A weekly newsletter on digital equity for Black people in the South.
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.
“Some of the members of the committee was ordered by the committee to go into every State in the South where we had been slaves there, and post one another from time to time about the true condition of our race, and nothing but the truth.”
Henry Adams, of Shreveport, Louisiana
Testimony before the U.S. Senate select committee investigating the migration of Negroes from the Southern states, 1880. Senate Report 693, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., part 2, pp. 101–111. Transcript via the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University.
The week in one minute
Federal
The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed ending the federal requirement that states notify the public and take comment before issuing air pollution permits to industrial facilities, Capital B News reported Sept. 10. The change would cover data centers and the power plants built to run them.
A second proposal would let developers begin construction before a permit is final.
EPA describes the changes as a way to responsibly speed up permitting and support economic development, and says state and local agencies can decide for themselves whether to hold a comment period.
Nearly 200 advocacy groups and more than a dozen states filed against the proposal in August. The reporting centers on a South Carolina community that is 40% Black, and on Louisiana, Georgia and Memphis.
The comment period is the only place most people ever get to speak. It is a date on a calendar, a room, and a record a permit writer has to answer. Take it out and the permit still gets issued, but nothing anybody said is in the file.
In the rural South, where these facilities are landing, there is usually no local environmental staff, no paid organizer and no reporter in the room. The comment period is the whole apparatus.
The federal comment window on this proposal has already closed. Because the change hands the decision to states, the next fight is at the state environmental agency over whether it keeps a comment period it is no longer required to hold. That is a state rulemaking, and it is winnable in a way a federal one is not.
The digital equity grants are still frozen. Applicants are waiting two months after a ruling that went two ways, KFF Health News reported Sept. 10. Judge John D. Bates held in July that the president cannot cancel a law Congress passed based on disagreement with it, and also held that awarding grants on the basis of race or ethnicity is unconstitutional.
Government attorneys have said they will reinstate the competitive grant program without the racial classifications and aim to release a new application in December. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which lost an award of nearly $26 million, asked the court for status reports every 30 days.
Congress appropriated $2.75 billion for the Digital Equity Act in 2021. The competitive grant program is $1.25 billion of that.
The half of the 2021 package that paid for people rather than wire is the half that stopped. Digital navigators, device refurbishing, library classes and the staff who sit with somebody through a benefits application were all funded here.
An organization that built a program around a competitive award has been waiting since the terminations in May 2025 and now has to decide whether to hold that program together for an application that may open in December. Any group in these nine states that intends to apply should be writing it now, because the window is likely to be short and the racial targeting language has to come out of every draft written before the ruling.
The FCC is asking whether to shrink E-Rate or end it. E-Rate pays for internet service at schools and libraries. The Federal Communications Commission approved an inquiry in June asking whether funding should be limited to rural areas or the program sunset entirely, and comments are due Oct. 13, Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 11. Nearly 400 comments are already filed, many from schools.
The program spends about $2.5 billion a year and supports more than 96% of U.S. public schools.
Jon Bernstein, co-chair of the Education and Libraries Networks Coalition, said the group is prepared to litigate, arguing that changing a program Congress created in 1997 requires Congress.
A library that loses E-Rate does not go dark all at once. It cuts hours, then bandwidth, then the computer class. In a lot of small Southern counties the library is the only public building with a reliable connection and somebody behind a desk who will help you use it.
The docket is open until Oct. 13 and a school board, a library board or a county commission can file in it. That is a letter, not a lawsuit.
NTIA asked what to put in the survey that counts device use. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration published a notice Sept. 9 seeking comment on the question set for the November 2027 Internet Use Survey, the supplement to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey that produces federal figures on who owns what device and who is online. The survey samples about 50,000 households. Comments are due Nov. 9.
This is the instrument that decides what device and skills data will exist in 2028. A question that is not asked produces a number nobody can cite later.
If there is a measure you have wished existed in an argument about your county, the window to ask for it is open until Nov. 9.
BEAD watch
Researchers count twice as many eligible addresses as NTIA does. Michael Santorelli and Alex Karras of the Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute at New York Law School put the number of BEAD-eligible addresses still unfunded at 1,041,099, Broadband Breakfast reported Sept. 9. NTIA’s tentative count for the new round is about 477,000.
