U.S. News & World Report recently ranked Brownsville, Texas as one of best places to live in the Lone Star State and as one of the most affordable places to retire.

Now – as the border city continues to make progress on an ambitious revitalization initiative – it is adding to its “best, most affordable” resume by transforming the digital landscape with a citywide fiber network to bring fast, reliable, and affordable Internet service to its nearly 200,000 residents.

The effort is being launched on the back of a city-owned middle mile fiber backbone and partnership with Lit Fiber to build out last mile service, operating as Lit Fiber BTX.

“We just lit up our first subscriber and will have 10,000 locations-passed by the end of the year,” Rene Gonzalez, Lit Fiber’s Senior Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs, told ILSR this week.

“Brownsville was a place that had been neglected. But now, SpaceX is here. We are here. It’s exciting.”

The excitement was palpable last week at the BTX Demo Center in downtown Brownsville where city and Lit Fiber officials held a “special community social” to celebrate service getting turned on for the first LIT Fiber BTX subscriber and to showcase what the network will offer city residents and businesses moving forward.

Imperial, Lassen, and Plumas Counties are among the first recipients of California’s $2 billion Last Mile Federal Funding Account Grant Program (FFA). The cities of Oakland, Fremont, and San Francisco have also been awarded significant state awards.

The FAA grants are part of California’s ambitious Broadband For All initiative, a $6 billion effort aimed at dramatically boosting broadband competition and access across the Golden State.

All told, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) awarded 11 FFA grants totaling over $86.6 million. Prominent awardees from this first round include publicly-owned broadband projects: the Golden State Connect Authority (GSCA) – a joint-powers broadband authority comprising 40 rural California counties – and Plumas Sierra Telecommunications for projects across Imperial, Lassen, and Plumas Counties.

“These projects will build community-based, future-proof, and equity-focused broadband infrastructure across California,” said CPUC President Alice Reynolds. “The Federal Funding Account – and these projects – are a shining example of our state’s Broadband For All values and objectives.”

In case you missed it, on Monday we streamed our second Building for Digital Equity (#B4DE) event of the year. The focus this time: "Pathways To Affordable Connectivity" in the absence of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).

You can watch the livestream in its entirety below.

As expected, the agenda delivered a number of gems for those working in the trenches to bridge the digital divide.

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Co-hosted once again by Pamela Rosales with the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and Director for the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks Initiative Christopher Mitchell, #B4DE began with a concise and candid acknowledgement of the moment: namely, the collapse of the ACP.

However, despite the challenge the loss of that program poses, #B4DE offered a lineup of digital inclusion practitioners providing a grounds-eye view of how they and their organizations are continuing the work of knocking down affordability barriers.

The three lightning round speakers covered devices and the creation of "device ecosystems." Attendees heard from Dave Sevick, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania-based Computer Reach; Ashley Martinez, Digital Equity Manager with Free Geek in Portland, OR; and Scot Henley, Executive Director of Digitunity based in North Conway, NH. Click on their names below to see their slide decks.

Next week an array of public interest groups, federal lawmakers, FCC officials, and digital equity advocates will converge on the Shaw/Watha T. Daniel Library in the nation’s capital for an Affordable Connectivity Program Rally.

Organized by Public Knowledge, Civic Nation, National Hispanic Media Coalition, National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), Digital Progress Institute, and Broadband Breakfast, the event will be held on April 30 beginning at 11:30 AM ET and will highlight the importance of the ACP and what happens if Congress allows the popular subsidy program to expire.

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They will be joined by U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, U.S. Sen. Peter Welch, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, and FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks as the rally aims to bolster the chances of a discharge petition making its way to a House floor vote to extend the ACP in the face of reluctant GOP leadership.

The rally will be livestreamed by Broadband Breakfast here.

With the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) upon us, digital inclusion practitioners are encouraged to save the date for the second Building for Digital Equity (#B4DE) event of the year.

The popular (and free) virtual gathering – co-hosted by Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks Initiative and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) – will be held on June 10, 2024 from 3 to 4:15 PM ET.

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Coming on the heels of our last B4DE event in March, the theme for this installment will be “Pathways to Affordable Connectivity.”

It will feature an informative agenda that focuses on what digital equity advocates across the nation are doing to address broadband affordability and the pressing need for creating sustainable solutions for communities. 

You can register for the event here.

