WASHINGTON, April 8, 2026 – Winning a grant from the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program may not be the only path to gaining a competitive edge as the market undergoes major expansions.

At a webinar hosted Tuesday by the Fiber Broadband Association, industry experts said the BEAD program is creating opportunities not just for awardees, but also for providers that did not receive funding.

“For the non-awardees,” said Jeremiah Sloan, head of product marketing at Vetro, “they essentially have their competitors’ roadmap laid out before them. That’s intelligence and data that they can leverage for better strategic positioning.”

WASHINGTON, April 10, 2026 – Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said competition in the wireless industry is helping lower prices for consumers while improving service, arguing the model could guide broader broadband and economic policy.

“America’s innovative wireless providers aren’t just stabilizing prices; they’re driving them lower while delivering competitive choice, more data, and better services,” Pai said in the opinion piece on April 8.

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Pai pointed to declining wireless costs alongside rising performance.

“We could see billions of dollars in benefits for the American economy,” says FCC chairman, Brendan Carr.

In sum — what to know:

Policy change: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to discard the power limits on satellite spectrum use.

EPFD limits: The current Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) framework which was established in the 1990s is “an enormous regulatory constraint,” that limits operators’ ability to deliver faster speeds.

New regime: The commission proposes looser power limits that could potentially produce $2 billion from increased usage and lower broadband costs for customers.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing to rewrite a key piece of satellite policy, in a move that could clear a major bottleneck constraining growth of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite services.

In 2018, Xcel Energy made a pledge no major U.S. utility had made before: 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050, with a commitment to fully exit coal by 2030. The markets rewarded it. ESG funds bought in. The narrative was clean.

Today, Xcel is asking Colorado regulators to keep burning coal through 2030 — not as a strategic pivot, but because a single turbine failure at one plant exposed how thin the actual reliability margin was. The same utility that led the clean energy narrative is now the clearest demonstration of what I’m calling reliability debt: the growing gap between the retirement timelines utilities promised investors and regulators, and the timeline the physical grid can actually absorb without reliability risk.

This is post one of a series. I’m not short, I’m not long. I’m establishing a public thesis and then checking it against reality over the next twelve months.

I’m not a utility analyst. I’m a grid researcher who learned to read balance sheets — because the companies I was already tracking turned out to be publicly traded. The analysis starts with the grid and works backward to the stock.

Overview

The proposal envisions:

• Up to 51,600 satellites

• Sun-synchronous orbits at 500–1,800 km altitude

• Primary reliance on optical inter-satellite links

• Limited use of radio spectrum (Ka-band) for control and reliability functions

Fresh Speedtest data from Ookla finds that a handful of US states have more Starlink subscribers in urban areas than in rural areas.

In Boston’s vibrant Egleston Square neighborhood sits the Charles J. Beard II Media Center, home to Boston’s community radio station WBCA 102.9 FM. 

The station was created as a partnership between local nonprofit Boston Neighborhood Network Media, or BNN, and the City of Boston back in 2016. At the time, the then-Mayor of Boston Marty Walsh praised the collaboration, extending his thanks to BNN “for their partnership with the city to create another platform for civic engagement,” in a 2015 press release. 

BNN has gained independence over the years, but its partnership with the City continues to ground their mission to be a voice for the community, through their work which focuses on enhancing the unique culture of Boston neighborhoods that often go unnoticed. WBCA broadcasts daily from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., featuring a diverse mix of local news, current events, talk shows and music. Segments range from discussions on education and technology to multi-language programming and sports.

As media consolidates into fewer hands, there are more channels with fewer voices and community media becomes more essential.

Pick up your phone and you can access more media than any generation before you. News channels, streaming services, podcasts, social media, the options never end. It looks like we have more choices than ever.

C Spire announced this week that it has completed its work under Mississippi’s allocation of the federal Capital Projects Fund, saying the company provided home fiber access to more than 14,000 residences and to 18,530 undeveloped lots across multiple counties.

The Ridgeland-based technology provider said the work reached communities “from Amite to Lincoln to Lamar to Madison to Desoto and Hinds counties,” and that some of the projects targeted underserved areas of the state.

