Fierce

Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program money may be enough to connect most folks to 100/20 Mbps, but those speeds likely won’t cut it by the end of the decade, said Connect Humanity’s Brian Vo. We’ve heard from the White House that the BEAD Program will help connect everyone in the country to reliable and affordable high-speed internet by 2030.

Money is beginning to really flow into the U.S. fiber ecosystem, but the dollars are coming from a somewhat unexpected source—middle-mile and long-haul fiber projects.

Kendall County (IL) wanted to deliver a better broadband experience to its residents. So, it reached out to the local incumbent providers which reacted with smugness and arrogance. The county was so put off by the incumbents that it instead pursued a public-private broadband partnership. Many of the county’s residents have been dissatisfied with their selection of broadband providers, which include AT&T, Comcast and Metronet. So, the county decided to put out a request for proposal (RFP) for a private company to bring some broadband competition to the area.

At the Mountain Connect conference, one of Elon Musk’s top lieutenants—Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX—regaled the audience with exciting stories about rocket launches, and she also touted SpaceX’s Starlink broadband service as a great way to close the digital divide in hard-to-reach rural locations. Shotwell also revealed SpaceX was working with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on some “structural elements” to determine if SpaceX will bid for Broadband Equity Access and D

AST SpaceMobile, which is preparing to offer low earth orbit (LEO)-based cellular broadband network services, says that it has gotten an initial license from the Federal Communications Commission for space-based operations in the United States. Initially, AST SpaceMobile’s services will include a cellphone-to-satellite offering.

Like a phoenix, Starry is on the rise again. The fixed wireless internet service provider (ISP) took the world by storm a few short years ago before declaring bankruptcy in 2023. Besides climbing out of bankruptcy, much of the past year has been focused on upgrading its hardware and software to offer gigabit speeds (1,000 Mbps).

Fixed wireless access (FWA) is often thought of as a way to connect remote areas where fiber can’t do the job. But the technology also has a place in the big city, as nonprofit DigitalC has shown. DigitalC kicked off in January an 18-month plan to construct a citywide FWA network in Cleveland.

The broadband industry needs more workers. Specifically, it needs tens of thousands more construction workers and broadband technicians to complete a coming wave of government-funded deployment projects or else critical broadband expansions could be delayed. Some original research conducted by Continuum Capital found that the U.S.