Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act

This paper argues that with fiber and gigabit cable now reaching most US locations, bandwidth is no longer the binding constraint on internet performance—latency is. The authors contend that latency is determined largely outside the last mile, by middle-mile fiber, peering density, and proximity to Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), so the massive public investment in last-mile deployment does little to address it. They distinguish AI training, which follows power supply, from AI inference, which follows network performance.

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) is adding its voice to those calling on the NTIA to release BEAD winners' performance testing results to the public, with a stated concern that "some providers" may not be able to meet their commitments. The labor union's request came in the form of a letter to Arielle Roth, NTIA chief administrator, dated Tuesday, July 14.

At ConnectLA, we believe transparency and accountability are essential components of any publicly funded infrastructure program. This is particularly true for broadband deployment, where we have a once-in-a-lifetime, urgent mandate to connect our entire nation—and, for us, our entire state of Louisiana—to high-speed internet. From the first dollar spent to the final connection made, taxpayers deserve to understand how their investment is being delivered.

Texas’ Democratic candidate for attorney general says, if elected, he would investigate whether SpaceX got preferential treatment in receiving $109 million in state broadband grants. The remarks by Nathan Johnson, a state senator, come after the state revised its broadband grant process following the Trump administration’s restructuring of a $42.45 billion federal broadband expansion initiative. 

Comcast Cable Communications has filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau that claims that the Appalachian Power Company is not complying with the FCC’s order on pole attachment pricing in Virginia. The conflict focuses on the $126 million grant to Comcast from the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. The service provider is to provide broadband to approximately 13,000 unserved and underserved locations in the commonwealth. Comcast needs access to APCO’s poles in order to fulfill its obligations.

From 2020 through 2024, Congress appropriated over $82 billion to programs across multiple agencies to expand broadband access. In a number of reports in recent years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog that investigates how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, recommended that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration better communicate the financial sustainability of broadband projects to Congress and improve collaboration with the other federal agencies that fund broadband deployment.

Business Oregon’s Oregon Broadband Office announced the preliminary awardees selected to assume Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment projects that were voluntarily declined by their original awardees.

Rural cooperatives have been the backbone of modern efforts to bring affordable next-generation fiber to long-neglected rural U.S.

Pew recently published an article that cautioned that States Must Consider the Future of Broadband Offices. They note that some states have a sunset date embedded in the enabling legislation that will mean the end of State Broadband Offices if state legislatures don’t act. I’ve also been thinking about this lately.

The Texas office responsible for distributing over $5 billion in state and federal money to expand rural broadband faced allegations of “favoritism” and offering “sweetheart” deals at a recent hearing of the state Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee. At the June 24 hearing, lawmakers suggested the Texas Broadband Development Office was changing rules and giving special treatment to companies that offer broadband via low earth orbit satellites. According to testimony, some of those changes came at the suggestion of the office of Gov. Greg Abbott.