The Trump administration's National AI Framework falls short of offering Americans any real mechanisms for accountability or oversight.

The conservative legal activist thinks “radically woke culture” is the problem with America right now—not the climate-destroying oil and gas industry he lavishly supports.

St. Joseph, Louisiana has celebrated the opening of a renovated community center that will now serve as a local broadband hub.

A renovated community center in a small Tensas Parish town is being positioned as a local hub for broadband-enabled services after a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday marking upgrades to the St. Joseph Community House.

Town leaders say the project will add high-speed workspaces and classrooms for data, language and driver’s training, along with space for GED and HiSET tutoring and extracurricular programs tied to area schools.

n 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the T-Mobile/Sprint merger, reducing the number of wireless carriers in the U.S. to just three. 

In a new paper titled “Performative competition: The U.S. wireless communication market and the T-Mobile/Sprint merger,” published in the journal International Communication Gazette, several researchers with ties to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania examine the evolving political economy of the U.S. wireless communications market through a case study of the merger, arguing that telecom executives and regulators worked to construct a perception of competition to justify the merger’s approval. 

The researchers, Postdoctoral Fellow Sydney Forde, Visiting Scholar Hendrik Theine, and alumni Pawel Popiel (Ph.D. ‘20) and Christopher Ali (Ph.D. ‘13), call this strategy “performative competition.” Drawing from policy documents and industry data from the Global Media & Internet Concentration Project (GMICP), they show how the FCC justified ongoing consolidation in the U.S. wireless communications market by downplaying antitrust concerns, reframing consumer harms, and emphasizing the speculative promises of new technology.

“The wireless industry has long been dominated by just a handful of corporations,” says Forde, postdoctoral fellow at Annenberg’s Media, Inequality, & Change Center. “AT&T and Verizon, alongside smaller competitors Sprint and T-Mobile, have made up a tight oligopoly since the early 2000s,” she says.

From AI-generated images to restricted satellite data, the systems used to verify what’s real online are struggling to keep up.

Lego-style propaganda videos alleging war crimes are flooding online feeds, echoing the White House’s own turn toward cryptic teaser clips and meme-native visuals. This is not just content drift. It is a new front in the information war, one where speed, ambiguity, and algorithmic reach matter as much as accuracy.

One Iran-linked outlet, Explosive News, can reportedly turn around a two-minute synthetic Lego segment in about 24 hours. The speed is the point. Synthetic media does not need to hold up forever; it only needs to travel before verification catches up.

Last month, the White House added to that confusion when it posted two vague “launching soon” videos, then removed them after online investigators and open source researchers began dissecting them.

This report describes important and challenging connectivity gaps that should be a priority as governments and industry develop visions and plans for a “6G” wireless ecosystem. While forms of broadband convergence, based on substitutability and bundling, are increasingly evident in the marketplace, a broader and more ambitious convergence should move to the fore. Convergent connectivity can also refer, as it does here, to the integration of varied wireless communication technologies and networks (mobile, fixed, satellite) to create ubiquitous, seamless, and interoperable networks that allow users to access and transition among the best available connections everywhere they go. This form of convergence bridges the gaps between diverse networks and platforms, enabling real-time communication and data sharing across multiple devices, networks, and locations at all times.

Today’s networks fall far short of this goal, subjecting users to rural coverage gaps, urban “not-spots,” weak (or nonexistent) indoor mobile signals, and enormous friction and frustration when smartphones and other devices must manually authenticate to Wi-Fi and other location-based networks as they move around throughout the day. Instead of embracing this challenge, industry and most governmental bodies emphasize visions for mobile 6G that remain siloed and misaligned with some of the most important benefits that convergent connectivity could yield for consumers and the economy. This report explores the current reality, including consumer preferences for frictionless connectivity and the flattening growth rate of mobile network data consumption, both of which indicate that 6G-related policy priorities should nurture a wireless ecosystem anchored on ubiquitous and seamless connectivity.

