News

Digital equity advocates rode into San Antonio, Texas for Net Inclusion 2023 to kick-off the largest gathering of the annual conference to date.

Last August, we launched the first version of our Affordable Connectivity Program dashboard. Now, two versions later, we're back with a 2.0 version of the dashboard. It still tracks everything it did before, but adds a mobile version, a Congressional District Map, and a more nuanced, complete predictive model to calculate how long the fund will last.

Net Inclusion 2023 begins tomorrow in sunny San Antonio, Texas. Join us to watch panels and breakout sessions planned for the all the diverse challenges and opportunities that make up the arena of digital equity and inclusion today, from skills training, to device access, to cost, to use in higher education, medicine, and aging in place.

Join us on Wednesday, March 1st at 7:30pm ET for a very special episode of the show, live from Net Inclusion 2023 in San Antonio, Texas. Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) will be joined by Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber), Angela Siefer (National Digital Inclusion Alliance), Autumn Evans (City of Detroit), and ILSR's DeAnne Cuellar, and in front of a live audience at The Friendly Spot Icehouse.

Profile on the people behind Project Waves, a non-profit organization founded in 2018 to bring broadband to mostly low-income households in Baltimore City.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced it has awarded $63 million through its ReConnect Program to expand access to high-speed Internet service in rural parts of Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Mississippi.

West Des Moines, Iowa is making steady progress on a $60 million open access fiber-optic conduit system to expedite the delivery of affordable fiber citywide.

Ziply Fiber has been increasingly active across Washington State, helping municipalities expand access to affordable, open access fiber networks.

After years of consideration and planning, Waterloo, Iowa is finally moving quickly forward with its plan to build a citywide municipal fiber network.

Joining nearly a thousand digital inclusion practitioners, policymakers, advocates, and researchers from across the nation, ILSR’s entire Community Broadband Networks (CBN) team will be in San Antonio, Texas at the end of this month for Net Inclusion 2023.

It’s not too late to register for our first Building for Digital Equity (#B4DE) livestream event of the year. This Thursday, Feb. 16, from 2-3 pm CST/3-4 pm ET, ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative will kick off our Building for Digital Equity series.

Fourteen years ago, the original MuniNetworks.org went live. With support from the Ford Foundation, it came into being to tell the stories of all of the communities around the country that were taking back their telecommunications future from the monopoly providers. I hoped it would be two things: a clearinghouse of news and local-government success stories, and a lasting, living archive of the movement to return the ideology of self-reliance to Internet infrastructure. We launch this new site and begin the new year full of hope. We want to thank long-time readers and new arrivals alike, as we start a new phase of life. Read on to see what stays the same and what's new.

The Digital Equity LA Summit last week focused on the challenges ahead. Front and center: urging state officials to fix the broadband priority maps the state will use to target where to invest $2 billion in state broadband grant funds

Save the date! ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks team is back for a second season of our Building for Digital Equity series.

AARP has announced it is accepting applications for its seventh annual Community Challenge grant program, a funding source for nonprofit organizations and governmental entities to apply for “quick-action” projects that make communities more livable and have the potential to seed long-term change.

In an announcement last week, Alexandria, Minnesota's (pop. 15,000) electric and water utility (ALP Utilities) announced it would be selling its business-facing fiber network to Arvig, a 40-percent employee-owned Internet Service Provider (ISP) that has 54,000 subscribers across urban and rural Minnesota.

Dryden, New York, population 14,500, has formally launched the town’s municipal broadband network, becoming the first municipality in the state to provide residents with direct access to affordable, publicly owned fiber.

On the most recent episode of the Connect This! Show, Geoff joins to share what happened when he moved to a house and discovered that it was in the Bermuda Triangle of broadband service, and what he's done to try and fix it.

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is pleased to announce that it has been selected by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) as a host organization for a Leading Edge Fellowship for the second time. The application window has opened for recent PhDs in the humanities to apply for a two-year, full-time fellowship to be a Tribal Broadband Policy Analyst. The fellow will continue and contribute to foundational work by ILSR on Internet access in Indian Country while gaining experience in the regular portfolio of research and policy activities by the Community Broadband Networks initiative at ILSR.

LA County is accelerating its plan to deliver affordable broadband access to the city’s unserved and underserved, with an eye toward building one of the biggest municipal broadband networks in the nation. But the county is first taking baby steps, recently announcing target communities prioritized in a pilot program aimed at bridging the digital divide.