Decorah, Iowa has struck a public private partnership with West Union Trenching to deploy a modern fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that passes every household in the city.

The project is the culmination of decades of planning and frustration at the lack of affordable, next-generation broadband in the city of 7,500.

According to the city, the Decorah 2025 Fiber to the Home Project will finally begin construction early next year.

The city has also struck a deal with Minnesota-based AcenTek to operate the system and provide retail internet service to residents. Network equipment and construction is being financed by a $13.7 million loan approved last month by the city’s Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board of Trustees.

“The fiber plant and electronics will be city owned, our operations side of it is being handled by Acentek,” Chopper Albert, Decorah IT Director told ISLR.

The first subscribers are expected to come online sometime in early 2027. The project’s origins extend back more than a decade after locals struggled to gain access to affordable, fast, and reliable broadband access.

“This is a unique start-up arrangement for Iowa,” said Travis Goedken, City Manager of the City of Decorah.  “After reviewing multiple business plan options since the successful election by Decorah residents in 2015 to establish a Board-governed municipal telecommunications utility, this was the most favorable option.

"City staff and the Municipal Telecommunications Utility Board have been working diligently the last two years to organize and execute the necessary steps to make this a reality.”

Last year the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, a new study indicates that many ISPs aren’t doing a great job adhering to the rules. The Trump FCC has also announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections.

The new academic study (first reported on by Broadband Breakfast) by York University researchers Jonathan A. Obar and Boxi Chen gave 35 different U.S. ISPs a ten-star based grade on how well they are adhering to the FCC broadband label requirements, including label placement, standardized formatting, machine-readable data files, and required policy links.

The results weren’t pretty: only sixteen ISPs properly placed labels at the point of sale as required, and not a single ISP received full marks for completely adhering to the FCC’s requirements. Only six ISPs received a full ten star ranking for proper formatting.

Legal analysts are questioning the recent assertion by the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

NTIA administrator Arielle Roth said last week that the agency she oversees will withhold federal broadband deployment funds from states that have laws enforcing net neutrality or that have enacted affordable broadband legislation similar to New York’s Affordable Broadband Act.

As the assistant secretary overseeing the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, Roth’s legal reasoning is striking.

All the more so given that the New York Affordable Broadband Act that requires Internet service providers in the Empire State to offer a low-cost broadband service plan to income-eligible households has been upheld as Constitutional – a case in which the Supreme Court twice declined to intervene and overturn.

Yet, last week in speaking before the conservative Hudson Institute, Roth offered remarks that have legal observers scratching their heads in bewilderment. During her speech, Roth said:

“Consistent with the law, which explicitly prohibits regulating the rates charged for broadband service, NTIA is making clear that states cannot impose rate regulation on the BEAD program. To protect the BEAD investment, we are clarifying that BEAD providers must be protected throughout their service area in a state, while the provider is still within its BEAD period of performance. Specifically, any state receiving BEAD funds must exempt BEAD providers throughout their state footprint from broadband-specific economic regulations, such as price regulation and net neutrality.”

The stakes are high for broadband affordability advocates across the nation. 

Superior, Wisconsin’s community-owned open access fiber network has gone live in its first two deployment neighborhoods, as the city works toward providing affordable next-generation fiber access to the city’s long under-served community of 26,000.

When we last checked in with Superior back in April, the city was working with Nokia for final configuration and testing before launch. Now, the municipal broadband network says its ConnectSuperior fiber network is live in its first two target neighborhoods in the northern part of the city (see the city’s latest deployment map).

The city’s open access network means that multiple broadband providers can compete over the same shared infrastructure. Historically such a model helps boost competition and drive down costs for both consumers and competitors. That’s already the case in Superior, where the city’s website lists two providers – Advanced Stream and Superion Networks – with more on the way.

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Advanced Stream is offering locals three tiers of service: a symmetrical 300 megabit per second (Mbps) tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical one gigabit per second (Gbps) tier for $83 a month.

Superion is offering three tiers of service as well: a symmetrical 300 Mbps tier for $63 a month; a symmetrical 650 Mbps tier for $75 a month; and a symmetrical 1 Gbps tier for $85 a month. Both companies offer phone bundles for a modest additional surcharge.

Studies consistently show that the primary reason millions of households do not have home Internet service boils down to affordability.

Research by EducationSuperHighway indicates that of the estimated 28.2 million households in the U.S. that do not have high-speed Internet service, 18 million of those households (home to 48 million Americans) are not online because the cost of service is simply too expensive.

But now, thanks to a recently published study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, broadband affordability advocates may be able to more accurately measure the elusive nature of affordable broadband costs.

