Linda Hardesty

Lumen Technologies has launched Lumen Intelligent Internet, which lets its enterprise customers buy connectivity in minutes and scale bandwidth up or down as their AI, cloud, and business needs demand.

According to interviews and research from the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, state broadband officers are exhausted by the challenges and shifting dynamics of implementing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. Leaders from the Benton Institute have interviewed over 30 SBOs so far about what it is taking to implement BEAD. And Dr. Revati Prasad of the Benton Institute talked about the takeaways from those conversations in a recent Fiber Broadband Association webinar.

The company Ooma has been around for about 20 years, offering its voice-over-IP and unified communications as a service phone technologies, but now Ooma has come up with a product that lets residential Starlink broadband subscribers add voice to their Starlink service. Ooma’ StarDial is targeted to Starlink internet users in rural, remote or off-grid locations who may want to also tap their satellite broadband service for voice.

Illinois isn’t doing so great closing its digital divide, and perhaps that’s why people in the state are picking up Starlink broadband at a faster pace than other states. According to new research from Ookla, based on Ookla’s Speedtest data, rural broadband access expanded across the U.S. in the first half of 2026, with nearly every state narrowing the gap between broadband performance in cities compared to broadband performance in rural areas. When compared to the second half of 2025, every state—with the exceptions of California, Delaware, and Illinois—made progress.

Charter’s CFO Jessica Fischer is leaving the company on October 15 to become the founding CFO of a new Blackstone–Google joint venture called Crux AI, which will be focused on AI infrastructure. But still representing Charter, Fischer spoke at Citi's 2026 Global TMT Conference.

Comcast has sparked a plan to transform its cost structure and the overall business in a way that will save billions of dollars and enable Comcast to redirect those funds toward growth initiatives, CFO Jason Armstrong revealed at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. "We embarked earlier this month on the largest cost transformation in the company's history. This will be billions of dollars in costs," he said. "I frame it [as] more of a transformation. It's not a budget exercise.

Light Source Communications signed its second major hyperscale tenant on a 500-mile, dark fiber route it’s building between Tulsa (OK) and St. Louis (MO). The company says the new hyperscaler deal highlights the fact that the central U.S. is becoming a critical corridor for the massive data center demands of AI. Debra Freitas, CEO of Light Source Communications, said, “If you see where all of the major builds are happening, they're primarily in the central U.S.

EPB, the Chattanooga, Tennessee, electric utility company has long been a hero in the broadband world because it was the first electric utility to offer 1 Gbps broadband to consumers. These days, it can offer speeds of 25 Gig. EPB has more than 200,000 energy customers and over 130,000 fiber customer.

Telecom providers and cable companies are ditching areas where they no longer want to serve customers. Nebraska Technology and Telecommunications just filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to discontinue all its voice and data services in the states of Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota. The discontinuance will affect approximately 3,756 customers.

Recon Analytics principal Roger Entner has some amusing insights from recent research: “One-third of Americans cannot tell you what home internet technology they have. Of the ones who think they know, one-third are wrong,” wrote Entner. Recon Analytics gleaned this information because it surveys thousands of broadband customers every week, and it runs speed tests inside its surveys, so it can compare what people say they have against what their connection actually delivers.