Every Monday we go through the week’s digital equity news in nine Southern states and say plainly what it does to Black people living there. The states are Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia, plus the national policy that reaches them. Every claim links back to its source, and every number says what was counted.
“All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, of Ruleville, Mississippi
Testimony before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention, Aug. 22, 1964. Transcript via American RadioWorks.
The week in one minute
Federal
The Government Accountability Office reported in August that federal agencies decide which places need broadband money using maps built from what internet providers say about their own coverage, and that the Federal Communications Commission has not done the outreach that would test those claims.
The audit covered nine federal programs holding more than $50 billion. It did not estimate how much of the map is wrong. It said the checking has not happened.
Money from the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program flows to all eight states based on those maps. An address marked as served does not get funded, and no routine process would catch the error.
The audit is worth citing for anyone building a coverage challenge. GAO is an auditor, not an advocacy group.
Black Belt counties are exactly where a provider's self-report is least likely to get challenged. There is no local broadband staff, often no local paper, and no organized process for a resident to say the road is not actually served.
The error compounds. Undercounted need means underfunded buildout, and the next map still looks fine.
The number those maps produce. The FCC's own Section 706 report says 99.7% of the U.S. population can get broadband once satellite service is counted, Penn State's Christopher Ali noted in a Sept. 3 post for the Benton Institute. The figure comes from the same provider-reported pipeline the audit flagged, and it treats satellite as equivalent service.
This is the number quoted to say the problem is solved. Louisiana's own plan puts 8.4% of its addresses on low-earth-orbit satellite. Counting that as equivalent to fiber is how a coverage gap disappears on paper without anybody's service changing.
BEAD watch
NTIA reopened the program. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration issued a notice Sept. 3 letting states fund addresses the first round missed or that became newly eligible, drawing on roughly $21 billion in savings.
States get seven days to publish revised address lists, then a 30-day public challenge period. NTIA has 30 days to rule, with no rebuttal round. Each state's funding is capped using the average cost per address in its approved final proposal. The Benton Institute estimates the process adds nine months or more.
Nine more months. Households across these eight states that have been waiting since 2021 now wait into 2027.
The 30-day challenge window is the opening. A county or community group that documents wrong coverage inside it can move addresses back onto the funded list. As far as we can tell, nobody across these eight states is organized to do it.
Rural cooperatives pushed back the next day. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association said delayed implementation, shifting guidance, cost constraints and unrealistic funding assumptions have slowed progress and discouraged participation, and warned that BEAD "risks leaving rural America behind."
In many Black Belt counties the electric cooperative is the only provider willing to build.
In much of the Black Belt the electric cooperative is the only builder willing to go down a dirt road for 40 houses. If cooperatives walk, a national carrier does not pick those addresses up.
Cooperative boards are elected by their members, which makes them one of the few utility decision points a community can actually contest.
One widely repeated figure is a year old. Estimates that roughly 1.1 million addresses and $5.6 billion to $9.3 billion are in play traced back to an October 2025 analysis by the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School, which counted 1,063,812 unserved addresses outside current plans. The estimate predates the notice it is being used to describe.
Practical note. If someone quotes 1.1 million unserved locations at you in a meeting, that figure is from last October and predates the rules now in force.
Louisiana
Louisiana will finish construction on nearly 15,000 addresses across 23 parishes by the end of March 2027, ConnectLA said, using part of the state's $1.36 billion BEAD allocation. The state also cleared federal environmental review for more than 50,000 addresses, the first in the nation to do so.
The parish breakdown is public. Swyft Fiber holds the largest share at 5,830 addresses across Jefferson Davis, Rapides, Sabine, St. Landry and Tensas parishes. REV has 2,434 across East Baton Rouge, Livingston and St. John the Baptist. Cajun Broadband has 2,221 across Iberia, Plaquemines and Vermilion. Nextlink has 2,041 across Bienville, Bossier, Caddo, Natchitoches and Webster. Pelican, Skyrider and Star Communications hold the rest.
