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Before getting to the full news round-up, I want to focus on something odd I saw over the past week. A bunch of different elites started making more aggressive claims that artificial intelligence is now some sort of super-intelligent singularity. It’s weird, and I would normally discount these arguments as not worth paying attention to, except that they seem to be capturing the minds of major financiers and even lefty Senators like Bernie Sanders. And I think there’s something problematic going on here. Why Are They Saying We’ve Invented God? Let’s start with the arguments. There are a number of them, and they go into a few categories. The AI cultists went into overdrive this week, Meta got the creepiest patent imaginable, and AOC attacked monopolies to burnish her foreign policy chops.
Kitsap Public Utility District (KPUD) is making big moves to bring faster, more reliable internet to more homes and businesses across the county. Thanks to $6.6 million in federal ARPA funding (allocated by Kitsap County), we’re building 21 new fiber distribution nodes throughout Kitsap. So what does that mean for you?
AT&T is making a massive $5.75 billion move to bring its brand to millions of new customers. The company recently announced an agreement to buy the “mass market” (residential and small business) fiber division from Lumen Technologies. Customers of Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, will find a new name on their bill as AT&T has completed their purchase of Lumen's fiber business. What does this mean for customers? If you live in one of the 11 states included in the deal—such as Colorado, Arizona, Minnesota, or Washington—your home internet might soon be powered by AT&T. The deal includes Lumen’s “Quantum Fiber” service, which currently serves about one million subscribers and passes by four million homes and businesses in cities like Denver, Phoenix, and Seattle. AT&T’s goal is to become the nation’s top provider of high-speed fiber internet.
Industry leaders will soon have a direct opportunity to hear how this transition will unfold. Ryan Mulhall, Executive Director of the Iowa Communications Network, is a confirmed featured guest for the CBAN 2026 Spring Summit in Ames on April 2nd. The Iowa Legislature is currently moving forward with a bold plan to privatize the Iowa Communications Network (ICN). For years, the state-owned network only served schools, hospitals, and government agencies. However, new legislation aims to change that. Senate Study Bill 3149 and House Study Bill 709 seek to open this 3,400-mile fiber-optic network to the commercial market. Consequently, this shift offers a massive opportunity for Iowa’s rural broadband providers.
Fears over a drug cartel drone over Texas sparked a recent airspace shutdown in El Paso and New Mexico, highlighting just how tricky it can be to deploy anti-drone weapons near cities.
Vermont has invested enormous public resources into connectivity, creating Communications Union Districts and committing more than $100 million in state and federal broadband funding to expand last-mile fiber infrastructure so Vermonters can get online. That work matters. It is necessary. But it is no longer sufficient. The system isn’t strained. It’s broken. Small towns, many run largely by volunteers, are now responsible for managing complex grants, cybersecurity risks, disaster recovery, emergency dispatch services and climate resilience, while residents reasonably expect to interact with local government online — paying bills, applying for permits, accessing records and participating remotely in civic life.
Verizon Commits to Invest $150 Million to Expand its High-Speed Broadband Network To Underserved Communities, Advance Digital Inclusion, Enhance Service Quality and Network Reliability, and Support Small Businesses Across New York State. Verizon to Invest $150 Million in its Small Business Accelerator Program in New York. ALBANY — The New York State Public Service Commission (Commission) today approved the transfer of control of Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. (Frontier) and its subsidiaries to Verizon Communications Inc. (Verizon). As part of the Commission’s approval, Verizon is required to make investments that will strengthen New York’s connectivity, expand digital opportunity, and accelerate economic growth. “This transaction will expand fiber-based broadband services to the underserved and unserved,” said Commission Chair Rory M. Christian.
Major carriers sign 85% of voice traffic while smaller carriers manage only 17.5%. We need AI-powered solutions to combat robocall fraud. The multi-year battle to secure the voice channel and combat scam and spam robocalls has hit a wall, so to speak, between the haves and the have-nots. The nation’s top carriers, with sufficient budget and resources to invest in robocall mitigation efforts, continue to experience encouraging and tangible results. Smaller and rural carriers, however, have struggled to balance network modernization from legacy switched Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) networks with financial realities. Combined with increasingly sophisticated voice fraud campaigns, these carriers are more exposed than ever to vulnerabilities that translate into persistent risks to their bottom lines, and subscribers.
