Indiana Cooperatives are once again at the front of the pack as the state prepares to dramatically expand affordable fiber access on the back of $483 million in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grants.

The first round of bead funding is expected to connect an estimated 123,000 Indiana households and businesses that currently have either substandard Internet access, or no access at all. All told, the state’s BEAD deployment plan is slated to expand affordable fiber access to 91 of Indiana's 92 counties.

Last June, the Decatur County Rural Electric Membership Corporation (DCREMC) was the first of the state’s 24 BEAD grant awardees to sign a contract with the Indiana Broadband Office.

The cooperative’s $7.1 million BEAD award will help extend fiber service to roughly 2,800 additional homes and businesses across the rural and sparsely populated communities across Decatur County, including Greensburg, Napoleon, Millhousen, and St. Paul. Most of the construction is expected to be finished before year’s end.

Image

Decatur County REMC expanded into fiber Internet access in January of 2025 under the Power Stream Fiber brand. Power Stream Fiber currently offers three tiers of service: a symmetrical 500 megabit per second (Mbps) offering for $65 a month; a symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $80 a month; and a symmetrical 2 Gbps service option for $110 a month.

California and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) continue to heavily invest in state efforts to expand affordable Internet access, and bolster digital equity, inclusion, and education programs to ensure freshly-connected communities are able to make the most of it.

According to a new announcement by the CPUC, the agency has freshly approved $14.7 million in California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) Broadband Infrastructure Grant Account funding for four fiber-optic broadband projects in rural Northern California.

The agency says it approved another $3.4 million in CASF Rural and Urban Regional Broadband Consortia grants supporting broadband planning and coordination efforts across 16 counties, and nearly $200,000 in Digital Divide Grant Program funding to expand access to technology, devices, and digital literacy training in underserved communities.

The state’s latest $18.2 million in digital literacy and access grants are one small part of California’s landmark $6 billion Broadband for All Initiative, which prioritized closing the digital divide in all of California’s 58 counties, and recently culminated in the launch of the state’s new $3.2 billion Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative (MMBI).

The CPUC states that its $14.7 million in CASF broadband infrastructure grants will be doled out to Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications – a wholly owned subsidiary of Plumas-Sierra Rural Electric Cooperative (PSREC) for four projects around the Golden State. Plumas-Sierra Telecommunications will own the finished networks across all four projects:

Rural cooperatives have been the backbone of modern efforts to bring affordable next-generation fiber to long-neglected rural U.S. communities. 

So it’s important to listen to them when they warn that Trump administration NTIA changes to U.S. telecom subsidy programs are going to have a profoundly-negative impact on efforts to expand fast, affordable Internet access.

Earlier this month rural electric and broadband cooperatives gathered in Washington, DC, for the 5th annual Broadband Leadership Summit. 

The topic du jour was broadly unpopular changes made by the NTIA to the Broadband, Equity, Deployment, and Access program (BEAD) created by the 2021 infrastructure bill.

As ILSR has repeatedly explored, NTIA BEAD changes reduced oversight of deployment, lowered quality standards, stripped away requirements that the resulting taxpayer Internet access be affordable and equitably deployed, and redirected billions of dollars away from affordable fiber to the low-Earth orbit space ambitions of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

That’s not sitting well with the cooperatives doing the heavy and costly lifting to bring affordable access into long-neglected rural communities.

Moore Haven, Florida-based Glades Electric Cooperative has completed a long-planned fiber broadband network into largely unserved parts of the Sunshine State. The 1,600-mile network, built in conjunction with Conexon Connect, now spans Glades, Hendry, Highlands and Okeechobee counties, and the vast majority of the cooperative’s electrical footprint.

Like so many U.S. cooperatives, Glades Electric, founded in 1945, is leveraging a long history with rural electrification to inform its fiber broadband expansion plans and bring connectivity to those long-stranded by market failure and a lack of Internet access competition.

Also like most U.S cooperatives, the upgrades not only bring affordable Internet access, they aid in monitoring and repairing the existing electrical network.

“In addition to closing the digital divide for our cooperative members, we are pleased to update and expand our communications to our substations, corporate offices, grid connected devices and beyond, as a result of our project and long-term partnership with Conexon Connect,” said Michael Roberge, Glades Electric Cooperative CEO

For many rural Florida subscribers getting fiber for the first time, the speeds and pricing are better than what’s seen in many urban markets.

Image

Conexon offers locals four fiber pricing tiers: an “Essentials” plan offering 200 megabits per second (Mbps) symmetrical for $59.95 per month; a “Premier” plan delivers up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) symmetrical for $79.95 per month; an “Ultimate” plan offering symmetrical 2 Gbps for $99.95 per month; and the top-tier “Elite” symmetrical 5 Gbps plan with variable pricing.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance today released its comprehensive 2026 census of Tribal Internet networks, finding that the number of active Tribal-owned and operated broadband networks has doubled since ILSR first conducted this research in 2020 while offering a new way to interact with these networks’ stories.

Across the country, nearly 90 Tribal nations are actively providing Internet access to their communities. These Tribes own the wires or the wireless equipment that guarantee community members can stay connected to loved ones, continue their education remotely, check in with their doctors without driving an hour each way, and stay engaged in the social civic life of their communities.

This number underscores a period of massive growth in the last ten years among Tribal broadband owners. 

Image

Nor is that growth over. Our research also located about 50 Tribal nations that are building or have received funding to build networks, and another few dozen that have expressed interest in bringing Internet access to their communities. Over the next decade, the ranks of Tribal broadband owners may well double again.
 

*The following story by Broadband Breakfast Reporter Kelcie Lee was originally published here.

California just activated the nation’s largest open-access middle-mile network, bringing it one step further in closing the digital divide. 

On Thursday, the California Department of Technology (CDT) announced that after five years of planning, building, and promising access, the state’s $3.2 billion Middle-Mile Broadband Initiative (MMBI) is now operational. The high-speed network connected the last mile to the state’s first customer, the Bishop Paiute Tribe, a Native American community in Inyo County. 

This connection represents a key resource for places across the country that have been historically underserved or unserved, including rural and tribal areas. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the MMBI plans to construct 8,000 miles of fiber across the state, and he hopes to get more than 5,300 miles completely built out by the end of 2026.  

California’s MMBI milestone was celebrated by a ceremonial signing between CDT and Bishop Paiute Tribe leadership as well as a live network light up demo. As the switch was flipped, students and children were seen using computers with their new internet service.

The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa (also referred to as Ojibwe) has officially begun construction on a foundational fiber optic broadband expansion project in northern Minnesota that is poised to bridge the digital divide for thousands of Tribal residents.

The ambitious undertaking is supported by a significant $20 million grant awarded under the 2021 Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, marking a major step forward in modernizing infrastructure for the sovereign nation.

The massive project aims to overhaul the existing connectivity landscape across the Bois Forte Reservation.

Image

Once completed, the new network will deliver a high-speed, future-proof up to 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber-to-the-home network to over 2,097 largely-underserved Native American households, businesses, and community anchor institutions.

Many Tribal nations were skipped over by past fiber deployments either due to outright hostility to Tribal interests, or a disinterest in the work required to align for-profit deployments with the needs and wishes of what is often multiple Tribal territories.

For Bois Forte, this new fiber network is expected to have a transformative impact across several key sectors, fundamentally improving community access to vital services: