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Sens Joe Manchin (D-WV), Susan Collins (R-ME), Angus King (I-ME) and Rob Portman (R-OH) led 16 bipartisan Senators in encouraging the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Assistant Secretary Alan Davidson to follow Congressional intent in implementing the $65 billion included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) for broadband expansion efforts across the United States. "The IIJA provides unprecedented levels of funding for broadband directly to states," said the letter.

Consolidated Communications launched a fresh “Fidium Fiber” brand for consumers in its New England footprint, pairing its residential connectivity with a new app that offers users more control over their in-home broadband experience. Currently available to customers in parts of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, Fidium Fiber offers symmetrical 50 Mbps, 250 Mbps and 1-gig service tiers. The latter runs $70 per month, with Wi-Fi equipment and installation costs included and no contract required.

Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss.

Comcast said it is closing in on 1 million quasi-public hotspots deployed after standing up about 50,000 access points in Illinois, northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.

Comcast said it plans to deploy “hundreds of thousands” more in the region over the next several months. Currently, only Comcast customers have access to the new home-as-a-hotspot signals, which the MSO began to light up last June. The MSOs behind the CableWiFi initiative have deployed more than 200,000 hotspots. Comcast is only disclosing its total Wi-Fi hotspot deployments, and is not breaking out how many are being applied to the cross-MSO roaming initiative and how many are coming way of its neighborhood hotspot project.

A former Los Angeles schools superintendent has stepped forward to criticize a $1 billion effort to provide every student, teacher and campus administrator with a tablet or laptop computer.

William Johnston, 87, did not object to the goal, but focused instead on using school-construction bonds to fund the project, which, so far, has involved purchasing iPads.

“I believe the current purchase of iPads from school bonds is illegal,” Johnston wrote in a Feb 6 letter to the committee that oversees the spending of the voter-approved funding. “iPads are known to last for approximately three years,” Johnston wrote. “New developments and technology will make them obsolete, requiring replacements. School bonds are designed to buy property, build schools, equip schools with lasting equipment. School bonds are paid for over a 25-year period.”

He added: “Voters approved the school bonds because they needed schools built, schools repaired, school equipment updated. They did not vote for iPads, a three-year consumable product.” Johnston, who served as superintendent from 1971 to 1981, is hardly alone in his concerns, which the district recently addressed publicly. Officials have maintained that state law, over time, has been clarified to affirm that bonds can be used for technology. And bond measures specifically list funding for technology.