In this episode of Broadband Action, CBAN's Jon Willow and Curtis Dean talk with Karl Bode, a journalist who's been covering broadband for 25 years. Karl shares his perspective on the big issues facing the broadband industry and some insight on what further changes may be coming.

In this episode of Broadband Action we chat with leaders at two municipal broadband utilities who have integrated their own affordability programs to benefit their community members. Chad Crager is the Broadband Executive Director at Fort Collins Connexion and Chris Roy is General Manager at Shrewsbury Electric and Cable Operations, also known as SELCO.

Fort Collins Connexion: https://fcconnexion.com/

Shrewsbury Electric & Cable Operations: https://www.selco.shrewsburyma.gov/

CBAN Spring Summit registration: https://bit.ly/CBAN24

In an interview borrowed from a CBAN Member Spotlight, Curtis Dean with CBAN chats with Justin Stinson of Liberty Communications, a community focused broadband provider in Iowa. Liberty has been very proactive in not only improving services to their traditional customer base but expanding to new areas in need of better broadband service.

The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, also known as BEAD, is slowly inching toward implementation. The access portion of BEAD, which is where most of the money will be spent, has the stated goal of achieving universal broadband availability across the nation. The BEAD framework is currently being interpreted by each state to develop their own action plan.

Recently ACA Connects, which represents smaller cable and broadband operators, released a national overview of the BEAD program and has some recommendations to be considered as BEAD moves forward. Our guest today on Broadband Action is Brian Hurley, Chief Regulatory Counsel at ACA Connects.

CBAN is a big supporter of community-owned broadband networks, as well as private providers with strong community roots. So we were excited to read a recent report by our friends at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance which outlined just how much the municipal broadband community has grown in recent years and just how far we’ve gone since the early days of maverick municipal networks like Glasgow, Kentucky, which was the first publicly owned network to offer internet service.

Our guests on this edition of Broadband Bytes were both involved with putting together the ILSR’s report. Welcome Sean Gonsalves and Ry Marcatillio!

In the latest edition of of Broadband Action, we’ll explore the relationship between higher education and Esports. Co-hosts Jon Willow and Curtis Dean chat with Jason Clark, one of the founders of the Collegiate Fighting Game Conference, to discuss how epsports competition serves the larger role of engaging young people in educational institutions to compete and learn.

An unprecedented amount of network construction has been take place over the past few years as the nation works to try to bring better broadband to more Americans. And that pace of construction will only accelerate over the next several years as the BEAD program subsidizes new networks in unserved and underserved areas.
Many of those new fiber networks will be installed underground. But while the process of burying conduit and cables is fairly straightforward, there’s a hidden crisis affecting the deployment of these networks - a shortage of qualified, well-trained workforce to do the necessary job of locating existing underground utilities to hopefully prevent crews from damaging those faciities. This “locate crisis” is being felt around the country, and in the latest episode of Broadband Action, we discuss how it is impacting the work of the engineers that design the networks, the construction companies that build the networks, and the broadband providers who need that network completed in a timely basis to provide services to a hungry consumer base.

Hosts Curtis Dean and Todd Kielkopf are joined by Ronnie Marler with NewCom Technologies, Greg Hinz with Fort Dodge Fiber, and Brett Niles with Open Country

Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting has dusted off his crystal ball and for the third year in a row shares is Broadband Predictions with the Broadband Action team. Will BEAD solve the nation's broadband problems? Will the ACP survive? Doug shares his predictions on these and other important topics!