Surfing the Broadband Bit Stream

From North Carolina, G.R.E.A.T. shares progress on broadband planning, mapping wins, and building toward countywide fiber

Innocent sites are being delisted from Google because of copyright takedown requests against rampant OnlyFans piracy.

Editorial: Oops!… I Did It Again

This week’s confessions offer an insider view of three decisions that looked smart on slides and turned into long-term taxes on reality. Shortcuts dressed up as strategy.

• Splitting 5G was a mistake. A radio engineer’s take: we shipped LTE-with-steroids because politics and vendor timelines won. The icon said 5G; the core didn’t.

• NFVi was stupid. A core head’s verdict: we virtualized legacy into fat VMs, called it cloud, and paid for it with sprawl, lock-in, and invoices.

• The Towerco Trap CFO autopsy of Towerco’s sell-outs, one-time arbitrage in, permanent OPEX out; control gone when we needed it most.

If you’ve seen this up close, or you’ve got a different sin to confess, tell me.

Submit your confession: here

Comcast announced a major milestone expanding ultra-fast internet access across rural parts of Florida.

The latest bleak new AI slop niche are “nostalgia” videos about how good the 1980s and 1990s were. There are many accounts spamming these out, but the general format is all basically the same. A procession of young people with feathered hair wonder at how terrible 2025 is and tell the viewer they should come back to the 1980s, where things are better. This video is emblematic of the form:

The Worthington Globe… Many local companies are working together to bring enhanced broadband services to underserved, rural Nobles County residents, using approximately 637 miles of fiber to provide high-speed internet to 1,550 households and sites. Bill Loonan, general manager of Lismore Cooperative Telephone Company, met with Nobles County commissioners and other project stakeholders Wednesday morning…

From church hubs to local businesses, Wave 7 is expanding internet access in rural North Carolina — proving what community-rooted broadband can achieve.

New Mexico's $432.9 million BEAD plan is now under review by federal NTIA authorities, according to the state's broadband office.

A Wisconsin city along the western shores of Lake Superior has launched an open-access city owned fiber network.

Economists predicted doom if the Federal Reserve were controlled by the President. Trump has moved in that direction, but Wall Street doesn't care. Is 'independence' not what we think?

The Answer to Better Broadband is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in Minnesota 

Long before USF, ARPA, CPF, SLRF, BEAD, and the next sure-to-be acronym’d broadband program, Minnesota was at the forefront of funding broadband connections in rural Minnesota. 

Minnesota’s “Border to Border” Broadband Infrastructure grant program was established by Minnesota’s state legislature in 2013 with bipartisan support. Ever since, the program has been investing funding in broadband infrastructure, prioritizing unserved and underserved areas. To gain perspective on just how long ago this was, Prince was still alive when Border to Border launched (RIP, Sometimes it Snows in April). 

Recently, I sat down with Bree Maki, Minnesota’s executive director of the Office of Broadband Development (OBD), to catch up on where Minnesota was with their broadband efforts and the BEAD process. I knew from speaking with her prior, Minnesota has a 2026 statutory goal  from the state legislature that established the goal to connect “all Minnesota businesses and homes with access to at least one provider of broadband with download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of at least 20 megabits per second.”

Crypto used endless spending to get rid of all political opposition. Now Mark Zuckerberg will do the same against those who want to regulate AI. Plus, a ruling on tariffs and a dentist revolt.

Here on a holiday I’m posting a more light-hearted blog, but one that shows the degree to which people have become attached to their cellphone. D30, a manufacturer of hard cases for cellphones, conducted a survey across the U.S. and the U.K. asking about how people feel about their cellphone. Some of the questions were…

ShinyHunters, the attacker group behind the breach, gained access by impersonating an IT help desk to a Google employee.

Three sources described how AI is writing alerts for Citizen and broadcasting them without prior human review. In one case AI mistranslated “motor vehicle accident” to “murder vehicle accident.”

AT&T's deal to buy EchoStar's spectrum means Boost will no longer be a fourth facilities-based carrierBut Boost's struggles mean it was hardly a true comp | AT&T's deal to buy EchoStar's spectrum means Boost will no longer be a fourth facilities-based carrier. What does that mean for consumers?

SpaceX has beef with how Louisiana and Virginia classified “priority broadband projects” for BEADStarlink thus far was awarded roughly $16M in BEAD funds

A veteran-owned internet service provider in New Mexico is calling on NTIA to 'prevent wasteful overbuilding.'

A recent universal broadband service plan for 18 Vermont towns was delivered ahead of schedule and under budget, officials say.

Five years ago, when the world was still in a fervor about 5G technology, Charlie Ergen made a multi-billion-dollar bet on the relatively nascent concept of open RAN. Licensed to be a fourth nationwide US mobile operator, after the merger between T-Mobile US and Sprint had reduced the number to three, his Dish Network business would build its radio access network – the RAN in open RAN – not with the standard choices of Ericsson and Nokia but using a fresh lineup of younger and partly American faces. Now grizzled veterans of the open RAN movement, they have been aged and scarred by the Dish experience, and Ergen's entire scheme is in ruins.

Open RAN's big selling point at the time was interoperability.