News

A recent study suggesting New York State officials are trying to hide that the state’s ambitious grant programs are facing significantly higher costs and lower reach doesn’t appear to be based in reality, and originates from a group that fails to disclose its funding. A recent analysis of New York State’s broadband grant programs by the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute (ACLP) at New York Law School claims that New York State’s ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP) is facing $38 million in higher costs, resulting in 34,000 fewer connections than originally promised. The study also claims, incorrectly, that New York State is attempting to hide this data from the public.

Los Alamos County, New Mexico is inching closer to the launch of its “Atomic Fiber” county-wide open access fiber network, which aims to dramatically improve affordable Internet access to the county’s 19,400 heavily-rural residents. The $35 million network price tag is being financed via $40 million in New Mexico Gross Receipts Tax (GRT) revenue bonds. County leaders have stated that the 20-year maintenance and operations cost of the network will be around $15.9 million and paid off via subscription revenues.

A crushing near-miss at the ballot box last year hasn’t stopped the town of Southwick, Massachusetts from chipping away at Comcast’s local monopoly. After falling just 14 votes shy of the two-thirds majority required to authorize a full $16 million municipal fiber build at Town Meeting (353-204) last year, local officials refused to shelve the project. Instead, the Select Board approved a municipal agreement with Westfield Gas & Electric’s Whip City Fiber to construct a targeted pilot network funded entirely by existing money.

As Digital Inclusion Week 2026 kicks off October 4-10, the Building for Digital Equity webinar series — co-hosted by the Institute for Local Self Reliance’s (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks Initiative and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) — returns on October 8th. The livestream will feature a special spotlight on building wireless connectivity for tiny-home communities in Seattle that will uniquely engage the audience in a case-study exploring how local expertise is harnessed, coordinating a cadre of local volunteers, and facing down the challenges of sustainability.

The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) has been awarded a $5.58 million federal broadband grant to help expand affordable fiber access to the rural and underserved parts of its service territory in The Granite State. According to a cooperative announcement, NHEC officials say the New Hampshire Office of Broadband Initiatives has awarded it a $5.58 million grant courtesy of the Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, made possible by the 2021 infrastructure bill.

A recent Government Accountability Office report reveals what’s been obvious to broadband deployment experts for years now: the federal government’s multi-agency approach to closing the digital divide is undermined by a lack of coordination and data-management among agencies. The result is an FCC broadband coverage map with an amalgamation of inaccuracies that misrepresents where high-speed Internet service does or does not exist, a flaw that can steer taxpayer dollars away from communities that actually need them.

Researchers say they’re concerned that a massive influx of new federal grant money being redirected to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband company in Ohio will be thwarted by the simple fact that many targeted locations don’t have a clear, unobstructed view of the sky. Tom Reid of Reid Consulting conducted a study earlier this year taking a closer look at the 30,000 locations in Ohio that are poised to receive subsidized service from Starlink, and found that as many as 70 percent of the target locations were covered by tree canopy preventing the minimum 110-degree field of view Starlink dishes require.

Paulding Putnam Electric Cooperative (PPEC) was awarded $13.2 million in federal broadband grant support to help fund a major fiber-to-the-home expansion to rural unserved segments of northeast Indiana. According to a cooperative announcement, the co-op will receive $13.2 million in BEAD (Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment) federal grant funding from the Indiana Broadband Office, matched by $10.3 million in cooperative investment, to bring affordable fiber to thousands of unserved residents in Allen, Adams, DeKalb and Noble counties.

Researchers tells Pennsylvania House Communications & Technology Committee that persistent attacks by the federal government on Internet affordability protections and social safety nets are directly resulting in a drop in overall broadband adoption, with large numbers of low-income Americans unable to afford modern connectivity — and the vast benefits it provides. Researchers noted that sustained efforts by the federal government across numerous fronts — from attacks on the social safety net to the Republican destruction of the FCC Affordable Connectivity Program (which provided $30 broadband discounts to more than 23 million households) are directly driving vulnerable populations away from Internet adoption.

The Texas Broadband Development Office (BDO) says that it has placed Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grant money on hold to address continued claims that the program has been unfairly tilted to the direct benefit of billionaire Elon Musk. In July, the office faced widespread accusations that Trump administration changes made to the BEAD program deprioritized faster fiber technologies and gave an unfair advantage to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their slower, more congested low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite technologies.

