Late last month, voters in Block Island, Rhode Island’s sole town of New Shoreham gathered (at safe distances) in the local school building and on its grounds to approve $8 million in borrowing to build an island-wide, municipal fiber network. Residents were overwhelmingly in favor of funding the broadband network, which would be the first of its kind in the state.… Read More
This report investigates broadband competition in communities across the country.… Read More
UTOPIA Fiber, the publicly owned, open access network, has begun a pilot wildfire-detection projected which has the potential to provide safer, faster, less expensive service to communities in Utah, saving the state tens of millions of dollars a year.… Read More
Millions of students do not have access to adequate connectivity, but Black, Latinx, and Native children are disproportionately impacted by the “homework gap.” One study found that children in one out of every three Black, Latinx, and Native American households did not have broadband access at home.… Read More
Yesterday in an announcement via livestream, the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hamilton County Schools, and the fiber arm of municipal utility Electric Power Board (EPB) announced a partnership to provide free Internet access and hardware to the 17,700 homes with school children on free or reduced lunch programs in the county.… Read More
Tucked away in Kishacoquillas Valley (also known as Big Valley) between Stone and Jacks Mountains lies a 120-foot repurposed HAM radio tower, now the base of operations for the Rural Broadband Cooperative (RBC), a group bringing fixed wireless to a rural Pennsylvania community.… Read More
Yesterday, Congresswoman Deb Haaland and Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced the DIGITAL Reservations Act, a bill which ends the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) practice of selling wireless spectrum rights on the lands of Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations and grants ownership, management, and governance of all spectrum to those groups in perpetuity.… Read More
Maine’s High-Speed Internet Infrastructure Bond Issue has passed. 76% of voters authorized the issuance of $15 million in general obligation bonds to expand broadband access for residents in underserved and unserved areas.… Read More
The City of West Des Moines, Iowa, announced an innovative public-private partnership with Google Fiber to bring gigabit Internet to all 67,000 of its citizens. The city will build conduit connecting every home and business, available for use by different providers. Google Fiber will be the first, laying and maintaining its own fiber once the city’s construction is complete.… Read More
