Decades after bringing electricity and telephone services to America’s rural households, cooperatives are tackling a new challenge: the rural digital divide. New updates to the Community Broadband Networks initiative’s report Cooperatives Fiberize Rural America: A Trusted Model for the Internet Era, originally published in 2017, illustrate the remarkable progress co-ops have made in deploying fiber optic Internet access across the country. The report features new maps showing overall growth in areas served by co-ops, as well as expanded information about state legislation that supports co-op investment in broadband networks. A few important takeaways: 

• More than 140 co-ops across the country now offer residential gigabit Internet access to their members, reaching more than 300 communities. 
• 70.8% of North Dakota and 47.7% of South Dakota landmass is served by co-ops, and residents enjoy some of the fastest Internet access speeds in the nation. 
• Georgia and Mississippi have overturned state laws banning co-ops from offering Internet access, and other states, including Colorado, Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas, have implemented legislation that will further ease the way. 

The death of federal network neutrality protections in the US didn’t only give Internet service providers license to penalize customers who don’t agree to buy their services. It also pointlessly mystified the process whereby consumers acquire the most basic, unsimplified details about their home internet’s price, speed, and capacity. Whereas the Open Internet Order—the now-repealed Federal Communications Commission rules that established net neutrality—required ISPs to offer consumers quick access to information in a format that’s easy to digest, the method devised by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai all but ensures that some consumers will never find it. "Not only did the FCC’s misguided net neutrality decision do away with efforts to give consumers easy-to-digest information about their broadband service, it left them with an ISP disclosure portal that relies on the agency’s abused and antiquated electronic comment filing system,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. 

As with most decisions over the past two years, Pai’s FCC apparently now aims mostly to help ISPs do the bare minimum to serve consumers; allowing them, for instance, to hide information from consumers might need to make an informed purchasing decision. Ultimately, this easy access to knowledge is just another casualty of the FCC’s war against a free and open internet. “[T]he FCC is telling consumers ‘you are on your own’ when it comes to learning more about just what their broadband service can deliver,” Commissioner Rosenworcel said. “It’s not right that the agency sells consumers short like this—they deserve better.”

This is the paradox of 5G, the collection of technologies behind next-generation wireless networks: They require a gargantuan quantity of wires. This is because 5G requires many more small towers, all of which must be wired to the internet. The consequences of this unavoidable reality are myriad. The 5G build-out, which could take more than a decade, could disrupt our commutes, festoon nearly every city block with antennas, limit what cities can charge for renting spots on their infrastructure to carriers on which to place their antennas, and result in an unequal distribution of access to high-speed wireless, at least at first. 

Of course, it’s also a bonanza for the companies that supply this fiber-optic cable. But buying the fiber is the easy part for the carriers. “The secret nobody likes to talk about is when you’re deploying a network, the equipment—fiber, cable—is actually a small cost compared to the cost of digging holes,” says Claudio Mazzali, senior vice president of technology at Corning Optical Communications, a subsidiary of Corning. That high cost also includes getting city permits, striking deals with landowners and installing the antennas themselves.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a cease-fire on trade that will remove some curbs on Huawei buying high-tech equipment from the US, for the moment lifting one cloud over the global economy. Under the cease-fire, the US agreed to put off additional tariffs on Chinese goods indefinitely. In response, China will start buying large amounts of American farm products, President Trump said. Until the two leaders sat down for an 80-minute lunch meeting on the sidelines of a Group of 20 meeting, the US was poised to hit China with tariffs on the roughly $300 billion in goods that aren’t currently covered by 25% tariffs. Afterward, President Trump said the sides were ready to start talking again. “We’re going to work with China on where we left off to see if we can make a deal,” he said. “I’m not rushed,” he said, calling the talks “intricate.” President Trump said he was leaving the Huawei issue until the end of negotiations, but for now, the Chinese telecommunications giant looks to gain a significant reprieve. The president said American firms could ship goods to Huawei, which parts of the US government have called a national-security risk.