Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-host Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (TAK Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guests Gigi Sohn (American Association for Public Broadband) and Josh Etheridge (EPC). Topics include:

• Mountain Connect Reflections
• T-Mobile Buys USI Fiber
• Digital C Goes to Detroit
• T-Mo / US Cellular shows limits of Trump anti-trust interest
• Fiber Still Coming to BEAD?
• Cable Losing Ground to Fiber and FWA

Join us live on August 13th at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.

Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (TAK Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guest Angela Siefer (National Digital Inclusion Alliance) to talk about all the recent broadband news that's fit to print. Topics include:

• Charter and Cox announce agreement to merge, unseating Comcast as the largest cable provider in the United States
• What the public-funds match for Starlink should be, when BEAD moves forward.
• Funding for hot spots - a core digital equity tool that grew to new importance under the pandemic - is under threat.
• Trump's announcement that he was ending the Digital Equity Act, and the significant impact it will have if the order holds.

Join us live on May 16th at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.

Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (TAK Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guest Jason Livingood (Comcast) to talk how cable network operators are innovating to reduce latency, combat buffer bloat, and improve their networks around the county. Join us live on February 21 at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Join us live on February 21 at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.

Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (TAK Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guests Sascha Meinrath (X-Lab) and Robert Boyle (Planet Networks) to talk about all the recent broadband news that's fit to print. On tap:

• The shape of the new FCC
• The Cox and Rhode Island lawsuit is negotiated away
• New York's Affordable Broadband Act
• Straw man attempts to get NTIA to drop fiber preference for BEAD

Join us live on January 24th at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Join for the next show on February 7th at 2pm ET.

Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.

We're more than 15 years and a hundred billion dollars into the alphabet soup of federal broadband infrastructure subsidy programs, and millions upon millions of households are stuck on deteriorating connections and capacity-constrained technologies. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Jonathan Chambers, partner at Conexon, to talk about how the BEAD program is our last chance. And to make sure we get it right, we have to grapple with the array of long-standing failures - purposeful and not - that have gotten us to this point: the regulatory capture of the FCC, the willful ignorance of bad data collection and mapping, the acceptance of disingenuous "technology neutral" arguments, turning a blind eye to the imbalance in service and cost between our cities and rural expanses, and pretending that not every households in the country can have a first-class, affordable, reliable Internet connection.

This show is 40 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed. 

Transcript below.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.

Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Rudolf van der Berg, Partner at Stratix Consulting, a Dutch consulting firm that does work in telecommunications and has been deeply involved in the historic level of new infrastructure deployment projects in northern Europe. Rudolf breaks down what's going on today in Europe's broadband landscape, including efforts to reach the unserved, new entrants, and the actions of private equity.

Rudolf challenges the notion that overregulation stifles innovation and competition, and dispels the rhetoric (pushed by monopoly ISPs in the United States) that the European networks struggled with the onset of the pandemic because of the regulatory landscape and comparative lack of investment as compared to their ISPs' American counterparts. Christopher and Rudolf close out the show by digging into the struggle between tech companies and ISPs between which should pay for infrastructure upgrades.

This show is 41 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed. 

Transcript below. 

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.

Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.