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The most recent White House Budget proposes eliminating the ReConnect grant program, which is administered by the Rural Utilities Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. ReConnect has been a popular funding program in rural areas and was one of the few sources of federal broadband grants when it began. It is an interesting program because awards include both grants and low-interest rate loans. Congress purposefully put the ReConnect program at the RUS.

The US Senate voted to kill the decision of the Federal Communications Commission to use the Universal Service Fund to fund WiFi hotspots for students and libraries. The House is supposed to take up the issue soon. The FCC approved this funding in 2024 under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. The plan was to use the E-Rate funding aimed at schools and libraries to provide hotspots to bring temporary service to homes without a broadband connection. The idea of using hotspots leaped onto the scene during the pandemic when schools needed to keep students connected to schoolwork.

Charter, Rogers Communications, and CableLabs have collaborated on a new technology they are calling new radio over coax. The immediate goal of the new technology is to use a cable company’s coaxial network to transmit 5G signals. In Charter’s case, the company wants to use new bandwidth to take advantage of Charter’s CBRS spectrum. The technology to make this happen relies on opening up new spectrum inside the HFC (Hybrid fiber coaxial) network at frequencies higher than 1.8 GHz, which is the current bandwidth needed to implement DOCSIS 4.0.

I’ve regularly heard that U.S. broadband prices are a lot higher than European prices. I found a way to check this when I ran across this article from ISPreview that has a long list of gigabit broadband prices across the UK. The article includes the listed prices for 41 British internet service providers for 2022, 2023, and the current 2025 prices. The prices in the article include the value-added tax, which is administered the same as a sales tax.

State broadband offices (SBOs) have seemingly aligned to put pressure on the federal government to get the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment awards made and the construction process started in 2025.

After several delays due to bad weather, Amazon’s Project Kuiper finally launched its first batch of low-orbit broadband satellites on April 28. Amazon is under pressure to get the launches going and has a commitment to the Federal Communications Commission to launch 1,618 satellites by July 2026. That’s half of Project Kuiper’s first satellite fleet of 3,232 satellites. Project Kuiper’s stated mission is to provide fast, affordable broadband to communities around the world that are unserved or underserved with broadband.

On April 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t have the authority to levy fines. The case under appeal came from an AT&T fine issued by the FCC in 2024 for violating customer privacy by selling customer location data.

There is an interesting article from the Brookings Institute that documents four trends in infrastructure funding. The four conclusions of the report surprised me, and I suspect they will surprise others:

The Kansas legislature recently enacted HB 2061, which declared that broadband is critical infrastructure. Specifically, the new law says that it is a felony to trespass or damage aboveground and belowground lines, cables, and wires used for telecommunications or video services. When Governor Laura Kelly signed the bill, she said it was critical that all Kansans have access to reliable high-speed internet.

Anybody who was using computers before 2000 can describe a broadband journey of how they communicated over the years. That journey mostly describes the broadband choices we each had in our neighborhood. I've had a lot of broadband products over the years, but I think the 1 Mbps DSL modem from Verizon was my favorite. It was 30 times faster than dial-up and, for the first time, I felt freed from the limits of the connection technology. At the time, that was enough speed to do anything I wanted. I’m also still nostalgic about the beeps and boops of my first modem.