I’ve always thought that good public policy work should start by asking, “Who’s at the table?” This isn’t just a question of who’s consulted down the line, but who’s sitting there from the beginning, talking about a problem, the possible solutions and how to make them happen.

This week in Boston, I got to experience a real-life example of this, gathered around a large wooden table in a 200-year-old historic Quaker guest house hidden in the heart of Beacon Hill.

As the national field director at Free Press, I joined a dozen local newsroom leaders, journalists and community advocates for a local news lobby day, where we met with lawmakers and urged them to provide more funding and support for community-rooted news and information. This grew out of our broader organizing work to build statewide coalitions that can advocate for local news policies rooted in the needs of communities.

As a group, we had spent the past year meeting on Zoom, strategizing on how to advance legislation that would center the needs of local, independent newsrooms that provide vital public services to their communities by doing the daily work of connecting communities to a more equitable and fully-funded media system.

We decided that the day before Local News Day would be a good chance to gather in person in Boston and start talking with legislators about investing in the kinds of news and information that keep their constituents safe, informed and engaged in their communities.

There is an interesting technology that is slowly edging into the telecom industry. There are a handful of places that are using hydrogen fuel cell generators instead of the more standard diesel generators for backup power.

Everybody who works with a telecom network is aware of the wide use of diesel backup generators that kick in when commercial power fails. Diesel generators are permanently installed for critical hub sites, and telecom companies use portable generators that can be quickly driven to remote powered sites like huts and cabinets.

Hydrogen fuel cells offer an alternative to the shortcomings of diesel generators. 

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a major overhaul of satellite spectrum sharing rules, replacing decades-old constraints with a modern, performance-based framework designed to unlock faster, more affordable broadband from space.

This decision targets the longstanding limitations imposed on Non-Geostationary Orbit (NGSO) systems—such as low Earth orbit constellations—by rules originally developed in the 1990s to protect Geostationary Orbit (GSO) satellites. The FCC concludes that these legacy constraints now significantly restrict the capacity, speed, and efficiency of satellite broadband services, particularly in rural and underserved areas.

Explore the shifting U.S. broadband landscape in late 2025 as fiber builds, Starlink, and FWA narrow the urban-rural digital divide across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

OpenAI is throwing its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage.

The effort seems to mark a shift in OpenAI’s legislative strategy. Until now, OpenAI has largely played defense, opposing bills that could have made AI labs liable for their technology’s harms. Several AI policy experts tell WIRED that SB 3444—which could set a new standard for the industry—is a more extreme measure than bills OpenAI has supported in the past.

The bill would shield frontier AI developers from liability for “critical harms” caused by their frontier models as long as they did not intentionally or recklessly cause such an incident, and have published safety, security, and transparency reports on their website.

BISHOP, CA – Governor Gavin Newsom today announced a major milestone in California’s effort to close the digital divide: the state has officially turned on the nation’s largest open-access, public broadband network — and connected its first community. 

The Bishop Paiute Tribe is now the first customer of California’s Middle-Mile Broadband Network (MMBN), bringing high-speed, reliable internet to a rural and historically underserved community. Students were among the first to log on — experiencing dramatically faster speeds and new access to education, health care, and opportunity. With 35% of rural Americans lacking internet access, Governor Newsom’s Broadband for All Initiative aims to bridge that divide, serving millions of Californians across all 58 counties. 

So far NASA’s Artemis 2 has been spectacularly successful and today, the four astronauts – as well as the Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft itself – became the most remote Wi-Fi users of all time as Artemis 2 just a few minutes ago broke Apollo 13’s 55-year old record for longest distance from Earth.

If you’ve been following the live streams from aboard Moon-bound Artemis 2 over the past few days, you’ve probably discovered – like me – that the four astronauts look decidedly happy, comfy, and busy in their far-flung home. NASA says the Orion capsule is about the size of two minivans (60% larger than Apollo in terms of volume) and like any other acceptable home away from home, this Orion capsule (named ‘Integrity’ by the astronauts) comes with everyone’s favourite technology – and that’s Wi-Fi.

The company said the network, now serving parts of Leesburg, is “future-proof” and that it is staffed and powered locally in Florida.