At Fiber Connect in Nashville (TN), a panel of experts discussed the challenges of delivering broadband to the absolute hardest places in America using ferries, planes, and crossing international borders. One example came from panelist Donna Hilty, COO at Whidbey Telecom, which is in the Northwest corner of the state of Washington. The company’s footprint covers several islands. Hilty said their most remote site is part of Washington but requires techs to take a plane or boat and also to cross the Canadian border to get there, a difficult situation even before President Trump's tariffs. “Now we have a problem with the tariffs and a situation in Canada, so it's not nearly as friendly, and we may have some problems bringing materials over there." Jason Thune Thune from Hawaiian Telcom, who has to ship materials and workers in order to build, said planning a timeline to build to remote locations is important. He likened it to planning a large event. You have to source materials and line up crews. “It's literally like putting a production together,” he said. Regarding the level of production involved in delivering broadband, panel moderator Kathryn de Wit with Pew Charitable Trusts, said the idea that it’s no big deal if BEAD is delayed for several months is wrong-headed. “It does really matter for planning."

On April 28, Amazon’s Project Kuiper launched an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida and sent 27 satellites into low Earth orbit. The ground personnel rapidly established contact with the satellites. It was the first of a series of planned launches to an altitude of 280 miles, working toward a future constellation of 3,200 satellites beaming broadband service worldwide with extremely low latency. The hope is to give Starlink some competition. That sums up the state of the LEO-based broadband market today. Elon Musk’s Starlink has had the field to itself for years and continues to expand its constellation, which currently stands at 6,750 satellites. Project Kuiper and others have just begun launching satellites, but when will there be effective competition? Communications research firm Strand Consult compares competition between Project Kuiper and Starlink to a just-opened “burger bar” and an “interstellar McDonald’s.” 

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), who served on the House AI Task Force during the 118th Congress, says that he remains hopeful the group’s recommendations will receive renewed legislative attention later this year. The bipartisan House AI Task Force was created in February 2024, to provide lawmakers with policy recommendations for the safe and secure use of the emerging technologies. Beyer was one of the 24 representatives—12 Democrats and 12 Republicans—who served on the task force. The group released a 273-page final report that outlined more than 80 policy recommendations and endorsed over a dozen AI-focused bills designed to curb potential misuses and abuses of the advanced technologies. Rep Beyer noted that all 24 members of the group endorsed 14 specific legislative proposals. While some of these bills advanced out of their respective congressional committees during the previous Congress, Rep Beyer said they failed to make it to the full House for a vote “for strange but real reasons.” “The hope was that we built a base, a foundation, that future Congress’ could build upon,” he added.

The Artificial Intelligence-fixated tech industry is rapidly dismantling the old web, with no game plan for how to replace it. Chatbots have already begun to intercept web traffic and drain publishers' revenue. Now tech giants and startups aim to remodel the devices and browsers we use to access web pages, using AI to summarize or pre-empt the content that people and publishers post online. As tech goes all in on rebuilding our web experiences with AI, there's no guarantee that the web will still be there when that job is done. With chatbots becoming users' default way to find out what's happening in the world, their makers pretend they can plaster this new interface layer over the internet without disrupting the data sources that feed it. But some media observers believe an AI-first web will choke off the money and attention that motivates web creators to keep extending the common knowledge pool.

Gary Bolton, CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association, kicked off the Fiber Connect 2025 conference in Nashville by pointing out two sides of the same coin: fiber internet connectivity has made great strides in recent decades, even though the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program is not progressing as quickly as hoped. The theme for this year’s Fiber Connect conference—“Light It Up”—was chosen based on the idea that, by the time of this conference, BEAD funds would have lit up the first communities in the country with fiber, he said. Bolton’s introduction to Fiber Connect wasn’t all celebration, though. He came out strongly against rumored changes to the BEAD Program that may allow low Earth orbit satellite broadband companies to provide connectivity where, in Bolton’s view, fiber should be used. Bolton made the case that the federal government should not interfere with the progress BEAD has made so far, particularly regarding the BEAD preference for fiber.