Two cautions. The 15,000 and 50,000 are addresses. ConnectLA's separate figure of more than 450,000 Louisianans who gained access since 2023 counts people, and access there means service reached them, not that they subscribed. Light Reading also puts the statewide target at 127,108 addresses against ConnectLA's "approximately 124,000."
Louisiana is the only one of the eight states publishing buildout numbers at the parish level. Part of that is a permitting head start and part is a communications choice. It makes the state the easiest to track and a reasonable model to cite when asking the other seven for the same.
A resident of Tensas or St. Landry parish can find out who is building, how many addresses, and by when. In the other seven states you cannot answer that question about your own county.
That gap is the difference between a program a community can hold accountable and one it cannot. It is also a concrete ask: publish the parish or county table, the way Louisiana did.
The broadband director moved into health. Gov. Jeff Landry appointed ConnectLA Executive Director Veneeth Iyengar to the state's Rural Health Transformation Program advisory council on Sept. 3. The program is drawing roughly $208 million in federal funding and is positioned for more than $1 billion over five years. Broadband and rural health delivery now sit at the same table in Louisiana.
Where rural hospitals have closed, telehealth is the fallback being offered. Telehealth needs upload capacity, which satellite and older fixed wireless do not deliver reliably.
A broadband director sitting on the health council is the place to raise that before the money is committed.
Data centers
Virginia joins this newsletter's coverage area with this issue, and the reason is the data center corridor. Northern Virginia holds the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and the fights over who pays for the electricity they need are now running through the General Assembly, the State Corporation Commission and half a dozen county boards.
Loudoun County moved to end grandfathered approvals. Supervisors voted unanimously Sept. 2 to have the county attorney research whether they can revoke protections that let data center applications filed before Feb. 12, 2025 skip board review and get approved at staff level. Loudoun Now reports roughly 18.4 million square feet of data center development sitting in the county's pipeline. The attorney reports back in October.
Counts square feet of proposed floor area, not built capacity · Loudoun Now, Sept. 2 · County record not read directlyThe regional grid came up short, and data centers are named. PJM Interconnection's July auction fell 6.8 gigawatts short of the capacity needed for the 2028-29 delivery year, The Richmonder reported Sept. 6. PJM projects electricity demand across its territory will rise 32 gigawatts between 2024 and 2030, and attributes 30 of those gigawatts to data centers, primarily in Virginia. Average wait to connect to Dominion's grid is running about seven years.
Separately, Lt. Gov. Ghazala Hashmi opened an energy-cost listening tour in Loudoun on Sept. 2. Reporting from that event puts data centers at 28% of Dominion's Virginia power supply.
Follow where the load sits and where the bill lands. The facilities and the tax base concentrate in Loudoun and Prince William. The generation gets sited elsewhere, and the rate increases spread across every Dominion customer in the state, including households in Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk and Portsmouth that will never see a dollar of data center tax revenue.
This is the same structure as the broadband story above. Somebody else's infrastructure decision, priced into your monthly bill, decided in a proceeding you were not invited to.
A three gigawatt gas plant is proposed in Cumberland County. It would be the second largest in the country, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 3, and residents are split. The developer projects roughly $500 million in tax revenue over 35 years. A study commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center projects three to seven premature deaths a year, about seven new asthma cases, and 410 days of lost work annually. A proposed transmission line near the site would carry power north to meet data center demand.
Cumberland has just under 3,000 Dominion customers. The plant would serve load 100 miles away. When somebody tells you data centers are a Northern Virginia issue, this is the answer: the generation and its exhaust get sited in rural counties that had no part in creating the demand.
Americans like data centers least of anything you could build near them. A Public First survey for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation found 26% of American adults would support a new data center in their community and 46% would oppose one. For comparison, 58% supported new housing, 48% a road or highway, and 47% a solar farm. Nearly half said they would rather nearby land stay undeveloped.
