News

The next Building For Digital Equity (#B4DE) livestream will be centered around the theme: “Wired for Freedom: Digital Access and the American Dream.” The agenda is shaping up to offer attendees new battlefield intelligence and how community-centered organizations and coalitions are carrying on in the face of vital funding and programming cuts.

Congressional Republicans are moving forward on a plan to kill a popular Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program providing free Wi-Fi to schoolchildren. Critics of the repeal say it’s a “cruel” effort that will undermine initiatives to bridge the affordability and access gap for families long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The Trump administration’s dismantling of a popular broadband grant program has been greeted with disgust and anger by those working to bridge the digital divide, leaving many states' planned broadband expansions in limbo, and affordable broadband advocates contemplating potential legal action. The unprecedented choice to destroy digital skills training and broadband adoption programs created by an act of Congress is seeing escalating pushback by a growing coalition of frustrated lawmakers and state broadband offices.

NextLight's locally-funded Internet Assistance Program is currently helping 14 percent more city subscribers than the federal Affordable Connectivity Program did at its peak. At the time the ACP was discontinued, 906 NextLight customers were receiving the federal discount. As of April 2025, NextLight’s own assistance program is helping 1,034 customers – a 14 percent increase in one year.

Construction crews have begun work on Fort Bragg’s long-awaited municipal fiber network, which will ultimately bring affordable fiber to the California city of 7,000. The total cost of the project is estimated to be $17 million. Of that, $10 million will be paid for by a Federal Funding Account (FFA) grant from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)

Today we are releasing a new two-part dashboard based on California Public Utilities Commission data that helps visualize the success of community-based broadband projects under the state's transformative The Last-Mile Federal Funding Account program. The map visualizes the relative size of grant amounts per county and the percentage of those grants that went to community networks, in which we group municipal or other public entities, Tribal governments, cooperatives, and nonprofits.

Grays Harbor PUD says it’s getting to work leveraging a $7 million grant from the Washington State Broadband Office to expand affordable fiber access in the South Elma, Porter, and Cedarville areas of the Evergreen State. Grays Harbor PUD was one of 16 Washington utilities chosen by the Washington State Broadband Office to receive grant funding during awards first announced back in 2023.

Digital inclusion organizations are reeling after the Trump administration announced the Digital Equity Act, embedded in the bipartisan infrastructure law, was being cancelled months after federal grants had already been reviewed and awarded. As news began to trickle out, many of those working on these issues across the nation had more questions than answers as they scrambled to process a mix of confusion and frustration, especially mindful of the fact that the Digital Equity Act barely touches on the subject of race.

Timnath, Colorado's new municipal network has announced they’ve lit up their very first subscriber in partnership with the city of Loveland’s Pulse Fiber municipal broadband network. Inspired by Pulse, the Town of Timnath entered into an intergovernmental revenue-sharing agreement with Loveland’s ISP in August of 2023. Tinmath receives 25 percent of the network’s gross income, with an expected 2 to 6 percent return on capital investment over 20 to 30 years. The network is expected to be paid off in 25 years.

Some of the nation’s leading voices, thinkers, and doers in the community broadband sector will connect and collaborate in the nation’s capital for the inaugural "Community First: The Future of Public Broadband Conference and Hill Day" next week. The two-day conference – slated for May 14 and 15 – is being hosted by the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) and New America Open Technology Institute (OTI), in partnership with the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and the Community Broadband Action Network.

Legislation that would require ISPs operating in Massachusetts to offer qualifying low-income households high-speed Internet service for $15 per month is set to have its first legislative hearing today. The hearing in Massachusetts comes as similar legislation is being considered by state lawmakers in Vermont and California – all three of which are modeled on New York’s Affordable Broadband Act.

The City of Baltimore is making steady progress with several grant-fueled initiatives to deliver fiber and wireless to city apartment complexes to further expand affordable access. The city is putting the finishing touches on a Request for Proposal (RFP) to strike a new public-private-partnership with an as-yet-unselected broadband provider.

States are moving ahead with their Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program processes after the Commerce Department extended for 90 days the deadlines for final spending plans. The Trump administration last week gave all states a 90-day extension on their deadlines to submit their lists of selected projects for approval, documents that were originally due one year after a state’s initial BEAD implementation proposal was given the federal green light.

Vermont’s Otter Creek Communications Utility District (CUD) says it has completed its ambitious fiber deployment, bringing affordable access to more than 6,000 homes and businesses in the Rutland County region of the Green Mountain State. Otter Creek CUD leveraged grant funding to form a public-private partnership with Consolidated Communications.

Superior, Wisconsin officials say they’re getting very close to lighting up the first subscribers of a city-owned fiber network that will finally bring affordable, next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000. The city maintains that its ultimate goal is to connect every last city resident. Phase 1 of the network deployment is expected to cost $6.25 million, buoyed heavily by grants made possible by the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Port of Whitman County in Washington state has received a new $2.9 million grant it says will help dramatically expand affordable fiber access to the heavily rural county of 48,000. The latest funding, from the Washington State Department of Commerce’s Community Economic Revitalization Board (CERB) will support the construction of dark fiber to approximately 109 additional unserved and underserved locations in Whitman County.

In Chittenden County, Vermont the Chittenden County Communication Union District is using a $2.1 million grant from the Vermont Community Broadband Board to begin expanding high-speed fiber-optic Internet connections to unserved and underserved areas across five towns. The grant is expected to fund this first phase of the county’s network build this year. Phase two is dependent on additional federal funding sources (likely including BEAD) but is tenuously slated to begin in 2027.

Comcast says it’s acquiring San Bruno, California’s CityNet, a municipally owned and operated broadband, video and voice network that currently serves over 5,400 residents and businesses. San Bruno’s $8 million sale to Comcast was prompted by $21.5 million in debt and what the city says was surging operating costs.

UTOPIA Fiber is celebrating another banner year as the nation’s largest community-owned open access network recently announced its subscriber growth numbers for 2024. The Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency recently announced it officially hit the 70,000 subscriber mark and is now delivering fiber-to-the-home access in 21 Utah cities, partnering with 19 private-sector ISPs.

The Delaware County, Ohio Board of Commissioners and Consolidated Cooperative have announced the start of a $4.9 million joint initiative to dramatically expand affordable fiber optic broadband access to large swaths of the heavily underserved county. The expansion will be funded via American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds, and the deployment will target more rural communities largely in the northwestern and north-central portions of Delaware County.