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.

The calendar reads June 13, 2025, but I'm getting flashbacks to December 1977. As Israeli fighter jets strike Iranian nuclear facilities and President Trump calls Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a "$600 billion numbskull," we're witnessing a dangerous historical parallel to the Carter-Burns-Miller transition that helped create the Great Inflation. Yet today's constraints—with federal debt…

Less than a month after defending his record before the Senate, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is heading back to Capitol Hill.

Carr will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee for another round of oversight next week.

The hearing, scheduled for the morning of January 14, will feature testimony from Carr alongside Commissioners Anna Gomez and Olivia Trusty. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) and Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chairman Richard Hudson (R-NC) said the session will focus on ensuring the Commission “remains focused on the issues that matter most to our constituents.”

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.

An undersea fiber break was repaired in Alaska, pointing to concerns over GCI outages and subsea connectivity.

One of the weird tasks I had as a librarian was writing a disaster recovery (aka continuity) plan for the collection. So, I always think a little bit about recovery. We are so reliant on broadband, I found the following video from NCTA interesting… https://youtu.be/32pCPoRUBmk?si=K5f02Xvu5rAr0HdL Description from NCTA When natural disasters strike, the connections communities…

Four million Americans live within 1 mile of a data center. The communities closest to them are “overwhelmingly” non-white.

In December, on a two-lane road not far from the ACE Basin, a protected ecosystem and wildlife refuge in South Carolina, Paul Black drove past St. Paul AME Church and the cemetery where his wife’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother are buried, then slowed as the trees opened onto the piney tract.

Black is an environmental activist who has spent years fighting polluting projects across the South. But now he and Black residents in the rural South Carolina community are bracing for a new fight: to stop a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields.