Join us live on Friday, January 19th, at 2:00pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guests Shayna Englin (California Community Foundation) and Geoff Wiggins to talk about the January 13th location challenge deadline, what's going on in LA County and with the California Public Utilities Commission, and what it's like to buy a house in Ohio and find yourself stuck in the middle of the area's Internet service providers.

Email us at broadband@muninetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

While many of us were in the midst of celebrating the holiday season, a number of significant broadband developments were being unwrapped in the nation’s capital.

As the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is set to unleash an unprecedented amount of federal funds to expand high-speed Internet access as part of the Biden-Harris administration’s “Internet for All” initiative, all 50 states and U.S. territories have now received their initial planning funds. Just before Christmas, the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced Massachusetts as the final state to receive its portion of the planning funds. While each state has received a set amount of BEAD and DEA planning funds, the amount of additional federal funds each state will get hinges on the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) new broadband availability maps.  

When it comes to affordable broadband, Vermont has always been a trailblazer. From early adoption of municipal broadband and cooperatives to more recent experimentation with CUD (Communications Union District) fiber deployments, the state’s efforts are inspiring communities nationwide looking for new, creative solutions for the stubborn digital divide. CUDs provide individual communities significantly more power and leverage through cross-community alliances and partnerships, allowing them to accomplish more than they could have by themselves. And they’re a major part of Vermont’s plan to bring affordable access to every resident in the state.

Whether UTOPIA Fiber or the growing number of cities establishing open access fiber network agreements with Strata Networks, Utah continues to be on the cutting edge of developing creative, highly-localized alternatives to entrenched regional monopolies, the first step in genuinely bridging the nation’s stubborn digital divide. Officials in American Fork, Utah say they’ve struck a new partnership with Strata Networks to build a 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) capable fiber network to improve connectivity for the city’s 34,000 residents. Elsewhere in Utah, cities continue to craft new partnerships with UTOPIA, the nation’s largest open access network. 

A bipartisan coalition of Pennsylvania lawmakers have introduced legislation that attempts to reverse some of the state’s most-stringent provisions hamstringing municipal broadband builds. But experts suggest that while the bill may be well-intentioned, a cleaner approach would be to eliminate the state’s harmful and dated restrictions on municipal broadband entirely. SB1363, a new bill introduced in November to the Pennsylvania legislature, attempts to scale back at least some aspects of the state’s problematic restrictions on municipal broadband. 

On the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) are joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) to step back and remember the ups and downs as well as twists and turns in 2022. Did the supply chain fears that dominated news cycles ever really materialize? Will we ever have a functioning FCC? Is Congress completely out of touch with regard to the cost of broadband? Is fixing the urban broadband problem fundamentally different from fixing the rural broadband problem? The panel weighs in, and Christopher gets a little hot under the collar.

Email us at broadband@muninetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.