Innovative digital equity nonprofit DigitalC has been working for years to shore up affordable broadband access in underserved cities like Cleveland, Ohio. 

Now the organization is enjoying new momentum for its plans to expand fixed wireless broadband access in the city thanks to a $500,000 cash infusion from tech giant Google. According to a recent announcement, the donation includes next-generation Fixed Wireless Access (ngFWA) equipment from Tarana, which will allow DigitalC to expand its Canopy home broadband service – which provides symmetrical 100 megabit per second (Mbps) at $18 a month – to even more neighborhoods in Ohio.

The nonprofit just celebrated the connection of its 6,000th household in Cleveland, a city once ranked the worst-connected large city in the U.S. by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA).

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“This meaningful investment from GFiber adds bandwidth to our capacity to scale the Cleveland Model,” DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds said of the cash infusion. “This community-based blueprint proves that next-generation technology can be deployed quickly, trusted deeply, and scaled effectively to deliver the superior internet experience more communities deserve.”

The Trump FCC has voted to kill two different programs that helped bring free Wi-Fi to school kids in underserved poor and rural U.S. communities.

It’s the latest casualty of an administration that has been taking a hatchet to FCC consumer protection and affordability initiatives, many of which were developed over decades – with popular bipartisan support.

The FCC under Brendan Carr on September 30 voted 2-1 to kill the programs, with Republican Olivia Trusty voting with Carr and Democrat Anna Gomez dissenting.

In 2023, the previous FCC expanded the agency’s Universal Service Fund's E-Rate program to help fund free Wi-Fi service on school buses. In 2024, the Biden FCC further expanded the program to help fund schools and libraries looking to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises by school kids that lacked affordable home broadband.

Both efforts were lauded for bridging the “homework gap,” making it easier and more affordable for kids in disconnected areas to keep up with homework. The expansions incurred no additional costs to taxpayers, leveraging existing USF funding. E-Rate spends about $2 billion annually and has a funding cap of roughly $5 billion.

Both Texas Senator Ted Cruz and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr spent most of 2025 trying to eliminate the programs. At one point, Cruz claimed, falsely, that the program was “censoring kids’ exposure to conservative viewpoints.” Carr, meanwhile, had tried to suggest the program created risks for kids due to unsupervised Internet use.

The FCC’s Universal Service Fund (USF) has survived a Supreme Court challenge by a right wing activist nonprofit, but the program – which for decades has helped extend broadband to underserved rural homes and schools – still faces a precarious immediate future.

It is a peculiar political story, given that the rural regions that overwhelmingly vote for Republicans are now seeing Republicans try to dismantle a program that has been crucial for rural investment and development.

The FCC established the fund in 1997 in compliance with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Historically a program with broad, bipartisan support, the USF leverages around $8 billion annually to expand broadband access to rural communities, libraries, and schools. The program is primarily paid for by consumers via a small levy on traditional phone lines.

In 2023, a right wing activist nonprofit named “Consumer’s Research” sued the government over the USF, claiming that the FCC lacked the constitutional authority to levy a fee on consumers’ bills. The lawsuit claimed that the USF depended on what amounted to an “unconstitutional tax” on consumers to fund operations.

The CBN team's Associate Director for Communications Sean Gonsalves recently published a piece in ProMarket about the continuing consolidation of telecommunication markets and why municipal broadband is a better option. He writes:

"Last month, AT&T announced it would acquire all of Lumen Technologies’ fiber internet business for $5.75 billion. According to a company statement, the purchase will net AT&T one million fiber customers and significantly expand its fiber footprint in Denver, Las Vegas, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Orlando, Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.

Across AT&T and Lumen’s service areas, where they offer wired or licensed fixed wireless Internet service, more than half of the locations they claim to serve have two or fewer options for high-speed internet service.

Good news for AT&T stockholders. Not so good news for broadband-hungry subscribers who, for years now, have been paying among the highest prices for internet service of any developed nation in the world. Ever wonder why that is? The answer is as painfully obvious as our overpriced monthly internet bills.

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When big telecom giants consolidate—especially in a market where most people have only one or maybe two internet service providers (ISPs) to choose from—the results are predictable: without meaningful competition for something as fundamental as internet connectivity in an internet-connected world, monopolists have no incentive to improve service, invest in network upgrades, or compete on price.

California lawmakers’ efforts to pass a new law mandating affordable broadband access is at risk of being destroyed by industry lobbying. California insiders say the changes are so dramatic they may wind up making broadband affordability in the state worse – undermining years of digital equity activism and discarding a rare opportunity to bridge the digital divide.

The California Affordable Home Internet Act (AB 353), introduced by Assemblymember Tasha Boerner last January, would require that broadband providers in the state provide broadband at no more than $15 per month for low-income households participating in a qualified public assistance program.

The original legislation mandated that state residents should be able to receive $15 for all ISPs for broadband at speeds of 100 megabit per second (Mbps) downstream, 20 Mbps upstream. The proposal mirrored similar efforts by New York State which opened the door to other state efforts after the Supreme Court recently refused to hear a telecom industry challenge.