The difference is the definition. The researchers count unserved and underserved addresses. NTIA’s figure appears to count unserved only. The money follows the count: roughly $5.3 billion against the larger number and about $2.37 billion against the smaller one.
Congress appropriated $42.45 billion for the program. States have approved spending of $18.2 billion covering about 3.79 million addresses.
Underserved means the address has something and it is not enough. Across the Black Belt that describes a great many addresses, and they are the first to fall out when the definition narrows to unserved only.
Each state publishes a revised eligible address list and then runs a challenge window on it. None of the nine has published one yet. The useful move is to reach the state broadband office while the list is being built, not after it is posted.
Electric cooperatives asked again for a course correction. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association is pressing NTIA for flexibility on cost increases caused by program delays, funding that matches real costs in remote terrain, and removal of pole attachment rules that depart from federal policy, Light Reading reported Sept. 9. Chief Executive Jim Matheson said BEAD’s initial investment is failing rural America.
NRECA counts 900 member cooperatives, about 200 of which deliver broadband.
This is the second week running that cooperatives have said publicly they may stop bidding. In much of the Black Belt the cooperative is the only builder that will go down a dirt road for 40 houses.
Cooperative boards are elected by their members. A member can attend a board meeting and ask directly whether the cooperative is still bidding, and get an answer on the record.
Trees are a problem for the satellite plan. Most Ohio addresses slated for subsidized Starlink service under BEAD sit under tree canopy that blocks the clear view of the sky the dish requires, according to research by Tom Reid reported by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Sept. 10. Ohio designated about 30,000 addresses for subsidized Starlink, and the analysis puts 70% of them under obstructing canopy. A dish needs roughly 110 degrees of unobstructed view.
The article shifts units partway through, from addresses designated to households awarded. Read the 70% and 30% as two views of the same set rather than as a clean pair.
The analysis is about Ohio. The question transfers. Any state that routed addresses to satellite service instead of fiber should be able to produce the obstruction analysis behind that choice.
The pine and hardwood counties of Alabama, Mississippi and south Georgia are not less wooded than Ohio. If a state broadband office cannot produce the analysis, that absence is itself the answer, and it is worth asking for in writing before construction schedules are set.
Data centers
A Birmingham resident sued over the abatements. Terri Michal, a Birmingham resident and former school board member, filed suit Sept. 11 in Jefferson County Circuit Court against the city’s Industrial Development Board, board chairman David Perry and Nebius Inc., al.com reported. She alleges the board approved the abatements out of public view, did not meet where it was required to meet, gave inadequate notice, kept inadequate records and lacked the authority to abate the taxes at all.
The abatements total $3.2 billion over 30 years against a project the developer values at $36 billion. The site is about 75 acres, the facility would draw 300 megawatts, and the project is projected to create 78 permanent jobs. The abatement covers 80% of construction-related taxes excluding education revenue and 65% of noneducational property tax.
An abatement is a spending decision made without a spending vote. The money never arrives, so no council has to stand up and explain what got cut to pay for it.
What this suit attacks is the meeting, not the arithmetic. Industrial development boards across these nine states approve abatements in rooms with no audience, no minutes worth the name and no notice anybody saw. Open meetings law is the lever, and it works in any county with a courthouse.
Satellite images show a very large battery outside Memphis. Canary Media counted 720 Tesla Megapack containers at the Colossus 2 site in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis, in imagery dated July 11, and published the finding Sept. 11.
Three capacity figures are in circulation and they measure different things. Canary Media’s estimate from the container count is 2.8 gigawatt-hours of stored energy and between 720 and 1,400 megawatts of instantaneous discharge. A company developer put the storage at 3.3 gigawatt-hours. The chief executive of Memphis Light, Gas and Water described 2,000 megawatts of batteries behind the meter. Stored energy and discharge power are not the same quantity and should not be compared.
Sixty-nine gas generators were running at the site without air permits as of July. The Southern Environmental Law Center’s suit over unpermitted air pollution is pending.
Whitehaven sits near Colossus 2 and Boxtown carried the pollution from the first site. Both are Black neighborhoods, and neither got a permit hearing on generators that were already running. Hold that against the EPA item at the top of this issue, which would remove the hearing that was skipped here anyway.
The battery is worth understanding on its own terms. Stored power lets a facility ride through the hours when the grid is tightest. Whether that lowers what everyone else pays, or simply lets the facility avoid the hours when power costs most, is a question for a rate case and not for a press release.
