Doug Dawson

Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath wrote to customers saying that Verizon customer service has “taken a different path” and the company is raising the bar on the customer service experience.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has proposed changes to the way the FCC sets broadband goals and tracks broadband coverage. The proposed changes are included in the Nineteenth Section 706 Notice of Enquiry, which is scheduled to come up for a vote at the FCC’s August Open Meeting. The FCC asks if 100/20 Megabits per second (Mbps) should be the benchmark for defining fixed broadband. This is a question that almost every annual Enquiry has asked, and the FCC will be asking for input.

Is there any practical future for the US Department of Agriculture's ReConnect program? The Senate Appropriations Committee recently approved the fiscal year 2026 budget for the Department of Agriculture. Buried within that budget is $100 million for new ReConnect loans or grants. It’s still early in the federal budget process, and the $100 million slated for next year is a preliminary number, but it’s already lower than previous annual allocations to the program. ReConnect has been a popular program, particularly with cooperatives and small telephone companies.

CenturyLink told the Federal Communications Commission recently that it is defaulting on 41,000 Rural Digital Opportunity Fund locations spread across eight states and 153 Census block groups. There are a number of consequences of this default. First, this has now happened after states made Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment maps and allocation. That makes it likely that nobody will be bringing improved broadband to the default areas. If the defaults had happened earlier, these areas could have been rolled into the BEAD process.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration has leaned into supporting fixed wireless throughout the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. In June 2025, NTIA surprised State Broadband Offices by announcing they would need to remove areas already served by unlicensed fixed wireless from BEAD eligibility. NTIA's new BEAD guidelines, which prioritize the cheapest technology, make it likely that many awards will go to wireless internet service providers that rely heavily on CBRS and 6 GHz spectrum.

The Federal Communications Commission recently issued a proposed new set of rules in the ongoing pole docket, which also solicits feedback on additional questions and includes some clarifications of earlier orders. The primary focus of the new rules is to define requirements for handling requests to add fiber to 3,000 or more poles at a time. This order has not been approved yet, but it is included for consideration in the FCC’s July 2025 meeting and is likely to be approved.

The One Big, Beautiful Bill creates some significant new benefits for building broadband networks:

One big change coming from the current administration is that the federal government is shoving payments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency down to the States. The administration talked about completely closing FEMA, but recently said that they would keep the agency open in the future. But with the budget cuts that came out of the "One Big, Beautiful Bill," it’s clear that the federal share for paying for disasters will go down, meaning the State share will increase.

Over the last decade, I’ve heard from dozens of real estate agents who work in rural America.

The guessing game is over since the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has released the final rules about how the new Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) grant process will work. It’s still impossible to make any guesses about the percentage of BEAD that will be awarded to fiber or other technologies. It’s clear that a lot of State Broadband Offices (SBOs) still want to maximize the amount of awards made to fiber.