Counts adults surveyed · Measures stated support and opposition · Sample size not published in coverage · Route Fifty, Sept. 1Around the states
Virginia has signed 19 of its 22 BEAD winners. Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 4 that the state executed agreements with 19 of 22 subgrantees by early August. The same office stripped RiverStreet Networks from several state-subsidized projects that had been intended to reach more than 30,000 rural customers.
Counts subgrantee entities, and customers targeted rather than served · Broadband Breakfast, Sept. 4 · Virginia DHCD record not read directlyHampton University opened an AI center. The university announced a Digital Artificial Intelligence Immersive Experience, opened Aug. 18 inside its Workforce Development Enterprise, alongside a planned Hampton Artificial Intelligence and Technology Center and a new bachelor's degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Worth watching against the data center items above. Virginia is building the physical infrastructure of AI at enormous scale, and the question of who gets trained to work in it, and who only gets the electric bill, is being answered right now.
Arkansas expects money from a Meta settlement. The Arkansas Advocate reported Aug. 31 that the state anticipates millions of dollars from its social media case against Meta, with other states' suits still pending. Not a broadband story, but it is state money touching platform accountability in one of the eight, and where it lands is worth asking about early.
Settlement money is discretionary. People in a room decide where it goes. Digital literacy and youth online safety work in Black communities is an eligible use if somebody asks early, and a much harder ask once the allocation is drafted.
Six states published nothing. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee produced no broadband or digital equity data in this window. The most recent Alabama item, a report on coverage versus cost, dates to Aug. 11. The silence is a finding, not a gap in the search.
Negative result · Sweep of 10 trade and research sources, Aug. 31 to Sept. 7Cost and access
The affordability picture in one place. Ali's Benton post collected several figures worth having together: a median broadband bill of $78 a month, more than 50 million households that qualified for the Affordable Connectivity Program before it ended, and an estimate that 49% of households earning under $50,000 a year are "subscription vulnerable," meaning they lose service when money gets tight. New York's Affordable Broadband Act requires a $15 plan for 25 megabits per second.
These are secondhand within his essay and the data years are not stated. Treat them as a map of the argument until we pull the originals.
This is the part that gets missed. Across much of the eight states the wire already runs past the house. The reason the household is offline is $78 a month.
Building fiber to a home that cannot afford the subscription produces an availability win and no change in who is actually online. Availability programs are funded. Affordability programs are not.
States are behind on website accessibility. Some 69% of states report they lack the staff or money to fix all their websites and applications, and 51% describe their repair capacity as limited, according to a survey by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers. Half say they cannot help their local governments at all.
Compliance is due April 2027 for jurisdictions above 50,000 people and April 2028 for those below. In the rural South, that means county websites stay broken longest.
Unemployment claims, Medicaid renewal, SNAP recertification. If the county site does not work on a phone or with a screen reader, the barrier is the same as having no internet at all, and it lands on the people with the least margin for a failed application.
New York's numbers preview an argument we cannot yet make here. The city's chief digital equity officer put the share of New Yorkers without full connectivity at 25%, Government Technology reported Sept. 3. The city's Racial Equity Plan finds household broadband subscription gaps near 40% in parts of the Bronx and other high-poverty neighborhoods, and more than a third of households headed by Black or Hispanic New Yorkers not fully connected.
No equivalent breakdown exists for Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham or Jackson.
New York can say more than a third of Black-headed households are not fully connected. Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham and Jackson cannot say anything, because nobody has produced the number.
That absence is a choice. It is why arguments in those cities fall back on state averages, which average away the neighborhoods we work in.
Device programs are a budget line, and budget lines get cut. New York is winding down a $320 million contract for 350,000 LTE-equipped Chromebooks that ran about $3.5 million a month to T-Mobile, New York Focus reported Sept. 2. Whatever the merits of that deal, device and connectivity programs go first in a tight budget, and most of ours are smaller and less defended.
