CCG Consulting

Local governments have been installing flood sensors as a way to alert the public about high-water situations. There seems to be an increasing number of major flooding events, like Hurricane Helene and the Guadalupe River floods. But there are numerous smaller flooding events all of the time that result from heavy rains. In Appalachia, where I live, and in places like the Ozarks and the Rocky Mountains, floods can spring up quickly along roads after a rain event, often from upstream rain outside the flooded area.

Rural broadband is facing a dramatic moment when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration decides what it's going to do with the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment proposals that States have presented to it. State Broadband Offices have been submitting final BEAD plans that are mostly fiber, which seems to fly in the face of the Trump administration's June 2025 changes to the program.

It seems like there is daily news concerning satellites used for broadband and telecommunications. Starlink experienced a worldwide 2.5-hour network outage on July 23 that was blamed on “key internal software services that operate the core network”. This raises questions about using satellite broadband for mission-critical uses, such as for military field operations. T-Mobile has been plastering the airwaves with ads that tout the ability of T-Mobile customers to use its satellites to send text messages from remote locations.

In July 2025, the White House released Winning the Race, America’s AI Plan, that described the administration’s view of the role that government will have in the future of Artificial Intelligence.

You probably haven’t noticed, but the press is no longer full of articles claiming that Fixed Wireless Access cellular broadband is a poor broadband choice for customers. For several years, there was a constant stream of quotes by executives of big cable companies and telcos saying that FWA was a flash in the pan that was only selling quickly because of low prices. They said that FWA performance was erratic, and cellular carriers didn’t have enough excess capacity to provide a reliable broadband connection.

The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Federal Communications Commission has the authority to operate and fund the Universal Service Fund, overturning rulings by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which agreed with Consumers’ Research and said that the USF is unconstitutional. This puts the issue back on the table of somehow fixing the USF, which universally is regarded as broken. The current funding mechanism of taxing interstate telephone services is becoming untenable, with the current USF fee set at 36 percent of the applicable revenue source.

While States are scurrying to award Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment infrastructure funds before September 4, the other portion of BEAD—non-deployment funds—is in limbo. For those who haven’t been following BEAD closely, non-deployment funds are any remaining money after a State has made awards to bring broadband to every BEAD unserved and underserved location. Because of the uneven nature of allocating BEAD funding to States, some States didn’t expect to have any non-deployment funding, while others expected significant non-deployment funds.

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.