Fifteen South Carolina counties have moratoriums passed or pending. Chester, Colleton, Spartanburg, Chesterfield, Newberry, Greenwood, York and Anderson have enacted restrictions, and Orangeburg, Fairfield, Lexington, Kershaw and McCormick are weighing year-long bans, The Post and Courier reported Sept. 8. Cayce is writing restrictions into a zoning update.
At an Orangeburg town hall on Aug. 25, a South Carolina State University student asked what a data center would do to the county’s two historically Black college campuses. Officials said they did not know.
Google’s Berkeley County facility is a $1.3 billion project drawing 400 megawatts, with water use estimated at 900 million gallons a year. The paper counts up to 30 data centers of various sizes statewide, of which only the Google site is hyperscale.
A student asked the question and the answer was that nobody had looked. Orangeburg County holds South Carolina State and Claflin, two campuses a few minutes apart, both drawing power and water from the systems a data center would draw on.
That analysis does not exist until somebody asks for it in writing. A county council can commission it before it votes. A university can request it as a ratepayer and as a large customer, which is a stronger position than a resident has.
Foley became at least the eighth Alabama city to pause data centers. The city adopted a six-month moratorium covering data centers, cryptocurrency mining and server farms even though no project has been proposed there, al.com reported Sept. 10. Mayor Ralph Hellmich said the pause lets the city review its environmental and zoning rules first. Foley’s city-owned utility already requires data centers to bring their own power rather than draw on existing customers.
Birmingham passed the state’s first moratorium in March. Leeds, Homewood, Cullman, Fort Payne, Fairfield, Springville and Prichard have adopted or are considering their own.
Foley did this with no project on the table. That is the cheapest version of this fight and the only version that runs on the town’s schedule rather than a developer’s.
Once an application is filed, a moratorium is a fight about one company’s money. Before one is filed, it is just zoning housekeeping.
A Tennessee lawmaker wants the tax exemptions frozen and named. Rep. Aftyn Behn, a Nashville Democrat, will file a bill for the 2027 session freezing new state tax exemptions for data centers for three years and requiring the Department of Revenue to report what they cost each year, identify the facilities holding exemption certificates and account for compliance and revocations, Tennessee Lookout reported Sept. 9.
Tennessee has granted 25 data center exemptions. When Behn’s office asked which companies hold them, the department declined, citing taxpayer confidentiality law.
A company now qualifies by investing $100 million over three years and creating 15 full-time jobs. The thresholds used to be $250 million and 25 jobs. The state counts 60 data centers operating or under construction, 25 in Nashville and 13 in Memphis.
Tennessee residents are paying for 25 exemptions and are not permitted to know who holds them. The confidentiality rule was written to protect individual taxpayers and it is doing work here it was not written to do.
The useful half of this bill is the disclosure half. A legislator in any of these nine states can file the same two requirements, an annual public accounting of what data center tax exemptions cost and who holds them, without proposing to change a single exemption. That is a much easier bill to pass and it produces the number every later argument needs.
Former EPA officials put a number on the health cost. The Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency staff, published a report projecting that pollution associated with data center electricity demand would carry between $11.7 billion and $20.9 billion a year in public health costs by 2028, with 600,000 asthma cases and 1,300 premature deaths under a rapid buildout scenario, the Louisiana Illuminator reported Sept. 10. The health figures come from a 2026 University of California, Riverside and Caltech study.
The report also lists 30 federal actions it says raise pollution risk, among them narrowed environmental reviews and reduced public participation in permitting.
Counts projected dollars, asthma cases and deaths per year · Measures a modeled scenario, not counted outcomes · Louisiana Illuminator, Sept. 10, reporting by Elise Plunk · Report and underlying study not read directlyData center building is pulling Georgia construction workers. A survey by the Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER found 58% of contractors nationally reporting increased competition for labor from data center projects, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sept. 11.
Treat the Georgia numbers carefully. The article reports a Georgia subsample of six respondents in one dataset and 26 in the other, so a state-level percentage in that coverage rests on a handful of people.
Counts survey respondents · Measures reported labor competition, not wages paid · Georgia subsample too small to carry a state claim · Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 11, reporting by Zachary HansenVirginia
Virginia is in this newsletter’s coverage area because of the data center corridor, and this week the corridor’s costs showed up in three places at once: a transmission route through Orange County, a merger review that will set rates for the whole state, and four bills in Congress about who pays for the wire.
