The ​​soundproofed privacy pod tucked inside the first floor of the Rural Edge affordable housing development may be one of the most consequential pieces of infrastructure built in Vermont since the state’s Communications Union Districts (CUDs) first began deploying fiber networks.

With a population of just over 500 Vermonters living in the small town of Groton — where the nearest hospital is a 30-minute drive away and not every conversation can or should be overheard at home — the fiber-connected privacy pods are small enough to fit just two people, but private enough for life-enhancing online conversations to be had.

“Groton is where the largest percent of folks are without high speed Internet access. It’s highly unserved, except for downtown,” explained Chritsa Shute, Executive Director of NEK Broadband Collaborative, which recently combined with the CVFiber CUD to form a 72-town telecommunication utility district now providing fiber Internet service across some of the most rural parts of the most rural state in the U.S.

Thanks to the commitment of Groton volunteers and town leaders and their intimate knowledge of their community – backed with the resources of the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCCB) — “we knew what addresses didn’t have service,” Shute tells ILSR, fresh off the weekend’s grand opening celebration of the Groton Connectivity Hub, which also featured a live fiber splicing demo, online safety presentations, and drop-in tech help for the public.

Lawmakers are pushing the Trump administration to stop being murky on whether states will be able to access tens of billions in “non-deployment funds” mandated by Congress that have been temporarily hijacked by the administration’s unpopular changes to a once-in-a-lifetime federal grant program to expand high-speed Internet access.

Representative April McClain Delaney (D-MD) is the latest politician to send a letter to the Trump NTIA asking for competent guidance on what will happen to the estimated $21 billion in “non deployment funds” suddenly stuck in limbo.

“States cannot build a workforce without workforce development funding; they cannot ensure safe adoption without digital safety education; they cannot support vulnerable populations without telehealth and remote-learning infrastructure; and they cannot protect critical networks without robust cybersecurity capacity,” Delaney and three other lawmakers wrote.

Image

A year ago the Trump administration made numerous controversial changes to the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program included in the 2021 infrastructure bill. That included removing rules ensuring that the resulting taxpayer-funded Internet access would be equitably deployed and affordable.

Today, The Verge published an in-depth piece – “Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband” – authored by our own Sean Gonsalves and ILSR contributor Karl Bode that examines the BEAD program from its inception to where it is now.

The piece details how the once-in-a-generation federal initiative to solve America’s digital divide has devolved into “a flaming mess.”

Here's a few excerpts:

"At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide."

"But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage left smoldering on the ground. It was an unintentionally perfect metaphor for a once-in-a-generation attempt to fix the creaky US broadband system, now a flaming mess melting into a slush fund for billionaires."

"Bezos — along with newly minted trillionaire Elon Musk — has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), a $42.45 billion broadband expansion program passed as part of President Joe Biden’s 2021 “Build Back Better” initiative. BEAD was intended to give long-underserved communities billions of dollars for high-quality, future-proof fiber networks."

"But under President Donald Trump and a coalition of MAGA-allied tech moguls, Build Back Better has been transformed into 'tear down quickly,' leaving states mired in bureaucracy and delays. Five years later, only a handful of the millions of Americans slated for an internet access upgrade actually got one, and there’s little accountability in sight..."

For years, the conventional playbook for communities stuck with slow, expensive Internet service has been to wait. Wait for the incumbent cable or phone company to upgrade connections, wait for a federal grant, wait for someone else to solve the problem. 

Now, a growing number of communities have decided they are done waiting.

And on July 7 at 12 noon ET, the next installment in a joint webinar series from the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) will showcase a new financing model being put into action that allows for communities to control their digital futures.

The free, one-hour live webinar to be broadcast on ILSR's YouTube channel — "Control + Shift + ALTernative: Building Community-Owned Fiber" — will go behind the scenes of two real-world community fiber projects to tease out the practical lessons that other communities can learn from.

Registration for the webinar is now open here.

The webinar will be moderated by Gigi Sohn, one of the country's foremost telecommunications policy experts and head of AAPB, and Sean Gonsalves, Senior Writer and Associate Director for Communications with ILSR's Community Broadband Networks Initiative.

Together they will lead a conversation with four practitioners who have been in the trenches of community broadband development: Jim Cannon, CEO of Pivot-Tech; Scott Corbitt, General Manager of the Port of Lewiston; Christina Burns, Kendall County Administrator; and Chris Perlitz, Managing Director at Municipal Capital Markets Group, Inc.

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.
 

Trump Federal Communication Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has announced vague potential changes to the FCC’s E-Rate program that could harm program funding, effectiveness, and the overarching goal of bringing affordable Internet access to long-neglected schools and rural communities trapped on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The reforms come as Carr also looks to make changes to the FCC’s broadband mapping efforts, something consumer groups say could harm the government’s ability to measure which communities need improved, affordable access, or suffer from a pronounced lack of broadband competition.

