Unbuffered

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Brent Christensen, President and CEO of the Minnesota Telecom Alliance (MTA). The MTA is a trade association that currently represents 41 holding company members operating over 70 companies across the state, including cooperatively-owned, family-owned, and publicly-traded Internet Service Providers. Most are rural broadband providers. Chris and Bre...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Karl Bode, a returning guest who has long covered tech and the telecommunications industry. They talk about the history of net neutrality, the landmark decision by the Commission in 2015, the states that stepped in to fill the void, and the likely consequences of a return in 2023.  ★ Support this podcast ★

This week on the podcast we bring back a fan favorite that feels particularly relevant. Christopher is joined by Harold Feld, Senior Vice President at Public Knowledge. The show takes on a reflective nature, as they talk about theories of change in the context of doing broadband policy today.  ★ Support this podcast ★

This week on the podcast, we bring over a conversation from our Connect This! Show, where Christopher is joined by a ground of policy experts to talk about why we don't see more cities doing deals with entities like Google Fiber, what we can expect now that Anna Gomez has been confirmed to the FCC, and what it means for BEAD grantees if the Affordable Connectivity Program goes away.  ★ Support thi...

This week on the show, Christopher is joined once again by Sean Gonsalves. After a short stop to talk about the establishment of a new municipal network in Timnath, Colorado, Christopher and Sean get down to talking about the BEAD 5-Year Plans that states are filing with NTIA to get their hands on the first tranche of what will be an historic pot of federal funds for new broadband investment. Some...

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Mona Thompson, General Manager at the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority (CRSTTA). CRSTTA serves the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in North Central South Dakota, which includes 20 communities dispersed across nearly 3 million acres. Chris and Mona discuss the history of CRSTTA and the Telephone Authority’s efforts over time to upgrad...

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Brieana Reed-Harmel, Municipal Fiber Manager for the City of Loveland, located in Colorado’s Northern Front Range about an hour north of Denver. The city is home to over 80,000 residents as well as a municipal fiber broadband network called Pulse.  Chris and Brieana discuss Loveland’s population expansion over the past few years and Pulse’s resulti...

This week on the show we're featuring an episode of our Building for Digital Equity podcast, with Brandon Forester - the National Organizer for Internet Rights at Media Justice - joining Christopher to talk about helping communities build more agency over how technology shows up in their neighborhoods and among the digital communities they create for themselves.   ★ Support this podcast ★

We're more than 15 years and a hundred billion dollars into the alphabet soup of federal broadband infrastructure subsidy programs, and millions upon millions of households are stuck on deteriorating connections and capacity-constrained technologies. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Jonathan Chambers, partner at Conexon, to talk about how the BEAD program is our last chance.   ★...

May 2022 witnessed something remarkable: the birth of a new nonprofit advocacy organization whose sole purpose was to speak up for the hundreds of communities that have built municipal broadband networks, and the thousands more that want to but don't know where to start. Now, the American Association for Public Broadband has named as its Executive Director as Gigi Sohn, former Biden nominee to the...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Christine Parker (Senior GIS Analyst at ILSR), and Meghan Grabill (Geospatial Analyst at the Maine Connectivity Authority) to run through the recently announced NTIA location challenge process for the upcoming BEAD program and talk about how state processes can adjust eligible technologies and location types, shift of the burden of proof to the IP...

 This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Sean Gonsalves to chat about the astroturf anti-municipal misinformation campaign being run by the Utah Taxpayer's Association, how a city negotiated a capital fee it's using to build its own network and get out from under Comcast's thumb, and the growing momentum behind Maine's Broadband Utility Districts (BUD) and their quest to improve competi...

 This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Justin Holzgrove and Mike Rientjes from Mason County Public Utility District 3 in Washington State. The PUD provides electric service to more than 35,000 households across an area the size of Rhode Island, and began connecting its grid infrastructure to fiber in the late 1990s. Since 2003, it has operated an open access ftth network for household...

Electric cooperatives overwhelmingly serve regions that face population density challenges and income disparities as compared to their urban counterparts, as well as all of the other challenges that go with it: declining populations, hospital closures, increasingly frequent extreme weather events, and more. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Brian O'Hara, Senior Director of Regulat...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Will O'Donnell, Broadband and Communications Director at Jefferson County Public Utility District in Washington State, to talk about the Herculean task facing the PUD: how to deploy an open access fiber network to the utility's 21,000 meters in some of the least-dense parts of the state.   ★ Support this podcast ★

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by three members from the Kitsap Public Utility District's open access FTTH team in Washington state to talk about the formation of Local Utility Districts, managing an open access network seeing increased demand, and the value of increased choice and competition for residents and businesses.  ★ Support this podcast ★

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Angela Siefer (Executive Director, National Digital Inclusion Alliance) and Matt Larsen (CEO, Vistabeam) to talk about connecting the unconnected and doing digital equity work as a small Internet Service Provider (ISP). In a marketplace that heavily favors the largest cable and telephone providers, they share the ways that they participate in gran...

 It's strange to see the FCC continually patting itself on the back for releasing a new national broadband map. Spend just a little bit of time with it, and the cracks and holes quickly show themselves. This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Christine Parker, Senior GIS Analyst at ILSR, and Alexis Schrubbe, Director of the Internet Equity Initiative at University of Chicago. They do a...

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Keith Quarles, President and CFO of A2D, a fiber-based, open access competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC). A2D stands for ‘Analog to Digital,’ and as Keith explains, represents the infrastructure transition from analog to digital communications.  Chris and Keith discuss A2D’s business model, which focuses on filling in the gaps – serving commun...

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Joshua Edmonds, CEO of DigitalC, a nonprofit technology social enterprise in Cleveland. DigitalC offers affordable wireless service for $18/month, as well as a co-working and collaboration space for the community.  Joshua served as Detroit’s Digital Inclusion Director for four years before heading DigitalC, and he and Christopher discuss Joshua's c...

This week on the podcast, Christopher tunes in from Broadband Communities in Houston for an interview with Mark Ouellette, CEO of Axiom Technologies. Axiom is an Internet Service Provider based in Machias, Maine, the county seat for the large, rural county of Washington along the state’s eastern border.  Christopher and Mark discuss Axiom’s publicly-owned and accountable network model, and its wor...

This week on the podcast, Christopher speaks with Joey Wender, Director of the Capital Projects Fund (CPF), U.S Department of the Treasury. Joey administers the $10 billion fund targeted to help close the digital divide on behalf of the Biden Administration. Joey and Chris discuss the flexibility of CPF funding and how it allows states to tailor their plans to their own needs. The two also talk ab...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Outreach Team Lead DeAnne Cuellar and John Speirs, Harris County, Texas' (pop. 4.7 million) Broadband Manager. Its county seat, Houston, is home to one of the largest ports in the world, and citizens and elected officials are working on projects to boost the region's economic development, climate resiliency, and connectivity to set a solid foundat...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Jamie Davis, CTO of KUB Fiber, the broadband division of the Knoxville Utilities Board in Tennessee. The division is poised to be halfway done with a build across its footprint by June 2024, hitting 90,000 premises, with plans to steam ahead and complete its electric service territory as quick as possible thereafter. Jamie shares with Chris how th...

This week on the podcast, Christopher is joined by Kevin Shendo, Education Director at the Pueblo of Jemez Department of Education, and Angela Diakah, Network Operations Supervisor at Jemez Pueblo Tribal Network (JPTN) . JPTN is a wireless network serving more than 500 households in the Jemez Pueblo north of Albuquerque. Kevin and Angela share the origins of the network, spurred in part by prior s...