A 765-kilovolt line for Northern Virginia would cross a Black family’s farm. Michael Carter Jr. farms land in Orange County that his great-great-grandparents bought on Nov. 5, 1910 for $722.50, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 8. All three current route iterations for the Valley Link transmission line converge near his property.
Valley Link is a joint venture involving Dominion. The line would run 115 miles from Joshua Falls in Campbell County to a new substation in Culpeper County and carry 6.6 gigawatts north to serve Northern Virginia’s data centers. Nine counties sit on the potential route: Campbell, Appomattox, Buckingham, Fluvanna, Louisa, Orange, Goochland, Spotsylvania and Culpeper.
Carter said the acreage was considered the Black and poor side of town. “You know, births, deaths, joys, and pains have all been experienced here, and you’re trying to rob me of that because you want to provide more electricity to the data centers,” he said.
The developers have not yet submitted a preferred route to the State Corporation Commission.
Land Black families bought and held through the whole of the 20th century is on this route because it was the cheap land in 1910 and it is the land with the least ability to object now. The route follows the same logic the sale did.
Routing gets decided at the State Corporation Commission, and the record is built from filings and testimony by people who live along the line. The moment to be in that record is before a preferred route is submitted, because after that everyone is arguing against a proposal instead of shaping one.
The commission ordered public hearings on the $67 billion Dominion and NextEra merger. The State Corporation Commission ordered three in-person public hearings, Virginia Mercury reported Sept. 10. The first is Nov. 5 at the commission’s Richmond courtroom. The other two locations and dates have not been set. Telephonic testimony is scheduled for the morning of Nov. 5 and for Nov. 9 and Nov. 10, with written testimony encouraged by Nov. 9.
Commissioner Samuel Towell said this is not a normal case, because the entire Dominion service territory is affected rather than one locality. Loudoun Now reported Sept. 11 that the hearings outside Richmond follow a petition from a coalition of nine Virginia organizations.
Two hearing locations are unassigned right now. Whether one lands in Hampton Roads or Southside, or whether both stay inside the Richmond and Northern Virginia corridor, decides who can physically attend the proceeding that sets rates for every Dominion customer in the state.
Asking the commission to seat one in Norfolk, Portsmouth or Emporia is a letter that can be written this month. A coalition asking is exactly what produced these two hearings in the first place.
Richmond City Council voted to intervene in that review. The council voted 5-0 on Sept. 10 to seek intervenor status in the commission’s merger review, The Richmonder reported, after an earlier attempt failed on absences two days before. Council President Cynthia Newbille cited the city’s “absolute, unequivocal interest in the outcome of this proceeding.” Councilor Kenya Gibson said the merger “has the potential to be a disaster for the average Virginian.”
The council has not taken a position on whether the merger should go through. The filing deadline was the following day.
Intervenor status is the difference between commenting and participating. An intervenor receives the filings, can put questions to the company and becomes part of the record the commission has to answer in writing.
Petersburg, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton and Newport News are Dominion cities too. Richmond has just shown what the vote looks like, how narrow the window is, and that it can fail once on attendance and still be brought back.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam introduced four data center bills. The Virginia Democrat announced them Sept. 9, Loudoun Now reported. The Data Center Fair Share Act would require data centers to pay the full cost of grid and generation upgrades built to serve them, and would require states to adopt tariffs putting that cost on the facilities rather than on residential customers, with access to federal highway funding as the enforcement lever.
The Responsible Data Center Siting Act would have the energy secretary set siting guidelines weighing utility bill impacts, water and electricity use, noise and environmental effects. The other two would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology to write energy and water measurement standards, and require a strategy for protecting communities near data infrastructure from adversarial threats.
Loudoun County expects $1.3 billion in data center tax revenue this year. No bill numbers appear in the coverage.
Cost allocation is the entire argument, compressed into one bill. Every dollar of grid upgrade not assigned to the facility gets spread across the rate base, which means households in Petersburg and Portsmouth help pay for wire built to serve Loudoun, where the tax revenue stays.
A bill in Congress is a long road. The same allocation question is live at the State Corporation Commission right now, in the merger case above, and that venue is closer, faster and open to intervenors.