The study also examines how to better pinpoint contributing factors like the state of local infrastructure and how lower-performing broadband access technologies powerfully influence low-income households' decision to sometimes choose cellular service-only over home Internet service.

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“Broadband Affordability: Assessing the Cost of Broadband for Low-and-Moderate Income Communities in Cities” provides a research-driven lens on how to measure broadband affordability neighborhood by neighborhood, city to city.

“While national and state-level analyses have helped highlight the digital divide,” the study’s author Ambika Nair writes, “measures of broadband affordability at the community level are limited.”

The Trump administration's illegal “termination” of the 2021 Digital Equity Act continues to have devastating real world impacts on everything from affordable broadband access to protecting Americans from skyrocketing online scams.

The $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act was passed by Congress as part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It mandated the creation of three different major grant programs intended to shore up equitable, widespread access to affordable Internet, while providing the tools and digital literacy education needed to help neglected U.S. communities get online.

But last May the Trump administration unceremoniously demolished the Act, froze all program funding, and left countless states, programs and organizations – many on the cusp of major new efforts – high and dry.

At the time, President Trump and GOP leaders like Sen. Ted Cruz disingenuously attacked the Act’s programs as “racist” and "unconstitutional,” – part of a broader effort to dismantle programs deemed as “DEI,” even in instances where the programs had little to nothing to do with race or gender. Many of the “covered populations” covered by the bill included rural residents, veterans, and elderly Americans from all walks of life.

Funding Freeze Puts Most Vulnerable Americans at Risk

The sudden "termination" of the popular law resulted in dozens of states having to abruptly cancel major broadband expansion plans. But the freeze has also been a massive problem for state programs that were taking aim at a U.S. online fraud epidemic proving particularly harmful to the U.S. elderly and marginalized communities.

After years of neglect by regional broadband giants, five years ago the town of Arrowsic, Maine decided to build their own broadband network on the back of federal grants and loans. 

Now regional broadband provider Fidium has targeted the small town of 477 with broadband expansion, after previously rejecting calls for better, more affordable service.

Critics say Fidium’s goal isn’t honest competition, but a bid to try to put the popular local municipal broadband network on shaky financial ground.

We first wrote about Arrowsic back in February of 2020, shortly after Governor Janet Mills announced that the town would be building its own fiber network after decades of frustration with spotty, expensive, or nonexistent service from large telecom giants like Consolidated Communications, which recently fully rebranded as Fidium.

The project was a partnership between a new Arrowsic Broadband Authority (ABA) and Axiom Technologies, heavily driven by a combined $1.2 million in grant and loan funding from the USDA's ReConnect Pilot Program. The goal: connect 237 households, 20 businesses, and four farms with symmetrical fiber optic service of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).

*This is the second installment of an ongoing series we are calling Connected Complex looks at how states and local communities are working to address the often complex challenges involved in bringing high-speed Internet access to multi-dwelling units.

California lawmakers approved new legislation letting renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider. Lawmakers say they didn’t ban the practice for fear of undermining some of the more beneficial aspects of bulk billing, which can make deployments more financially tenable for smaller providers.

Starting January 1, AB1414 requires that landlords “allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy."

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The new law states that if landlords prevent tenants from opting out of such arrangements, tenants "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent." Landlords are also prohibited from any sort of retaliation.

AB1414 passed the California state Senate in a 30–7 vote a month ago, and was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom last week.

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.

When it comes to community-owned and operated networks, better, faster, cheaper broadband is often only one of the benefits. Some telephone cooperatives, like Paul Bunyan Communications in Northern Minnesota’s Beltrami County, share profits with its members, literally paying the benefits of shared telecom ownership back into the communities they serve.

The Cooperative recently announced it was giving a $3.6 million profit windfall back to local community members. It’s the fourth such payout to local subscribers in the last seven years.

For distributions of $150 or less, a credit was applied to subscriber’s bills. For sums greater than $150, the cooperative mailed checks out to locals.

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With origins that owe a part of its success to the Beltrami Electric Cooperative, it was in 1996 when locals were first offered broadband access through Paul Bunyan Telephone. Three years later, it began the necessary infrastructure upgrades that allowed it to offer phone, high-speed Internet access, and digital television.

In 2005, the cooperative expanded with fiber technology for the first time. In 2010, Paul Bunyan Telephone changed its name to Paul Bunyan Communications. 

“Our cooperative continues to grow and thrive, now serving over 35,000 active members across over a 6,000-square-mile service area,” said Paul Bunyan Communications CEO Chad Bullock.

“Through steady investment and expansion, we’ve built one of the nation’s largest rural all-fiber [networks], transforming how our members live, work, and play. It’s incredibly rewarding to see that success come full circle as we share the benefits with our members.”