
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (TAK Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) and special guests Sascha Meinrath (X-Lab) and Robert Boyle (Planet Networks) to talk about all the recent broadband news that's fit to print. On tap:
Join us live on January 24th at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.
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Data unsurprisingly ranks remote Alaska dead last when it comes to the availability of affordable broadband. That’s particularly true in areas like Bristol Bay, an area the FCC’s updated broadband maps suggests lacks access almost entirely. But as with most underserved regions, local cooperatives are at the forefront of efforts to finally address the problem.
Launched in 1975, the member-owned Nushagak Electric & Telephone Cooperative, based in Dillingham, Alaska, offers locals broadband access through microwave towers; often the only way to provide service across Alaska’s rugged landscape. But the co-op, which also offers a electric, telephone, and cable TV service, says it’s on the cusp of new fiber deployments that should finally bring next-generation speeds to a chunk of the co-op’s members.
The co-op has been working since 2021 on a $22.4 million plan to expand more reliable fiber to the region. The project is partially funded by the USDA ReConnect program as well as $6.5 million in term loan money from the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation. The cooperative will also use $784,000 of its own money to get the project underway.
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. And to make sure we get it right, we have to grapple with the array of long-standing failures - purposeful and not - that have gotten us to this point: the regulatory capture of the FCC, the willful ignorance of bad data collection and mapping, the acceptance of disingenuous "technology neutral" arguments, turning a blind eye to the imbalance in service and cost between our cities and rural expanses, and pretending that not every households in the country can have a first-class, affordable, reliable Internet connection.
This show is 40 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.
Transcript below.
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Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.
Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Rudolf van der Berg, Partner at Stratix Consulting, a Dutch consulting firm that does work in telecommunications and has been deeply involved in the historic level of new infrastructure deployment projects in northern Europe. Rudolf breaks down what's going on today in Europe's broadband landscape, including efforts to reach the unserved, new entrants, and the actions of private equity.
Rudolf challenges the notion that overregulation stifles innovation and competition, and dispels the rhetoric (pushed by monopoly ISPs in the United States) that the European networks struggled with the onset of the pandemic because of the regulatory landscape and comparative lack of investment as compared to their ISPs' American counterparts. Christopher and Rudolf close out the show by digging into the struggle between tech companies and ISPs between which should pay for infrastructure upgrades.
This show is 41 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.
Transcript below.
We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.
Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.
Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
Join us live on Thursday, September 22, at 4pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting). They'll dig into the recent New York City announcement that it would subsidize connection costs for hundreds of thousands in public housing, Tennessee's recent grant announcements, upcoming and dramatic speed increases announced by Comcast, and how the increasing cost of labor, materials, and now capital is affecting new fiber builds.
Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.
Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, watch on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.
Join us live on Thursday, September 22, at 4pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting). They'll dig into the recent New York City announcement that it would subsidize connection costs for hundreds of thousands in public housing, Tennessee's recent grant announcements, upcoming and dramatic speed increases announced by Comcast, and how the increasing cost of labor, materials, and now capital is affecting new fiber builds.
Email us at [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.
Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, watch on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.
Join us live on Thursday, August 18th, at 3:30pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guest Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Casey Lide, Partner at Keller and Heckman.
The panel will talk about LTD Broadband and Starlink recently getting removed from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) by the FCC, the most recent Universal Service Fund report sent to Congress, and whether the new streaming video landscape is materially different from the old cable TV model (and if we should care).
Subscribe to the show using this feed on YouTube Live or here on Facebook Live, on find it on the Connect This! page.
Email us [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.
Watch here on YouTube Live, here on Facebook live, or below.
Join us live on Thursday, August 18th, at 3:30pm ET for the latest episode of the Connect This! Show. Co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by regular guest Kim McKinley (UTOPIA Fiber) and Casey Lide, Partner at Keller and Heckman.
The panel will talk about LTD Broadband and Starlink recently getting removed from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) by the FCC, the most recent Universal Service Fund report sent to Congress, and whether the new streaming video landscape is materially different from the old cable TV model (and if we should care).
Subscribe to the show using this feed on YouTube Live or here on Facebook Live, on find it on the Connect This! page.
Email us [email protected] with feedback and ideas for the show.
Watch here on YouTube Live, here on Facebook live, or below.
Join us live on Thursday, November 11th at 5pm ET for Episode 25 of the Connect This! Show, where co-hosts Christopher and Travis Carter (USI Fiber) will be joined by Glen Atkins (a twenty-year veteran of the cable television industry) and Ron Hranac (former Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco) to talk about the future of hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network infrastructure.
Cable began as a one-way video distribution system before transforming into the avenue by which the majority of Americans access the Internet today. It has enjoyed a long life as the result of new specification standards, encoding schemes, and the result of pushing fiber farther and farther into the network. The panel will talk about DOCSIS and the move from the 3.1 standard to 4.0, which will enable symmetrical gigabit speeds to users and more households served at the highest speed tiers. They'll also dig into the pantheon of other hardware and system upgrades used by cable operators, from low latency DOCSIS to virtualized cable modem termination system (vCMTS).
With so much fiber being built in 2021 and beyond, how much life is left in the cable plant?
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A version of this story was originally published by the National League of Cities. Read the original here, with the full version below.
There’s an overwhelming tendency among regular Americans to conflate the basic infrastructure which surrounds us with permanence. Whether it’s the garbage truck predictably rumbling down the street at the same time every week, the water flowing from the tap, or our Internet connection, we assume that the physical ties which bind us together will always be there. And that’s because it mostly has, especially for community owned and operated infrastructure. When utility services are owned and operated by communities, they are by definition maintained by people who live locally for people who live locally. It’s hard to be taken by surprise and left without essential services.
But the odds tilt in the other direction when such services are delivered by outside firms. We’re seeing the consequences of this for electricity users in the wake of the Texas grid disaster last winter (as well as coming rumblings of heat-caused outages this June), but it’s a problem that’s been around longer than that for basic service providers of all types, where bankruptcies can leave whole communities high and dry.
The same consequences hold true when those firms are Internet Service Providers (ISPs), beholden to interests outside of the cities and towns they serve. Tens of thousands of American households learned this very lesson last fall when AT&T announced it was leaving the DSL business and no longer making new connections to its aging infrastructure, even though those wires will continue to sit in the ground for decades to come. Buy a new house in this area, and if AT&T DSL was the only provider in town, and you’ve got few or no options.