Community Broadband Bits Podcast

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Brieana Reed-Harmel, Municipal Fiber Manager for the City of Loveland, located in Colorado’s Northern Front Range about an hour north of Denver. The city is home to over 80,000 residents as well as a municipal fiber broadband network called Pulse. Chris and Brieana discuss Loveland’s population expansion over the past few years and Pulse’s resulting plans to extend beyond city limits into the “urban fringe,” which is more difficult to receive grant funding to serve. Brieana stresses the importance of having a solid business model and great project management, as well as the scrappiness and ongoing investment needed to ensure a municipal network is sustainable and can bring residents quality connectivity at the best value.

This week on the show we're featuring an episode of our Building for Digital Equity podcast, with Brandon Forester - the National Organizer for Internet Rights at Media Justice - joining Christopher to talk about helping communities build more agency over how technology shows up in their neighborhoods and among the digital communities they create for themselves.

We're more than 15 years and a hundred billion dollars into the alphabet soup of federal broadband infrastructure subsidy programs, and millions upon millions of households are stuck on deteriorating connections and capacity-constrained technologies. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Jonathan Chambers, partner at Conexon, to talk about how the BEAD program is our last chance.

May 2022 witnessed something remarkable: the birth of a new nonprofit advocacy organization whose sole purpose was to speak up for the hundreds of communities that have built municipal broadband networks, and the thousands more that want to but don't know where to start. Now, the American Association for Public Broadband has named as its Executive Director as Gigi Sohn, former Biden nominee to the Federal Communications Commission. And she's ready to get to work.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Christine Parker (Senior GIS Analyst at ILSR), and Meghan Grabill (Geospatial Analyst at the Maine Connectivity Authority) to run through the recently announced NTIA location challenge process for the upcoming BEAD program and talk about how state processes can adjust eligible technologies and location types, shift of the burden of proof to the IPSs, allow of more flexible speed test data, and include the ability to add community anchor institutions to grant-eligible maps.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Sean Gonsalves to chat about the astroturf anti-municipal misinformation campaign being run by the Utah Taxpayer's Association, how a city negotiated a capital fee it's using to build its own network and get out from under Comcast's thumb, and the growing momentum behind Maine's Broadband Utility Districts (BUD) and their quest to improve competition and Internet access for residents.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Justin Holzgrove and Mike Rientjes from Mason County Public Utility District 3 in Washington State. The PUD provides electric service to more than 35,000 households across an area the size of Rhode Island, and began connecting its grid infrastructure to fiber in the late 1990s. Since 2003, it has operated an open access ftth network for households; an endeavor that has sped up since 2015, when residents began clamoring for more. To meet demand and plan for the future, PUD 3 uses a fiberhood approach and construction adders.

Electric cooperatives overwhelmingly serve regions that face population density challenges and income disparities as compared to their urban counterparts, as well as all of the other challenges that go with it: declining populations, hospital closures, increasingly frequent extreme weather events, and more. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Brian O'Hara, Senior Director of Regulatory Issues for Telecom and Broadband at NRECA, to talk about how more than a quarter of the country's electric cooperatives have answered the call of their members and expanded into Internet service.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Will O'Donnell, Broadband and Communications Director at Jefferson County Public Utility District in Washington State, to talk about the Herculean task facing the PUD: how to deploy an open access fiber network to the utility's 21,000 meters in some of the least-dense parts of the state.

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by three members from the Kitsap Public Utility District's open access FTTH team in Washington state to talk about the formation of Local Utility Districts, managing an open access network seeing increased demand, and the value of increased choice and competition for residents and businesses.