Earlier this year, 55-year-old Cuban immigrant Geraldo Lunas Campos died at an ICE detention facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss, Texas. Officials claimed Campos had been “in distress,” and guards had been trying to help. But his death was ruled a homicide, the result of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Charges have yet to be filed; it’s unclear if an investigation is even pending. That’s not the only peculiarity surrounding Campos’s death. The detention center where Campos was killed was built by Acquisition Logistics, LLC, a private contractor with no experience building these kinds of facilities. Yet it won a whopping $1.2 billion contract to perform the work. Even stranger, the company has no website, and its official address is a “a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer,” according to the Associated Press. (See a photo here.) Ten years ago, ICE’s annual allotment from Congress was less than $6 billion. But thanks to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, and the GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed last summer, ICE’s budget has ballooned to $85 billion over the next four years, including $45 billion for immigrant detention. The result has been a bonanza for what the Brennan Center calls the “deportation industrial complex”—the host of private contractors profiting from ICE’s nationwide rampage.
In highly ambiguous and challenging contexts, a random approach to decision-making confers a number of advantages. Operations managers have been using randomized decision-making since World War II (randomized search was used to locate enemy submarines in the open ocean), but it has not yet been seriously applied to strategic decision-making, which remains focused on hypothesis formulation and testing. In this article the authors explain the strategic benefits of randomized decision making — early advantage, faster learning, less predictability, and reduced biases — and offer advice on how to incorporate randomness in the strategy-making process.
WASHINGTON, D.C. ― The space race between United States billionaires is heating up, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planning to build a lunar base and Jeff Bezos pushing Blue Origin’s ambitions as both companies aim to return humans to the moon ahead of a planned mission by China in 2030. With a planned initial public offering (IPO) this year, SpaceX CEO Musk has said in recent podcast interviews and company meetings that he wants to build “Moonbase Alpha” and put a satellite-slinging launch device on the lunar surface. The lunar base would help build up his envisioned artificial intelligence (AI)-computing network of up to 1 million satellites. Musk’s intensified drive toward the moon has shifted SpaceX’s aspirational focus from the Mars colonization mission he has pushed consistently since founding the company in 2002.
Feb 13 (Reuters) - Wall Street is in the grip of disruption worries from AI. It first started with investors dumping shares of software companies but soon spread to sectors seen as vulnerable to automation, driving sharp losses in U.S. stocks this week. The AI scare trade did not spare even sectors such as private credit, real estate brokers, data analytics, legal services and insurers. Global tech stocks took the hit after Anthropic unveiled a legal AI plug-in. But soon the investor unease deepened following a flurry of AI model upgrades and fresh releases. "With fear driving market sentiment, investors remain in 'sell first think later' mode, asking 'who is next' and showing no mercy for anything remotely seen as an AI loser," Barclays equity strategist Emmanual Cau said. Here's a look at how various sectors were impacted by the selloff:
The Energy Department has taken steps to start enriching uranium to fuel the AI race, said Assistant Secretary Timothy Walsh
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ImOn Communications (a CBAN provider member) has completed a comprehensive fiber network buildout across Southeast Iowa, designating three additional communities as “Fiber-Connected” following construction that brought fiber-to-the-premises service to more than 21,000 addresses in the region. The Cedar Rapids-based provider announced network completions in Mount Pleasant (January 21), Fort Madison (February 2), and Clinton/Camanche (February 12), marking the culmination of an 18-month deployment strategy that began in late 2024. The buildouts deliver symmetrical speeds up to 1 Gbps for residential customers and 10 Gbps for business users across communities ranging from 2,000 to 10,000 addresses.
