Individuals who primarily Reside in a Rural Area

The Universal Service Fund (USF) is inefficient, ineffective, and funded by a regressive tax mechanism. Several reforms could improve the program:

The House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation held a hearing on May 10 discussing federal funding for broadband deployment as part of ongoing efforts to

TDS has been taking every opportunity to talk up the Federal Communications Commission's Alternative Connect America (A-CAM) program and why the company is so excited about a possible extension to the program, even as the US gets set to award an unprecedented $42.5 billion for the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) rural broadband program. “A-CAM has been absolutely revolutionary for improving our hardest-to-serve rural areas,” said TDS Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Andrew Petersen. TDS is rather unique among publicly-held broadband providers in that it is eligible

The Federal Communications Commission quietly won two court cases over the last month that most folks have not heard about. A group of complainants brought a suit against the FCC, saying that the agency didn’t have explicit direction from Congress for the creation of the Universal Service Fund (USF) or the authority to delegate the operation of the USF to a third party.

The ACCESS BROADBAND Act requires the

A sweeping food and agriculture bill in the works in Washington (DC) is set to reshape the future of farming in Minnesota. Minnesota lawmakers are set to play a big role in shaping the final bill. Sens Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Tina Smith (D-MN) are members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, while Reps. Angie Craig (D-MN) and Brad Finstad (R-MN) are on the House panel. In terms of broadband, an estimated 144,000 Minnesota households still don't have access to high-speed internet.

The ongoing Farm Bill negotiations may mean linking millions of Americans to the 21st-century economy and taking a step toward the broader dream of high-tech agriculture. Since the last Farm Bill was passed in 2018, the federal government has spent billions to try to bring high-speed internet to the nearly 12 million rural households that don’t have it.

A bipartisan effort to push the Federal Communications Commission to expand internet access to rural areas will finally get a Senate hearing, two years after the bill was first introduced. The Reforming Broadband Connectivity Act has support in both the House and Senate and will get its day in the Senate Commerce Committee Thursday, May 11th, 2023. The bill — introduced by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the Senate and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) in the House — orders the FCC to determine ho

According to the US Census Bureau, between 2017 to 2021, about 28% of households in Ohio’s Columbiana County (more than 11,500 households) did not have an active broadband subscription. A similar problem exists across rural Appalachia in Ohio — and it is an expensive problem to fix. Regions like Southeast Ohio present a challenge to installing broadband due to the hilly and rural terrain.

Rapidly advancing technologies are further highlighting the global impact of the digital divide, which is the gap between those with reliable access to high-speed internet services and those without it. Here are five creative ways companies are trying to bridge the divide: