
Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
Before joining ILSR, Katie conducted outreach to members of rural electric cooperatives in western North Carolina. She holds a degree in economics and environmental studies from the University of Pittsburgh.
The Cost of Connectivity 2020, a recent report from the Open Technology Institute (OTI) at New America, explores how much Americans pay for Internet access compared to those in other parts of the world.
This is an update to our report Cooperatives Fiberize Rural America: A Trusted Model For The Internet Era, which we originally published in 2017.
Our case study, How Local Providers Built the Nation’s Best Internet Access in Rural North Dakota, explains how the majority of rural North Dakota has access to gigabit fiber, highlighting how 15 telephone cooperatives and local companies came together to invest in their rural communities and build broadband networks across the state. In the 1990s, those companies united to purchase 68 rural telephone exchanges in North Dakota from regional provider US West (now CenturyLink). Then, they leveraged federal broadband funds to deploy some of the most extensive fiber networks in the country, turning North Dakota into the rural broadband oasis that it is today.