Is Elon Musk's proposal to launch a million satellites into Earth orbit for real? Let's talk. Always one to “aim high,” Elon Musk has outdone himself with this latest venture. As Eric Urbach expertly detailed in his recent Broadband Breakfast article, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC on January 30th requesting authorization to deploy up to ONE MILLION satellites in low Earth orbit. These new birds would function as orbital data centers for AI computing. That’s right, he wants to move SkyNet from fiction to reality (if it’s not already on its way). Let that sink in for a moment. ONE. MILLION. SATELLITES. To put this in perspective: the European Space Agency reports that approximately 16,910 satellites currently orbit Earth. As Eric points out, this single request would represent a 5,813% increase over the current satellite population. SpaceX currently operates around 9,400 functioning Starlink satellites, making this request a more than 100-fold expansion of their own operational scale.
Nextlink, a direct competitor to many CBAN provider members, now offers mobile phone. Could they attract your customers? Nextlink Internet, a major fixed wireless and fiber provider serving rural communities across the Midwest and South, has launched Nextlink Mobile, adding mobile phone service to its broadband portfolio. The move positions the company as an increasingly formidable competitor to CBAN provider members, particularly those without their own mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) offerings.
Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths.
Starlink is in the industry news so often that it feels like I ought to have a recurring blog just for Starlink updates. The company recently made an interesting announcement that should make waves in the broadband industry. The company announced tiered pricing, with prices varying by speed, and starting at $50 per month in some selected markets. This is something Starlink has always been able to do, and perhaps they are doing this because the company is profitable and has landed 2 million U.S. customers with its standard $120 price. It’s clear that the company’s network is gaining capacity at a steady pace as the company launches additional and better satellites.
A group of Democrats in the US Senate is pressuring President Donald Trump’s Justice Department to hand over any and all communications between the agency and corporate lobbyists related to last week’s ouster of antitrust chief Gail Slater, which came weeks before the scheduled start of the closely watched Live Nation-Ticketmaster trial. In a Saturday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—herself a former corporate lobbyist—the Democratic lawmakers raised concerns about the timing of Slater’s departure, pointing to Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s ongoing “attempts to evade responsibility by convincing Justice Department leadership to settle the case on terms favorable to the company, rather than fans, artists, and independent venues.”
HARRISBURG, Pa., Feb. 13, 2026 (AP) — As outrage spreads over energy-hungry data centers, politicians from President Donald Trump to local lawmakers have found rare bipartisan agreement over insisting that tech companies — and not regular people — must foot the bill for the exorbitant amount of electricity required for artificial intelligence. But that might be where the agreement ends.
Nexstar: Smack in the middle of the Nexstar-TEGNA merger review, Justice Department antitrust chief Abigail Slater resigned Thursday after clashing with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on policy and other matters, according to news accounts. 'They’ve basically decided to decapitate the Antitrust Division. It’s not just Slater. Her top deputies are gone,' said Douglas Farrar, a senior policy advisor to Democratic FTC Chair Lina Khan.
Highlights - •
Commercial space markets have become competitive and diversified. - •
Cost of procuring, launching, and operating spacecraft has substantially declined. - •
Many chronic and potentially acute problems can thwart continued growth. - •
Space sustainability and commercial success require uniform rules of the road. - •
Multilateral consensus must resolve space debris, collisions, and weaponization. This paper assesses whether and how investment in outer space market opportunities will match bullish forecasts, despite the increased likelihood of spacecraft collisions due to proliferating space debris, the expectation that global conflicts will include a space component, and exponential growth in the number of orbiting spacecraft. The paper explains how emerging technologies and business plans contribute to both revenue enhancement and greater risk of calamity. It explores specific environmental, business, and political factors that have positive, negative, conflicting, or uncertain impacts on use of space for commercial gain. The paper concludes with specific recommendations on what binding commitments national governments and private ventures must make to ensure the sustainability of outer space for an ever-expanding array of productive endeavors.
Will there be a popular uprising against AI and the vast AI-based robotic machinery that’s taking over both the means of production and the means of information?
Feb 14 (Reuters) - Vietnam's government has allowed SpaceX to launch its Starlink satellite internet service in the country, state media reported on Saturday. The report said the Ministry of Science and Technology granted Starlink's local unit a license to provide both fixed and mobile satellite internet services. The company was also granted a license to use radio frequencies and radio equipment. The ministry did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation outside business hours.
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