In an announcement to the FCC website, Carr stated the 30-year-old bipartisan E-Rate program, which costs $3 billion annually, was in dire need of reforms. The program is primarily funded by a small surcharge affixed to phone lines. With the steady erosion of copper-based phone lines, debates have arisen about how to best sustain the program.

But instead of focusing on issues like subsidy fraud by large telecoms, Carr’s announcement oddly focuses heavily on concerns about student “screen time” and what content students are allowed to view. It’s a problematic foray for an FCC boss recently under fire for unconstitutional censorship efforts targeting comedians and journalists.

In 2020, former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled an Internet Master Plan that was one of the most ambitious municipal broadband proposals in U.S. history. 

It detailed a $2.1 billion commitment to deploy publicly-owned, open-access fiber across the city’s five boroughs, promising to reshape how the nation's largest city would connect a then-estimated 1.5 million city residents without Internet access.

Then, Mayor Eric Adams came into office and quietly killed it.

Now, with new Mayor Zohran Mamdani – whose entire political brand is built on making essential services affordable to the people who need them most – pursuing a popular affordability agenda that has energized his base and inspired electoral interest far outside the Big Apple, the prospect for a city-wide municipal Internet network is back on the radar.

Last week, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams – a non-voting member of the New York City Council with the right to introduce and co-sponsor legislation – released a detailed “Get Connected” report calling “for the city to deliver high-speed, low-cost citywide municipal Internet service akin to a public utility,” laying the policy groundwork for what at least has the potential to become the Mamdani administration's signature infrastructure initiative.

The Cost of Killing the Master Plan

At a press conference with advocates and tenants at the Grand Street Guild Housing Complex, where NYC Mesh has successfully installed fiber connections, Williams said “in the [I]nternet age, we cannot afford to be disconnected, yet many can’t afford to connect.”

In the last few years, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has been more intensely focused on ensuring that broadband in California is affordable. 

So it’s curious to see the California State Assembly vote 67-1 on May 18 to strip telecom oversight authority away from the CPUC and shift it to a more easily lobbied state legislature – and an as-yet-undefined state broadband office.

The effort still has a long road before it’s formalized.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 9, authored by Assemblymember Tasha Boerner, D-Encinitas, now moves on to the California Senate, where it needs to secure a two-thirds vote before appearing on a statewide ballot before California voters.

Image

The proposal would remove the state constitutional requirement to define and regulate telecommunications as a public utility, something long supported by telecom giants. Boerner’s amendment (and companion bill AB 2289) gives lawmakers leeway to strip the CPUC of its telecom portfolio and hand it over to a newly created state broadband office by 2028.

Consumer Advocates Are 'Shocked' and Skeptical 

Boerner’s proposal is being sold to state lawmakers and the local press as a way to keep the CPUC focused on soaring electrical costs.

In the marathon to bring universal high-speed Internet service to the most rural state in the nation, Vermont is heading into the last-mile stretch of the race with the finish line in sight.

In February, the Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) announced that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) overseeing the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, had approved Vermont’s Final Proposal, unlocking $93 million of the state's nearly $229 million federal allocation.

After years of painstaking planning, public input, and navigating bureaucratic hurdles, it marked a pivotal moment – with the state's selected grant recipients cleared to begin deploying mostly fiber to the communities that have long been waiting for high-speed connectivity after decades of neglect from the Big Cable and Telecom providers.

“This is a major milestone for many of our rural towns and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen and revitalize communities,” Gov. Phil Scott said in a statement, crediting NTIA, Vermont's congressional delegation, and the VCBB for shepherding the state's plan.

Image

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, never one to mince words, spoke to both the significance and the frustration of the moment. “Affordable, high-speed [I]nternet is a vitally important resource in every corner of the country. It is foundational to modern life,” he said. 

Consumer and civil rights groups last week told the Trump administration that their proposed “reforms” of the FCC’s Lifeline program would undermine efforts to ensure equitable, affordable access to the internet for all Americans, and are based on lies about immigrant fraud.

Last January, the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr proposed a series of “reforms” to the agency’s Lifeline program, which, as part of the broader bipartisan Universal Service Fund (USF) program, provides qualifying low-income US households with a modest $9.25 monthly subsidy for telecom services (which jumps to $34.25 for tribal homes).

At the time, Carr insisted that the reforms were necessary to improve government efficiency.

“The FCC has an obligation to be a good steward of federal dollars,” Carr said in a prepared statement. “And that is why the agency will be taking a comprehensive look at the FCC’s nearly $1 billion dollar a year Lifeline program, which subsidizes phone and Internet services for low-income Americans.”

To further sell his pitch, Carr made the false claim that the program was somehow awash with illegal immigrants who were exploiting U.S. taxpayers. To “prove” his claim, Carr stated that more than $5 million in Lifeline money funded 116,000 dead people across three states, with the heaviest “fraud” occurring in California.

Image

“Over 80% of those scams took place in California alone,” Carr said. “That type of waste, fraud, and abuse is completely unacceptable. It should go without saying that only beneficiaries that are both living and here legally should qualify for benefits under this program,” Carr said.