Working with the Federal Communications Commission's broadband data is hard. It's complex, at times capricious, and presents a host of pitfalls for analysts and researchers around the country. ILSR is here to help. We're excited to host the Broadband Data and Policy Forum, a place where data researchers across all sectors can compare notes, share tools, and troubleshoot with one another. Join us as we build a community of practice!

The Hoopa Valley Tribe is celebrating the opening of its new fiber network operations center as the Hoopa Valley Public Utilities District (HVPUD) expands fiber-to-the-home Internet service throughout the Hoopa Valley Reservation and into neighboring communities just outside of its Tribal lands. To mark the occasion earlier this summer, more than 50 community members, Tribal leaders, HVPUD staff, and project partners attended the July 17 opening celebration.

New Mexico-based Penasco Valley Telephone Cooperative (PVT) is using a $1 million disaster relief grant from the New Mexico Office Of Broadband Access and Expansion (OBAE) to construct and expand reliable Internet access in numerous New Mexico communities that have historically been subjected to wildfires and flooding. According to cooperative leadership, PVT is building an alternate fiber broadband route to establish more resilient and redundant connectivity to inhabitants of areas like the Capitan Mountains Wilderness, where the Seven Cabins Fire recently burned 31,000 acres after the crash of a medical plane last June.

Three months after town meeting voters in Longmeadow, Massachusetts rejected an $8.6 million proposal to kickstart the construction of a municipal fiber network, Town Councilors in the neighboring town of East Longmeadow moved in a different direction, voting to take control of its digital future and provide its residents and businesses with next-generation Internet access. The move was formalized earlier this month when East Longmeadow Town Councilors unanimously approved issuing $43.5 million in bonds to finance the construction of a municipally-owned fiber network.

Officials for the volunteer-run nonprofit NYC Mesh have been been awarded a new $898,000 grant from New York State’s ConnectALL initiative that should help the project expand affordable wireless Internet access to the Big Apple’s most vulnerable populations. The grant is one of $8.3 million in new grants recently awarded by New York State providing much-needed financial assistance to community or municipally run broadband connectivity initiatives through the Connectivity Innovation – Business Model Awards, which support organizations using “novel financing strategies” to serve low-income and rural communities.

Cooperative officials say the six-year, $60 million project was the largest infrastructure investment in the cooperative's 88-year history. 7,000 of the co-op’s 14,000 electrical customers are now subscribed to broadband service after the deployment of 14,000 miles of fiber optic lines that have also streamlined maintenance and monitoring of the electrical grid.

HomeWorks Tri-County Electric Cooperative says it has acquired the cable and fiber broadband systems of private ISP Vogtmann Engineering (VEI) in order to expand its broadband footprint across central Michigan. According to Homeworks, the acquisition of VEI’s network assets includes 15 miles of cable in the neighboring villages of Nashville and Vermontville, passing just over 1,000 homes and businesses.

For years, Cleveland was labeled as one of the worst-connected cities in the nation despite the presence of AT&T and Charter Spectrum. But all of that is changing, thanks to DigitalC, an innovative nonprofit community network provider. The data-backed progress was enough to convince the Cleveland City Council to recently sign off on a $4.35 million “performance payment” to DigitalC after the nonprofit Internet provider blew past its 2025 goals for getting residents online and teaching them digital skills, a milestone city leaders are pointing to as proof that “The Cleveland Model” for closing the digital divide actually works.

Indiana Cooperatives are once again at the front of the pack as the state prepares to dramatically expand affordable fiber access on the back of $483 million in Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) broadband grants. The first round of bead funding is expected to connect an estimated 123,000 Indiana households and businesses that currently have either substandard Internet access, or no access at all.

RiverStreet Networks has been removed from multiple broadband deployment projects by the Virginia Broadband Office after years of delays, leaving the state scrambling to find a replacement suitor for projects intended to bring affordable Internet access to more than 30,000 rural customers across The Old Dominion state. The company was stripped of its state contracts after it repeatedly failed to meet deadlines and struggled to find additional funding needed to complete promised state deployments. Most of the state contracts heavily subsidized RiverStreet via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).