In a period where every dollar counts for most Americans, consumer broadband services are delivering another year of declining prices and faster speeds. This sixth edition of USTelecom’s Broadband Pricing Index shows U.S. broadband services have continued a long-running trend of pairing faster speeds with lower bills. These price declines stand in sharp contrast to overall U.S. inflation, which stood at 2.4 percent from March 2024 to March 2025. The continued progress of broadband affordability and quality over the past year adds to a 10-year record of soaring consumer value. Indeed, broadband prices for today’s most popular services (100-940 Mbps) have declined by 43.1 percent over the past 10 years, while the cost of overall consumer goods and services has risen by 35.8 percent.

As part of Arizona’s expansive efforts to expand high-speed broadband access statewide, the Arizona State Broadband Office recently launched the Arizona Permit Finder, a first-of-its-kind interactive permitting map. The first-in-the-nation Permit Finder seeks to reduce regulatory barriers and accelerate the pace of broadband expansion—supporting new economic opportunities for communities across the state. The Permit Finder consolidates permitting requirements into a centralised source, ensuring Internet Service Providers and subgrant recipients have access to important agency and contact information. The tool identifies for Internet Service Providers and other stakeholders the necessary permits and points of contact to advance broadband infrastructure. 

Something remarkable happened in Western Massachusetts in 2018. Over the course of just four months that year, two new municipal fiber networks lit up in tiny towns in the leastdensely populated part of the state. In 2019, three more small towns in the region brought networks online. The next year, seven more communities followed suit. Another seven joined them the following year. Over the course of just four years, 19 towns launched municipal broadband networks, bringing ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access to their communities. The area became the most geographically dense collection of municipal broadband anywhere in the United States. How did they do it? For years, a cadre of volunteers in the region devoted thousands of hours to organizing, research, and advocacy in a region-wide effort to bring Internet access to every resident with no guarantee of success. When state officials doomed the regional project by withdrawing their support, advocates adapted their plans toward individual town ownership. Then, after officials changed the rules of the state grant program to prioritize private Internet Service Providers, broadband boosters in the communities stared down a pressure campaign to abandon municipal ownership — and persevered. Their commitment to local self-reliance and collective well-being was contagious. Voters overwhelmingly approved measures to take on debt in order to pay for network construction, even when it meant raising their own taxes. Often, these debts represented the single largest investment in the town’s history. 

The $2.5 billion USDA Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, was USDA's largest broadband program until the current ReConnect program. This study investigates the impacts of BIP on employment and telework for the period 2011–2017 using confidential American Community Survey microdata on individual workers, combined with program data and other data. The study finds that BIP increased the likelihood of employment in the sample of all workers and in subsamples of White workers, male workers, workers in metro areas, workers in service industries, and workers specifically in information services, finance and insurance, and professional services for residents of targeted areas. BIP reduced the likelihood of employment among workers in trade and manufacturing industries. Regarding telework, BIP increased the likelihood of working at home among workers employed in information services and professional services. The study also examined the impact of BIP on individual labor force participation, revealing a significant increase in labor force participation due to the BIP.

Fixed wireless access is still having its moment in the sun and applying heat to cable broadband competition. Though Verizon saw its rate of new FWA subscribers decline in the third quarter of 2025, FWA subscriber rates were on the upswing at both AT&T and T-Mobile during the period. Meanwhile, AT&T is in position to become even more aggressive with Internet Air—now its flagship FWA product—after putting some midband spectrum from EchoStar into action. AT&T recently said that spectrum—in the 3.45GHz band—is already goosing 5G capacity for mobile and FWA customers even before regulators stamp the proposed deal. While the use of "fallow" wireless capacity for FWA services seems to be a non-issue at the moment, some fresh analysis from MoffettNathanson raises questions about FWA's potential for the longer term as average broadband usage continues to climb even before AI-powered services start to leave a real mark.

Ookla's recent findings on the performance of wireless internet service providers were not well received by some of the referenced parties. WISPA Communications Director Mike Wendy called the report's headline claim that "most" WISPs "fail" the Federal Communications Commission's 100/20 Mbit/s benchmark "fatally over-inclusive and just plain wrong." Wendy went on to say that "the 'findings,' as compiled via a biased/non-scientific platform, are flawed through the company's own content creation/collection process" and that the report is "not representative of an entire industry." Furthermore, WISPA argued that the report "wrongly conflates speed with interference or congestion," and added that "speed is but one small factor" in customer ISP choice. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is pressing the Trump administration for more information on potential plans to “prop up” major AI companies with money from taxpayers. In a letter to David Sacks, the White House special advisor for AI and Crypto, and Michael Kratsios, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Sen. Warren writes that President Donald Trump’s “close ties” with AI executives and donors “raise concerns that the Administration will bail out AI executives and shareholders while leaving taxpayers to foot the bill.” Sen. Warren, who is a ranking member on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, points to a recent interview with OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who suggested the government could “backstop” the company’s investments in AI, before walking back the statement. However, Sen. Warren notes that OpenAI wrote a letter to Kratsios in October, requesting that the Trump administration expand the government-funded Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit—which is supposed to go toward semiconductor manufacturers—to support AI server production and data centers.

When you talk to as many industry players as we do, you start to pick up on trends. Many of these are technical in nature or simply recurring problems that folks are encountering as they all try to tackle the same challenges. But others are just—for lack of a better word—funny. Case in point: Neocloud companies absolutely hate being called neoclouds. This point was independently and organically made by executives from both Nebius and Lambda in recent interviews. But the reason behind the beef depends on who you ask. Nebius Chief Revenue Officer Marc Boroditsky referred to the term as “a convenient trash bin analysts put us all in.” Lambda’s VP of Data Center Infrastructure Ken Patchett also expressed disdain for the moniker. His preferred term? “Emerging hyperscalers.” For better or worse, the term is likely to stick. But that’s just one of the themes that has popped up in recent conversations.  The other? Data centers aren’t to blame for rising power costs.

Federal Communications Commissioner Anna Gomez released a statement in advance of a vote by the FCC to roll back the only concrete federal regulatory action taken in response to the Salt Typhoon breach, which U.S. officials described as the worst telecommunications hack in the nation’s history. “Ten months into this Administration, this FCC has still not put forward a single actionable solution to address the growing cybersecurity threat to our communications networks. Not one concrete proposal. Not one protection standard. Not one accountability mechanism. Its proposed rollback is not a cybersecurity strategy. It is a hope and a dream that will leave Americans less protected than they were the day the Salt Typhoon breach was discovered,” said Commissioner Gomez. “By rescinding previous efforts to strengthen our networks and offering nothing in their place, the FCC leaves the country less secure at the very moment when these threats are increasing. Salt Typhoon will not be the last attempt to infiltrate our networks, and without immediate action, it will not be the last successful one.”