Subscribers to FairlawnGig – Fairlawn, Ohio’s municipal broadband network – are being upgraded to new service levels as the city-owned network bumps up speeds and slashes prices to make its fiber Internet service faster, and even more affordable. Earlier this week, FairlawnGig announced that subscribers who had been getting Fairlawn’s basic service tier of symmetrical 300 Megabits per second (Mbps) were being upgraded to symmetrical gig speed service – for the exact same price of $55/month.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge. Feld is a staple of the field, and has been a consistent voice not only for consumers but broadband advocates of all types for more than two decades. 

In the year since Gigi Sohn has been nominated to fill the fifth and final seat on the Federal Communication Commission (FCC), we have been perplexed as to why Gigi hasn't been confirmed yet, as you can see here and here. We were also signatories to a letter of support signed by 250 industry and public interest groups.

And yet the mystery remained. 

In northeast Ohio, 15 miles north of Akron, the City of Hudson looks to modernize its telecommunications infrastructure through a public-private partnership that would expand the city-owned municipal fiber network, which now only serves part of the city, to reach all 22,000 residents who call Hudson home. The city wants every resident and business to have access to gig fiber service for the same afforable rate now being offered by its geographically-limited Velocity Broadband network. Proposals from prospective Internet service providers are due by Dec. 2.

When last we checked in with Glenwood Springs, Colorado, the city council had voted 6-1 to replace and expand the reach of its existing, municipally-owned fiber system. Two years later and the city, long at the vanguard of community-backed broadband solutions, is working on shoring up access to affordable gigabit fiber to harder to reach parts of the city.

Update November 2022: A previous version of the ACP Dashboard was based on an incorrect understanding of the Enrolled and Claimed household numbers. At the time, we believed that these two values (as reflected in the publicly available USAC releases) represented an important (and increasingly so) reality where a large number of the households that were eligible and enrolling in the benefit were not using (or claiming) the benefit.

Thus, the data seemed to show that millions of households who had been cleared to use the program were not getting the benefit each month. In the story below, we highlight what looked like gaps in major metropolitan areas, including places like Baltimore, Detroit, Washington D.C., and elsewhere.