As with the previous #B4DE events, the June live stream will once again be sponsored by UTOPIA Fiber and co-hosted by NDIA’s Pamela Rosales and ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative Director Christopher Mitchell.

If you missed our most recent Building for Digital Equity Livestream – Life After ACP – the virtual event can still be seen in its entirety (below).

The entire event focused on the imminent end of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and featured a lineup of speakers who shared on-the-ground perspectives and approaches being adopted at the community level to deal with the broadband affordability crisis in the absence of the popular federal program that has served 23 million Americans since its inception two years ago.

As a bonus, we are sharing links to the speakers slide decks below.

The first of two lightning round speakers, Margaret Käufer – President of The STEM Alliance – gave an overview on the short and long-term work her organization is doing in upstate New York in the face of ACP’s demise. You can find her slide deck here.

The second lightning round presenter Jason Inofuentes – Program Manager for the Broadband Accessibility and Affordability Office in Albemarle County, VA – unveiled an ACP supplement program his office is pursuing and how they see things moving forward. Those slides are here.

The first of the main presenters – Monica Gonzales, Digital Equity Supervisor for Methodist Healthcare Ministries in Texas – gave an overview of what her faith-based nonprofit healthcare organization is doing to address affordable connectivity across the 74 county South Texas region served by MHM. Gonzales’ slides are here.

For decades, ILSR has recognized that communities need to be engaged on Internet access issues to make sure that everyone – from low-income, historically marginalized residents to small businesses and even municipal departments – have the Internet access they need to thrive in the digital age.

Digital equity is essential to help resolve other challenges and the current chasm between the haves and have-nots makes solving many other challenges – like education – more difficult.

To further the quest for greater digital inclusivity, recently ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative Director Christopher Mitchell put together a panel for Net Inclusion 2024, a conference convened by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) that drew 1300 attendees and was by far the largest digital inclusion conference held in many years of doing this work.

Entitled “Without Political Power, There is No Path to Digital Equity,” the panel was originally going to focus on the importance of structural change – and how we cannot ensure everyone is connected by relying solely on the networks already present in neighborhoods that see quite low broadband penetration. Instead, the panel discussion went a bit deeper than that and landed on an observation often made by Joshua Edmonds from Digital C in Cleveland. To paraphrase Joshua, we cannot coupon our way to digital equity.

As the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) nears its end, our first Building For Digital Equity livestream of 2024 will focus on what digital inclusion practitioners across the nation are doing to ensure that as many ACP recipients as possible do not lose access to high-speed Internet.

The free virtual gathering – #B4DE Life After ACP – will be held on March 20, 2024 from 3 to 4:15 PM ET.

Attendees are encouraged to register now here.  

As the FCC is in the midst of winding down the ACP, which will run out of funds by April, it’s anybody’s guess just how many of the nearly 23 million Americans enrolled in the program will be forced to discontinue their Internet service because they can no longer afford it. But, if the 1,300 digital equity advocates who descended on Net Inclusion 2024 in Philadelphia two weeks ago is any indication, one thing is certain: the national effort to tackle the broadband affordability crisis will continue – even in the absence of ACP.

Sponsored once again by UTOPIA Fiber and co-hosted by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, the line-up of frontline digital inclusion practitioners will share their outlook and strategies and help provide attendees with a road map in dealing with the imminent demise of the program.

The livestream will be available (and later archived) on Facebook, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn, with live viewer questions answered by the invited speakers and presenters. We recommend viewing it on YouTube where the live chat will be most engaging. Other questions can be submitted using the #B4DE hashtag on X.

With the nation's premier digital inclusion conference in full swing right now in Philadelphia – and with yet another banner year in broadband in the making – the first Building For Digital Equity (B4DE) livestream event of the year is now set for March 20.

As you read this, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), organizers of Net Inclusion 2024, are engaging with hundreds of digital inclusion practitioners, advocates, academics, Internet service providers, and policymakers from across the nation at the conference. Joining them there in the City of Brotherly Love is a full complement of the Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR) Community Broadband Networks team. The energy and ideas from the event will inform the upcoming B4DE that will feature the theme: Life After ACP.

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We encourage you to save the date and register here for the popular (and free) virtual gathering to be held March 20, 2024 from 3 to 4:15 PM ET.

Coming on the heels of our last B4DE event in December, digital inclusion advocates are strategizing around how to tackle the broadband affordability challenge as the FCC winds down the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).