Around the states
Eight of nine state broadband offices published nothing. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia posted no new items to their broadband office news pages between Sept. 7 and Sept. 14. North Carolina was the only one that published.
Some of those pages have been quiet far longer than a week. Georgia’s broadband program site carries no dated item newer than 2021 and its BEAD challenge page lists no active challenges. Tennessee’s broadband announcements page has nothing newer than November 2024. Mississippi’s BEAM news page shows no dated item since 2023. Arkansas’s posted address files were last updated in November 2024.
None of the nine has published a revised eligible address list or opened a challenge period under the new BEAD round.
The revised address list decides whether your county’s addresses get funded in this round, and a state can post that document without posting any news about it. Eight of these offices have news pages that would not tell you it had happened.
Anybody tracking this should be checking the BEAD document and challenge pages directly, on a schedule, rather than waiting for an announcement that several of these offices have not made in over a year.
North Carolina opened a $1 million satellite resiliency grant. The Division of Broadband and Digital Opportunity at the state technology department opened applications Sept. 10 for satellite internet equipment and installation to serve as backup connectivity in emergencies. State agencies, local governments, volunteer fire departments and community anchor institutions including schools, libraries, community colleges and community centers can apply.
Priority goes to organizations operating in the 39 counties in the Hurricane Helene federal disaster area. Applications close Sept. 23. The release does not say how many sites or pieces of equipment the money will cover.
Thirteen days from open to close. A volunteer fire department or a small rural library without a grant writer will not make that window, and the money will go to applicants who already have staff who do this for a living.
If you know a fire department, a library or a community center in one of those 39 counties, the useful thing to do this week is tell them it exists. That is the whole intervention.
A South Carolina cooperative walked away from a federal award. CarolinaConnect Cooperative filed to withdraw from the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, citing construction costs that outran relatively modest support, the Benton Institute reported Sept. 10. The cooperative says it remains committed to gigabit broadband and voice service in rural South Carolina. It forfeits the support and may face noncompliance penalties.
The item gives no figure for addresses or dollars involved.
Those addresses do not become somebody else’s obligation when a provider withdraws. They go back on the map as unserved and wait for whatever program comes next, which in practice means years.
This is the concrete version of what the cooperatives have been warning about in the section above, and it happened in one of these nine states this week.
Louisiana published its permitting numbers. ConnectLA said it has run more than 150 permitting coordination and outreach events since March and engaged about 600 contacts at permitting agencies, and that environmental review approvals are averaging six days against the 30 originally expected, the Benton Institute reported Sept. 10. Bossier Parish averaged nine days and Webster Parish between six and 15.
These are process measures. They count events, contacts and elapsed days. None of them counts an address connected.
Louisiana keeps being the only one of the nine that publishes numbers a resident can check without filing a records request. The specific figures matter less than the habit, which is the thing worth asking the other eight to copy.
Six days against 30 is also the direct answer to any state office that says permitting is the reason nothing has started.
Cost and access
The subscription gap by race, as reported this week. In 2025 Pew Research Center polling, 81% of white adults said they subscribe to broadband at home, against 71% of Black adults and 68% of Hispanic adults. The figures appear in KFF Health News’s Sept. 10 report on the Digital Equity Act ruling.
This is a national figure from last year’s polling, cited secondhand. No equivalent county breakdown exists for any of these nine states.
Ten points, nationally, measured on subscription rather than availability. It is the figure most often reached for and it is the wrong scale for most arguments in these states, because it says nothing about Lowndes County or the Delta.
Until the Census survey below is released, that national number is the best available, and it will keep getting used in rooms where a county number would have settled the question.
Oklahoma is putting private booths in libraries. The state broadband office is installing enclosed, connected pods in public libraries so residents can do telehealth visits, job interviews and online classes in private, executive director Mike Sanders told Light Reading in an episode published Sept. 8. Libraries get the installation at no charge with vendor maintenance.
Of 175 planned units, 64 were claimed within the first month by 30 libraries across 32 of the state’s 77 counties. The initiative draws on $14.5 million in pandemic relief funds.
The problem this solves is privacy, which appears in no broadband statistic anywhere. A person doing a telehealth appointment or a benefits interview at an open library table is doing it in front of strangers, and a lot of people simply will not.
Every county library across these nine states has that same problem, and most of them have a room that is not being used. The money here came from pandemic relief, but the idea does not require that particular fund.
