For too long, businesses in our region have been accepting their connectivity limitations. If the legacy network could handle the emails, maybe a video conference or two, and a basic website, it was considered sufficient.But today, the internet isn't a utility you plug into; it's the foundation upon which your entire business strategy is built. If that foundation is cracking, your business is limited. It's time to shift away from merely managing outdated connections and start demanding infrastru

I was flying home from CES when a close friend and fellow Deadhead texted me the news of Bob Weir’s death. Coming off the high of a successful show, the message hit hard. Bob’s music is woven into every decade of my life. He was the soundtrack to the best moments and a lifeline during the hardest ones. Heading out with friends to follow the Dead was the closest I ever came to feeling like Jack Kerouac or any of the heroes of the American road.

Bob Weir joined the Grateful Dead at 15 and may have played more live shows than any musician in history. For him, music created community.  I had seen that same force at work days earlier in Las Vegas, where people from around the world came together to build, trade ideas, and push forward. “Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand” is from one of Bob’s songs and it also describes the magic that happens anywhere people of different backgrounds gather face to face with a common purpose.

The Dead were deeply embedded in Bay Area tech culture from the beginning. A remarkable number of early computer and internet pioneers were Deadheads: Stewart Brand, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Steve Wozniak, Howard Rheingold, and others. Some of the first digital messages traded between researchers at Stanford and MIT in the early Arpanet era were Grateful Dead setlists. The band’s ethos influenced how these founders thought about digital rights, user communities, creative exploration, and the cultural tone of early Silicon Valley.

Starlink did something new and recently issued an update discussing the recent history and the outlook for the company. Perhaps the company will update this kind of report periodically. Coverage and Customers. Starlink says it became available in 42 new countries around the world during 2025. The company says it has over 6 million customers,…

The industry spends a lot of time focusing on potential federal broadband regulation, and bills introduced in Congress get a lot of press. It’s easy to forget that a lot of broadband legislation happens at the State level, NCSL (the National Conference of State Legislators) tracks state legislation across the country and wrote an article…

WASHINGTON Jan. 12, 2026 – The Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland rejected a complaint filed by the Campaign for Accountability, or CfA, against FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on Thursday, citing a state bar rule that allows for dismissal without first-hand knowledge of misconduct. 

The complaint, filed in the District of Columbia and Maryland on Sept. 23, 2025 by Michelle Cuppersmith, executive director of the CfA, highlights recent public comments made by Carr against Jimmy Kimmel in which Carr “invoke(d) his regulatory authority to publicly demand ABC/Disney terminate late night host Jimmy Kimmel for his commentary, threatening to investigate broadcasters that air political content with which Mr. Carr disagrees.” 

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12, 2026 – USTelecom President and CEO Jonathan Spalter urged less red tape, retirement of copper networks and more fiber to rural areas in a New Year’s note to stakeholders of the telecom industry lobbying group.

Spalter began by calling for “more green lights and less red tape” regarding state permitting. As previously outlined by USTelecom in November 2025, “red tape” deployment of broadband networks through excessive permitting and fees delay BEAD funds from reaching dependent underserved communities. 

By mid-2024, Denmark had spent only about 1 percent of the $224 million in pledged funds.

The current tensions surrounding Greenland are not about a realistic risk of U.S. invasion. They are about something far more uncomfortable for Europe: Credibility. 

Specifically, they expose the gap between what NATO allies—Denmark included—promise on security, and what they actually deliver. That gap matters not only for Arctic defense, but increasingly for telecommunications infrastructure, vendor risk, and the future shape of global networks.

Greenland has become a strategic test case. Not of American imperial ambition, but of whether European allies can be trusted to follow through on commitments in regions that are militarily, economically, and technologically critical.

Ookla published a WISP Report Card in November that looks at the speed performance of eight large WISPs – Etheric Networks, GeoLinks, NextLink, Resound Networks, Rise Broadband, Starry, Unwired Broadband, and Wisper Internet. Since this article was published, Starry has been acquired by Verizon. Ookla trended speed test results for each WISP by quarter from…

Two high-speed internet expansion projects funded by the Oklahoma Broadband office and the federal government have been completed in two southwest counties in Oklahoma.

Residents and businesses in Washita and Greer counties saw recent completion after being administered by the state office and funded through the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund.

The projects, completed by Dobson Fiber, are delivering what the State Broadband Office called “reliable, fiber-optic internet service” to 366 locations in and around Burns Flat and Granite. With the availability of fiber-optic technology, residents will now have access to faster speeds, improved reliability, and enhanced connectivity to support education, healthcare, business development, and everyday needs.

