Individuals who primarily Reside in a Rural Area

American government civic leaders continue to prioritize digital inclusion and digital equity. In Boston (MA), elected officials, and tech leaders are collaborating to expand the scope of digital equity by making sure all residents have high-speed Internet, devices, and digital skills training. Additionally, Boston has a new focus; specifically, the City has broadened the scope of the work to also include looking at how technology can ease barriers toward equity for different groups.

A big piece of what the Federal Communications Commission does is to weigh competing claims to use spectrum. One of the latest fights, which is the continuation of a fight going on since 2018, is for the use of the 12 GHz spectrum. The big wrestling match is between Starlink’s desire to use the spectrum to communicate with its low-orbit satellites and cellular carriers and wireless internet service providers (WISPs) who want to use the spectrum for rural broadband. Starlink uses this spectrum to connect its ground-based terminals to satellites.

With US cable broadband subscriber growth remaining flat or going negative, operators are hard-pressed to find a remedy that will rekindle growth in a service category now considered central to the overall business.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is accepting applications for ReConnect Program loans and grants to expand access to high-speed internet for millions of people in rural America nationwide. USDA is making more than $1 billion available from the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act (IIJA). The USDA has made several improvements to the ReConnect Program for the current round of applications:

T-Mobile and Starlink made a joint announcement recently about an arrangement where Starlink will enable voice and texting capabilities to T-Mobile cellphones by the end of 2023. Elon Musk touted this as being able to reach people lost in the wilderness, but the much bigger use will be to fill in cellular coverage in rural areas for T-Mobile. While the two companies made a big splashy announcement about the arrangement, they are late to the game as other industry players already have similar plans underway.

Broadband is the future of New Hampshire, we reported in June as the state was one of the first to win approval from the U.S. Treasury for plans to use Capital Projects Fund support to extend the reach of broadband networks. On September 8, we learned that New Hampshire is once again leading the way—now it is the first state to gain approval for a second wave of Capital Projects Fund support. New Hampshire's plans are designed to connect 80% of locations in the state still lacking high-speed internet access.

North Carolina is currently putting to work over a billion dollars from American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding through a number of programs, including the Growing Rural Economies with Access to Technology (GREAT) grants to connect the 1.1 million households in the state unable to access the internet. Around $380 million in GREAT funding is designed to incentivize deployments to unserved rural parts of the state. The state also has a Completing Access to Broadband (CAB) program to address high-cost areas where service providers are traditionally reluctant to go along with money going to uti

North Dakota is the 19th largest state in terms of land area with more than 70,000 square miles yet is the 3rd smallest in terms of population with fewer than 800,000 residents. In too many rural areas of the U.S., residents struggle to get connected because commercial telecommunications providers are unable to recoup the cost of building infrastructure.

In 2019, Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR) laid out a goal of 25 Megabits per second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload broadband deployed to population centers of 500 or more by 2022. Approaching the end of 2022 and the time Arkansas set to achieve its original broadband goals, the state has received new funds through the US Department of Treasury's Capital Projects Fund to help achieve universal connectivity. The April 2022 Arkansas Broadband Master Plan, compiled by the Broadband Develo

Which rural minority communities are growing? What are the strategies behind these growth-oriented communities? Answers to these questions are central to this report; we illuminate inspiring leadership regimes and strategic policy models that are drawing in people and jobs to rural minority communities. We capitalize on a wealth of publicly available administrative data to outline these economies and deconstruct trends in employment, business creation, broadband adoption, and the labor force.