When a device program ends, the households that lose access are the ones that never had a second computer. The program is a line item to a budget office and the only machine in the house to everybody else.
Pew on phone use. About 53% of American adults say they spend too much time on their phone, rising to 70% among those under 30. The finding is useful for framing how ordinary phone-first life has become. It will not carry an equity claim, because the release has no breakdown by race or income.
Phone-first is not the same as connected. Job applications, benefits forms and homework do not work well on a phone. When someone says everyone has a smartphone so the gap is closed, this is the distinction to hold.
Algorithms
A Labor Day case for using the law we already have. Former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Charlotte Burrows argued in Tech Policy Press on Sept. 2 that disparate impact doctrine under the Civil Rights Act already reaches AI hiring tools, walking through Griggs v. Duke Power and a 2021 EEOC settlement over a trucking company's screening test.
The piece carries no data. It is a legal roadmap, and the clearest recent statement of what applies to algorithmic hiring without waiting on new legislation.
Hiring software screens people out before a human sees the application. Burrows's argument is that challenging it does not require a new law, because disparate impact under the Civil Rights Act already reaches it.
On the calendar
Trailblazer applications close Oct. 13. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance opened applications for its ninth annual Digital Inclusion Trailblazers program, which recognizes local governments. Last year's class was 58 local governments across 25 states, including 37 named Visionary Trailblazers and seven that scored perfectly. Past awardees have posted close to 900 public documents, a free library of what other places actually wrote and passed.
If your city or county has done real digital inclusion work and never applied, this is a cheap way onto a national map.
Free recognition, a national peer network, and a library of documents other places already drafted and passed. The cost is a staff afternoon. If a city or county in the eight is doing this work quietly, this is how it stops being invisible.
Web accessibility compliance, April 2027. Jurisdictions above 50,000 people must meet the federal rule by then. Smaller ones have until April 2028. Most small Southern counties fall in the second group and few are staffed for it.
Deadline · Justice Department rule, via NASCIO coveragePeople and money
Grace Tepper left Benton for Cook County. After five years compiling the daily digest much of this field reads, she is joining the Cook County Office of Digital Equity as a community outreach specialist. Her last weekly ran Sept. 4. The digest may change, and a county digital equity office with real staff is itself a model.
Cook County has a standing digital equity office with paid staff. No county across these eight states has an equivalent that we know of. Worth finding out what it took to create one, since a county office outlasts a grant cycle.
The FCC repaid its rip-and-replace loan. The commission returned $3.08 billion to the Treasury on Sept. 4, borrowed in March 2025 and covered by proceeds from the AWS-3 spectrum auction held in June. The program removing Chinese-made equipment from rural networks is funded through.
Counts dollars · FCC, Sept. 4A county model, wrong state. Allegan County, Michigan, completed a $65 million fiber project reaching 17,000 addresses over 1,100 miles, stacking a state program, county pandemic relief funds and private investment. Not our geography, but the clearest recent case of a county assembling three funding sources itself rather than waiting on a state allocation.
A county assembled three funding sources on its own instead of waiting for a state allocation. That is a replicable play for any county here that is tired of waiting on BEAD.
Coming up
"The release date for the 2025 ACS 1-year estimates is being determined. The Census Bureau is assessing the impact of the new departmental administrative order."
The notice went up Aug. 6 and has not changed. American Community Survey table S2801 is the source for nearly every county and state broadband figure in circulation, including the ones in this newsletter. If the release slips, the newest household subscription data available stays the 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates.
The Census Bureau has not said when it will decide.
Without table S2801 there is no county-level broadband number for any of the eight states. Every argument falls back to state averages, which is exactly the level at which the Black Belt disappears into the statewide figure.
How we count
Four words in this field get used interchangeably and should not be. Every figure above carries a label saying what was counted and what was measured. Where we worked from someone else's reporting rather than the original document, the label says that too.