State and local leaders must find a way to carry out their digital equity plans if they want their communities to stay abreast of tech’s growing role in society, experts say. 

With industry leaders hailing innovations like agentic artificial intelligence as the next big thing in 2026 and beyond, government leaders who do not prepare their residents for a tech-forward future could fall further into the digital divide and miss out on the benefits of a modernized workforce and economy, experts say. 

The COVID-19 pandemic galvanized a lot of investment into digital inclusion and skills programs, as most jobs, classes and services entered a remote environment, but now states and localities are grappling with how to maintain the momentum of their digital inclusion initiatives amid budget and funding uncertainty and competing priorities.

Jan. 13, 2026 – Sertex Broadband Solutions has been awarded a $1.58 million contract to expand a community-owned fiber-to-the-home network in southeastern Vermont, adding approximately 60 miles of new fiber infrastructure across five towns.

After years of waiting, states and territories will soon begin breaking ground on projects intended to expand access to high-speed internet nationwide under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

In June of 2025, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), the Department of Commerce agency responsible for administering this program, published updated rules for BEAD, rescinding previous guidance and conditional approvals for funding. The agency gave states 90 days to integrate new requirements and finalize their projects. On Nov. 18, the NTIA announced the first 18 approvals and has continued to make approvals on a rolling basis.

If you stand quietly in the nave of the former Christian Science church on Funston Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond District, you can hear the sound of the internet breathing. It is not the chaotic screech of a dial-up modem or the ping of a notification, but a steady, industrial hum—a low-frequency thrum generated by hundreds of spinning hard drives and the high-velocity fans that cool them. This is the headquarters of the Internet Archive, a non-profit library that has taken on the Sisyphean task of recording the entire digital history of human civilization.

Here, amidst the repurposed neoclassical columns and wooden pews of a building constructed to worship a different kind of permanence, lies the physical manifestation of the "virtual" world. We tend to think of the internet as an ethereal cloud, a place without geography or mass. But in this building, the internet has weight. It has heat. It requires electricity, maintenance, and a constant battle against the second law of thermodynamics. As of late 2025, this machine—collectively known as the Wayback Machine—has archived over one trillion web pages.1 It holds 99 petabytes of unique data, a number that expands to over 212 petabytes when accounting for backups and redundancy.3

The scale of the operation is staggering, but the engineering challenge is even deeper.

New York communities can now apply for a new round of state funding aimed at expanding high-speed internet access.

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that up to $36 million is available through the ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Program to support locally driven broadband projects in unserved and underserved areas across the state.

The program funds open-access, publicly controlled broadband infrastructure, giving municipalities more control over how internet service is delivered. Since launching, the Municipal Infrastructure Program has committed $268 million to projects in 24 counties, supporting more than 2,300 miles of new fiber optic lines and 68 wireless hubs serving more than 96,000 homes and businesses.

“Our ConnectALL initiative is delivering results — connecting thousands of homes and businesses to high-speed internet across every region of the state,” Hochul said.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6, 2025 – Rural wireless carriers and consumer advocates want federal regulators to reconsider the approval of a $1 billion spectrum sale from Array Digital Infrastructure to AT&T.

Groups argued cable wasn’t a meaningful competitive constraint in the wireless industry.

The Federal Communications Commission’s December order approving the deal “is in conflict with established law and is based on numerous erroneous findings with respect to important and material questions of fact,” the groups wrote in a Monday application for review. “Accordingly, review of the Order by the full Commission is warranted.”

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6, 2025 – A Maine legislative committee voted Tuesday to advance a revised version of a bill that initially sought to eliminate the state’s broadband authority.

The state’s Energy, Utilities and Technology committee considered LD 1975, sponsored by Rep. Jack Ducharme, R-Madison, which as introduced would phase out the Maine Connect Authority and the ConnectMaine Fund. Instead, the committee moved forward with a “strike-and-replace” version requiring additional planning, reports and recommendations before any such action could take effect.

At the heart of the debate are two modest communications surcharges that fund the ConnectMaine Fund, the state’s primary source of support for broadband planning, rural deployment, and digital literacy and device access initiatives.

Jan. 12, 2026 – Charter Communications has launched Spectrum broadband service to 20,110 homes and businesses in rural North Carolina as part of its multi-state rural expansion efforts.

The deployments, announced over the past several weeks, are supported by federal grant funding through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and the American Rescue Plan (ARP).

The North Carolina builds are part of Charter’s broader, $7 billion investment in rural broadband infrastructure across multiple states.