The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing $9 million in four, high-speed broadband infrastructure projects that will create or improve rural e-Connectivity for 3,744 rural households, 31 businesses, 41 farms and a critical community facility in Tennessee.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is investing $3.4 million to create or improve rural e-Connectivity for 603 rural households, 12 farms and a business in Hamilton County (IL). Hamilton County Telephone Cooperative Corporation Inc. will replace copper wire with fiber-optic cable wire. The upgrade will benefit 146 customers in the area. The company provides broadband internet access, entertainment video and voice services to 1,600 customers over approximately 467 square miles.
Rep A. Donald McEachin (D-VA) led 22 of his colleagues from the House Commerce Committee in sending a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai requesting that the FCC reconsider the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) Order in light of the last-minute language added to the adopted Order and released Feb 7.
Until today, the latest broadcast station ownership data reported by the Federal Communications Commission was from 2015. While I am pleased that we finally have updated numbers to talk about, it is still an unacceptable lag of more than two years in our reporting on data from Oct 2017. To effectively address the lack of media ownership diversity, we cannot use stale data and must get better at assessing the extent of the problem in a timely manner.
Schools, libraries, and hospitals are familiar examples of what has come to be known as a “community anchor institution," a term that includes “a public school, a library, a medical or health-care provider, a community college or other institution of higher education, a State library agency, and any other nonprofit or governmental community support organization.”
The Federal Communications Commission’s Media Bureau released its fourth report on the ownership of broadcast stations. The data contained in the report provide a tabulation of station ownership based on information submitted by licensees on FCC Form 323 and Form 323-E in response to the 2017 biennial ownership report filing window, which closed in March 2018. This filing window was the first to collect information from non-commercial educational stations about the gender, ethnicity, and race of the licensee’s attributable interest holders.
© 1994-2026 Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. All Rights Reserved.
