After five and a half years, dozens of guests, two emergency episodes, and 124 shows, we’re saying goodbye to Connect This!. We want to thank you all, from the bottom of our collective heart, for joining us on this journey. Across the live stream and audio versions of this show, we’ve been delighted and surprised each year to get nearly 10,000 listens as we’ve talked about building and managing networks, competition in the marketplace, creating clear and effective marketing campaigns, state and federal infrastructure grant programs, dark money campaigns, local broadband champions, affordability, digital skills, and more. Thank you to all of the guests who have lent their time and expertise to the show. We couldn’t have done it without you.

We’re taking the energy you all have given us and the lessons we’ve learned over to Unbuffered, our new show at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which talks about all the ways that communications and data technology shapes our lives and our communties – from Internet access, to devices, to privacy and surveillance, and more. Unbuffered combines the format and ethos of both Connect This! and the Community Broadband Bits podcast, where we recorded almot 700 episodes over a ten-year run. Community broadband will remain at the core of what we do here, but the world is a bigger, more complicated place than it was a decade ago, and new challenges call for new approaches to meet them.

Special thanks for Travis Carter, co-founder of the show, and Doug Dawson and Kim McKinley, for sharing their experience and knowledge as we continue to move the needle towards fast, affordable Internet access for every household that wants it.

Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (Tak Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) to talk about all the recent broadband news that’s fit to print.

Topics include:

• A new report from ILSR on 19 small towns in Massachusetts building public partnerships and new fiber networks.
• Massive AWS and Cloudflare outages impacting large parts of the Internet
• The new broadband usage report from OpenVault
• 18 states so far have finally gotten NTIA approval after redoing most of the work from last summer, with the result being fewer homes will be passed by the BEAD program and, of those, a smaller proportion will get fiber than under Biden.
• The latest attempt to hamstring any state regulation of AI by tying BEAD approval to the measure

Join us live on November 20th at 3pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Email us at broadband@communitynetworks.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.

Catch the latest episode of the Connect This! Show, with co-hosts Christopher Mitchell (ILSR) and Travis Carter joined by regular guests Kim McKinley (Tak Broadband) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) to talk about all the recent broadband news that’s fit to print. Topics include:

• Now that final Benefit of the Bargain numbers are in on the BEAD program, the trend is clear: tens of thousands of locations will no longer see any federal solution, and nearly a million more will get worse and more expensive satellite service rather the fiber.
• With BEAD now a shadow of what it could be, it’s never been more apparent that local governments need to step into the gap. Where are they all?
• A new report claiming just 8 million Americans remain offline as of 2025 shows the trouble of asking too simple of questions and accepting too simple of answers in describing the problem of the digital divide.

Join us live on October 24th at 2pm ET, or listen afterwards wherever you get your podcasts.

Email us at broadband@communitynets.org with feedback and ideas for the show.

Subscribe to the show using this feed or find it on the Connect This! page, and watch on LinkedIn, on YouTube Live, on Facebook live, or below.