A discussion from September 2020 about how municipalities are partnering with private entities to deploy broadband infrastructure. The panelists tackle the topic from several angles, including a nonprofit that built a fiber network and sold it to a private company, providers looking for communities in which to build, and Facebook leasing its excess fiber to nonprofits and municipalities.

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An interview with Sherry Lichtenberg of the National Regulatory Research Institute about whether broadband should be regulated in the same manner as utilities. Lichtenberg describes how the internet was originally lightly regulated to promote competition and discusses the questions that need to be answered before future regulations can be proposed.

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This paper offers background research on the digital divide and municipal fiber network projects, with a focus on California. The authors also compare California’s speeds and prices with other states, show where the United States ranks with other developed countries in terms of internet access, and offer case studies of cities with municipal broadband networks.

This report provides data analysis, mapping, and charts as an overview of CENIC’s current and prospective broadband network efforts within the catchment area for both Central Sierra Connect and Gold Country Broadband of the California Public Utility Commission’s broadband consortia. This includes four phases of broadband project deployment: evaluation, planning, implementation, and production.

This analysis looks at the 18 states that, as of December 2021, have restrictions against municipal broadband networks, and the five that make such networks difficult to establish. The author also examines legislation in five states intended to ease restrictions to municipal broadband.

This guide was created for communities looking to expand broadband service. The study includes models of fully public and fully private networks as well as public-private partnerships. The intention of the guide is to help municipalities understand the capital involved for deployment, how much revenue can be generated, and how to avoid pitfalls.

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A video of a panel discussion that focused on broadband planning in Urbana, Illinois. The event featured experts in local telecommunications and public broadband discussing the benefits and challenges of various local broadband strategies.

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This blog from June 2020 argues for the creation of a broadband competition policy agenda and details how governments can specifically encourage competition. The author recommends five methods: focus federal dollars on higher speeds than 25/3 Mbps, encourage concepts like open-access and municipal experimentation, allow people living in multi-tenant buildings to choose providers, empower community institutions to allow private ISPs to use their buildings to branch out into neighborhoods, and gather pricing data to help consumers make better choices.

This report shows how the United States is behind other developed countries when it comes to gigabit speed broadband, both in terms of coverage and adoption. The piece examines why public intervention has not led to better results, with a focus on the need for the country to move from vertically integrated operators to wholesale fiber networks that lease capacity to service providers.

This State Broadband Plan from West Virginia, published in 2019, reviews activities to date of the West Virginia Broadband Enhancement Council and sets the Council's goals for facilitating broadband deployment while outlining numerous strategies to meet those goals.

This 10-year Telecommunications Plan published in 2021 by the State of Vermont provides a roadmap to achieving telecommunications goals such as bringing to all unserved and underserved on-grid homes scalable 100/100 Mbps service, facilitating competition, promoting local input and oversight, and ensuring that systems are resilient, redundant, secure, and future-proof.

This 2020 broadband plan from the State of Utah summarizes the history of State broadband initiatives and outlines strategic goals and initiatives to continue to steer the course of deploying and expanding broadband in the State. These initiatives include maintaining existing infrastructure, connecting and upgrading services to schools and libraries, and continuing efforts to connect healthcare sites through the Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN).

This webpage explains that broadband is important for rural health care providers because many of the capabilities of health IT, including telehealth and electronic exchange of health care information, require the higher speeds and bandwidth of broadband.

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