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“I want to get something fair and reasonable that helps those who need it most,” Boerner said in a press release. “AB 353 will fill the gap and ensure our children can turn in their homework, families can get access to telehealth, and apply for jobs online.”

On June 4 a vote moved the legislation through the state Assembly and on to the state senate by a 52-17 margin.

Tired of the high prices, spotty coverage, and slow speeds of regional monopoly broadband providers, the remote West Texas city of Monahans has spent the last decade taking matters into their own hands.

Now, thanks to hard work, determination, and local philanthropy, the city’s 7,500 residents are headed for the right side of the digital divide.

Carroll Faulkner, who consulted with the city on its project, and Teresa Burnett, executive director of the Monahans Chamber of Commerce, told ILSR the project to bring Monahans into the modern era has been a challenging labor of love.

It has recently culminated in the completion of the first phase of the project, bringing affordable fiber to around 2,000 residents in city 36 miles southwest of Odessa.

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“We are very passionate about this project,” Burnett told ILSR. “It's been a lot of ups and downs, and it's been 10 long years.”

The city’s network build is in partnership with Hosted America, which is acting as the first last mile ISP serving residents, and View Capital’s American Fiber Infrastructure Fund, which technically owns the finished network. Hosted America enjoys early exclusive usage of the network, but the duo say the network will ultimately be open access, allowing numerous partners.

Phase one of the network plan was completed roughly a year ago, bringing affordable fiber for the first time ever to around 2,000 locals. The full cost of phase one was expected to be around $4.5 million, said Faulkner, of which around $1 million was funded by the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

The remainder of the funding was obtained from View Capital and a coalition of philanthropic organizations.

Just 40 miles north of the heart of Silicon Valley, the City of Oakland has its sights set on implementing an ambitious Broadband Master Plan.

Dubbed the OaklandConnect project – unanimously approved on May 20 by the Oakland City Council – the plan calls for the construction of a city-owned open access fiber network to expand affordable broadband connectivity to over 33,000 households that city surveys indicate are languishing without home Internet service.

While Oakland is served by Comcast and AT&T mostly (with a smattering of Sonic and T-Mobile hotspots), the service in many areas is substandard, expensive, or both – in a city where surveys indicate affordability as the primary reason so many do not have home Internet service.

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Once the East Bay city of 436,000 completes network construction, it would be one of the largest publicly-owned open access networks serving a major metro area in the nation – and may serve as inspiration for other large cities to follow suit with a model that’s been proven to bring affordable local Internet choice in monopoly-dominated markets.  

Construction crews have begun work on Fort Bragg’s long-awaited municipal fiber network, which will ultimately bring affordable fiber to the California city of 7,000.

The total cost of the project is estimated to be $17 million. Of that, $10 million will be paid for by a Last Mile Federal Funding Account (FFA) grant from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), awarded in February to help fund the construction of a Middle Mile Broadband Network (MMBN) that will run directly through the heart of Ft. Bragg.

The remaining project costs will be paid for by a $7 million, 20-year loan at 4.85 percent from EverBank, recently approved by the Fort Bragg city council.

“This project is a cornerstone for the future of Fort Bragg,” City Manager Isaac Whippy said of the milestone. “Reliable, high-speed internet is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. With this investment, we’re closing the digital divide and making Fort Bragg a more connected, competitive, and inclusive community.”

According to a city announcement, Ft. Bragg’s citywide fiber network, 170 miles north of San Francisco, is being designed with a centralized data hub and 15 Distribution Areas (DAs). Using horizontal directional drilling, crews will install conduit and fiber underground – primarily beneath sidewalks and alleys – connecting to a fiber terminal located near the edge of the city’s right-of-way at each property.

Home to one of the wealthiest and most successful companies in America, you wouldn’t expect residents of Mountain View, California to find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Yet the city of nearly 82,000 – frustrated with spotty and expensive service by AT&T and Comcast – is considering a municipal broadband network to deal with the deficiencies of the duopoly.

Last year, Mountain View officials hired the consulting firm, Entrust Solutions, to take a closer look at the city’s broadband availability metrics and device potential options for the city.

The finished report and accompanying technical memorandum note that Comcast enjoys a monopoly over vast swaths of the city, resulting in expensive, slow, and spotty access.

“Although most of the City is considered ‘well-served’ by federal and California state standards, most residents have only a single option for Internet service and are essentially subject to a cable monopoly,” the authors wrote. “When it comes to modern gigabit Internet services, only 42% of the serviceable addresses have fiber access.”

The study similarly found that despite ongoing taxpayer subsidization, AT&T has historically failed to upgrade its older DSL customers to fiber across large swaths of the city.

“AT&T provides legacy copper-based service for most of the city, but that technology is not capable of meeting the State of California’s minimum broadband speeds of 100 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload,” the consulting firm found.

“And while AT&T also provides fiber-to-the-premises (FTTX) services in limited neighborhoods of the City, this means that much of the City is effectively a Xfinity/Comcast monopoly, leading to an uncompetitive market for City residents seeking broadband service.”