News

California lawmakers’ efforts to pass a new law mandating affordable broadband access is at risk of being destroyed by industry lobbying. California insiders say the changes are so dramatic they may wind up making broadband affordability in the state worse – undermining years of digital equity activism and discarding a rare opportunity to bridge the digital divide.

On Tuesday, July 1, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and National Digital Inclusion Alliance will present the next Building For Digital Equity event - Wired For Freedom: Digital Access and the American Dream. It will run from 3:00 - 4:15 ET.

Empower Broadband, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Virginia-based Mecklenburg Electrical Cooperative, says it has successfully deployed affordable fiber access to more than 7,500 subscribers across long-neglected and underserved portions of the Old Dominion state. Like many cooperatives, Mecklenburg and Empower are leveraging generations-old experiences at rural electrification to migrate into the broadband business.

Maine Connectivity Authority President Andrew Butcher leads five-day “Driving Connections” tour to highlight broadband infrastructure investments the state has made to bring high-speed Internet access to 86,000 homes and businesses over the past several years and rally support for future work. The first stop on the tour is today, at the Woodstock Library, where Butcher and his team will meet with the town’s librarian, the town manager, and a digital navigator to hear how the state broadband office can continue to support community-based digital inclusion work in western Maine.

Baltimore city leaders have issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a partner willing to help the city’s ongoing efforts to expand affordable broadband access to marginalized city residents. According to the RFP, the city’s latest efforts would help bring affordable, high-speed Internet to over 4,100 new housing units spread across eight different public housing communities.

The remote West Texas city of Monahans has spent the last decade taking matters into their own hands and now the city’s 7,500 residents are headed for the right side of the digital divide. The city’s network build is in partnership with Hosted America, which is acting as the first last mile ISP serving residents.

Clallam County, Washington and Astound Broadband have begun construction on a major new joint partnership that will bring affordable fiber access to more than 1,500 homes across the largely rural Northwestern part of The Evergreen State. The deployment is a joint collaboration between The Public Utility District (PUD) No. 1 of Clallam County, Astound Broadband, and the Northwest Open Access Network (NOANet), a nonprofit coalition developed by regional Washington Communications Utility Districts (CUD) to bring more reliable, affordable fiber access to neglected rural Washington communities.

Trump administration changes to the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program are poised to introduce years of potential new delays to the already slow-moving program, potentially undermining the program’s goal of bringing universal broadband access to mostly rural communities. Worse, the looming changes would eliminate efforts to ensure taxpayer-funded broadband is affordable for low-income Americans, while driving billions in new subsidies to the world’s richest man and Trump mega donor Elon Musk.

The OaklandConnect project – unanimously approved on May 20 by the Oakland City Council – calls for the construction of a city-owned open access fiber network to expand affordable broadband connectivity to over 33,000 households that city surveys indicate are languishing without home Internet service. Once the East Bay city of 436,000 completes network construction, it would be one of the largest publicly-owned open access networks serving a major metro area in the nation – and may serve as inspiration for other large cities to follow suit with a model that’s been proven to bring affordable local Internet choice in monopoly-dominated markets.

Oregon’s Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative just connected its 5,000th customer, marking a major milestone in the Oregon cooperative’s five-year-effort to bring affordable fiber access to rural state residents long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. The recent celebration of the milestone featured a homeowner whose recent fiber connection came 80 years after the same cooperative first connected the home for electrical service.

The next Building For Digital Equity (#B4DE) livestream will be centered around the theme: “Wired for Freedom: Digital Access and the American Dream.” The agenda is shaping up to offer attendees new battlefield intelligence and how community-centered organizations and coalitions are carrying on in the face of vital funding and programming cuts.

Congressional Republicans are moving forward on a plan to kill a popular Federal Communications Commission (FCC) program providing free Wi-Fi to schoolchildren. Critics of the repeal say it’s a “cruel” effort that will undermine initiatives to bridge the affordability and access gap for families long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

The Trump administration’s dismantling of a popular broadband grant program has been greeted with disgust and anger by those working to bridge the digital divide, leaving many states' planned broadband expansions in limbo, and affordable broadband advocates contemplating potential legal action. The unprecedented choice to destroy digital skills training and broadband adoption programs created by an act of Congress is seeing escalating pushback by a growing coalition of frustrated lawmakers and state broadband offices.

NextLight's locally-funded Internet Assistance Program is currently helping 14 percent more city subscribers than the federal Affordable Connectivity Program did at its peak. At the time the ACP was discontinued, 906 NextLight customers were receiving the federal discount. As of April 2025, NextLight’s own assistance program is helping 1,034 customers – a 14 percent increase in one year.

Construction crews have begun work on Fort Bragg’s long-awaited municipal fiber network, which will ultimately bring affordable fiber to the California city of 7,000. The total cost of the project is estimated to be $17 million. Of that, $10 million will be paid for by a Federal Funding Account (FFA) grant from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)

Today we are releasing a new two-part dashboard based on California Public Utilities Commission data that helps visualize the success of community-based broadband projects under the state's transformative The Last-Mile Federal Funding Account program. The map visualizes the relative size of grant amounts per county and the percentage of those grants that went to community networks, in which we group municipal or other public entities, Tribal governments, cooperatives, and nonprofits.

Grays Harbor PUD says it’s getting to work leveraging a $7 million grant from the Washington State Broadband Office to expand affordable fiber access in the South Elma, Porter, and Cedarville areas of the Evergreen State. Grays Harbor PUD was one of 16 Washington utilities chosen by the Washington State Broadband Office to receive grant funding during awards first announced back in 2023.

Digital inclusion organizations are reeling after the Trump administration announced the Digital Equity Act, embedded in the bipartisan infrastructure law, was being cancelled months after federal grants had already been reviewed and awarded. As news began to trickle out, many of those working on these issues across the nation had more questions than answers as they scrambled to process a mix of confusion and frustration, especially mindful of the fact that the Digital Equity Act barely touches on the subject of race.

Timnath, Colorado's new municipal network has announced they’ve lit up their very first subscriber in partnership with the city of Loveland’s Pulse Fiber municipal broadband network. Inspired by Pulse, the Town of Timnath entered into an intergovernmental revenue-sharing agreement with Loveland’s ISP in August of 2023. Tinmath receives 25 percent of the network’s gross income, with an expected 2 to 6 percent return on capital investment over 20 to 30 years. The network is expected to be paid off in 25 years.

Some of the nation’s leading voices, thinkers, and doers in the community broadband sector will connect and collaborate in the nation’s capital for the inaugural "Community First: The Future of Public Broadband Conference and Hill Day" next week. The two-day conference – slated for May 14 and 15 – is being hosted by the American Association for Public Broadband (AAPB) and New America Open Technology Institute (OTI), in partnership with the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and the Community Broadband Action Network.