of reasons ranging from living in remote locations to lack of investment by internet service providers. The solution Rantanen and Mitchell came up with was the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp, a hands-on way to help people understand the technology through three-day sessions.

Starlink poses a potential threat to cable in largely rural areas, but it also turns out that Elon Musk's satellite broadband service is emerging as a partner for cable operators that are seeking new ways to keep their business customers connected. In the wake of announcing its first cable partnership, with Comcast's business unit in June, Starlink has quickly followed with a similar pact with GCI, Alaska's largest broadband operator. GCI, a subsidiary of Liberty Broadband, said it has inked an enterprise reseller agreement with Starlink, the satellite broadband service that relies on a constellation of thousands of low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Tapping into Starlink's platform will give GCI a new way to connect business service customers in some of the most remote areas of North America.

AT&T said most phone numbers connected to a Commerce Department-linked public safety network service relied on by U.S. first responders were compromised in a data breach. The new statement reverses course on how the breach affected FirstNet, a program managed by AT&T that’s relied on by federal, state, local and tribal governments for emergency public safety services like fire and police departments. “Our initial assessment of the percentage of FirstNet numbers in the compromised data was incorrect,” said an AT&T spokesperson. “We now believe the proportion of FirstNet numbers included in the data is similar to that of our broader customer base.” “We take protecting FirstNet data very seriously. And we’ll continue to work with the FirstNet Authority and the public safety community to ensure FirstNet is effectively serving the nation’s first responders,” the spokesperson added.

A flawed software update sent out by a little-known cybersecurity company caused major computer outages around the world on July 19, affecting airlines, hospitals, emergency responders and scores of other businesses and services. How could that happen? The chaos stemmed from an update sent by CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas, to businesses that use its software to protect against hackers and online intruders. But when CrowdStrike’s new code reached computers that run Microsoft Windows software, the machines began to crash. The cascading effects highlighted the world’s reliance on Microsoft and a handful of cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike that provide the world’s technological backbone. The issues also raised broader questions about what repercussions software firms should face when flaws in their code cause major disruptions.