Algorithms
The Meta settlement pairs each alleged harm with a remedy. Zoe Walker of the Benton Institute mapped the 130-page settlement between Meta and 47 states, the District of Columbia and three territories in an analysis published Sept. 11. Meta must offer a non-personalized chronological feed within four months, along with usage time limits, age verification and parental controls.
The money is $17 billion at most: $11.7 billion guaranteed over 10 years, $5.02 billion contingent on competitors adopting equivalent measures, and $75 million reimbursing states for litigation costs.
The remedy worth watching is the chronological feed, because it is a government requiring a company to offer a version of its product with the ranking system switched off.
Whatever that does for teenagers, it establishes that a feed is a design choice a regulator can reach. Every argument about algorithmic hiring, tenant screening and credit scoring runs into the claim that the system is too complex to regulate. This is a counterexample with a deadline attached.
Tennessee has to decide what its share pays for. State lawmakers will decide in January how to spend Tennessee’s Meta settlement money, routed through a new Children’s Digital Protection Fund, Chalkbeat Tennessee reported Sept. 11. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti announced roughly $752 million in August, of which about $517 million is guaranteed over 10 years at $51.7 million a year, with $222.7 million contingent on Snapchat and TikTok settling and $12.5 million under the attorney general’s direct control.
Permitted uses are broad: mental health treatment for minors, law enforcement resources, social media education and research. Rep. Gary Hicks, who sponsored the fund and is technology director at Rogersville City Schools, has floated school filtering technology and threat assessment programs.
That is $51.7 million a year for 10 years, with uses written broadly enough that a great many things can be argued into them. Money like that gets directed by whoever is in the room before January.
Digital literacy work, youth online safety programs and the school counselors who actually talk to children about this are all eligible uses. The ask is far cheaper to make now than after the first appropriation sets the pattern every later year copies.
On the calendar
Sept. 23: North Carolina satellite resiliency grant closes. Thirteen days after it opened. Priority to organizations in the 39 Helene disaster counties.
Deadline · NCDITOct. 13: comments due at the FCC on the future of E-Rate. The inquiry asks whether the program should be limited to rural areas or ended. Nearly 400 comments are already filed.
Deadline · Broadband Breakfast, Sept. 11Nov. 5: first in-person hearing on the Dominion and NextEra merger. Richmond, at the State Corporation Commission courtroom. Telephonic testimony Nov. 5, Nov. 9 and Nov. 10. Written testimony encouraged by Nov. 9. Two more hearing locations have not been announced.
Hearing schedule · Virginia Mercury, Sept. 10Nov. 9: comments due on the NTIA Internet Use Survey question set. This decides what device and digital skills data will exist in 2028.
Deadline · Federal Register, Sept. 9December: Digital Equity Act competitive grant applications, expected. Government attorneys told the court they aim to release a new application in December, without the racial classifications the court struck. No date has been set.
Expected, not scheduled · KFF Health News, Sept. 10People and money
An Arkansas company is now part of a 20-state platform. Ritter Communications of Jonesboro, Arkansas merged with Great Plains Communications of Blair, Nebraska on Sept. 2 to form Rightfiber, which plans to grow by building and by buying fiber providers in adjacent markets, Light Reading reported Sept. 11. The combined footprint includes Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana alongside 17 other states, with about 300,000 residential and business customers, more than 400 communities and 28,000 route miles, backed by a $1.6 billion credit facility.
Consolidation decides who your provider answers to. A cooperative or a family company answers to people who live in the service area. A 20-state platform assembled on a $1.6 billion credit facility answers to a lender’s schedule.
The rural routes are the ones that get reconsidered when that schedule tightens, and they are reconsidered in a boardroom several states away.
Virginia created a digital service office. Gov. Abigail Spanberger established the Virginia Digital Service and appointed Andrea Fletcher, formerly chief digital strategy officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to lead it, StateScoop reported Sept. 8. The move follows $52 million lost on a failed child support enforcement technology modernization under the previous administration.
Benefits systems and government websites are where digital equity actually meets a person. A Medicaid renewal that fails on a phone is the same barrier as no service at all, and it lands on the households with the least margin for a failed application.
Whether any of the other eight states has an equivalent office is worth finding out, because an office with a name and a budget outlasts a grant cycle.
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 Census Bureau notice went up Aug. 6 and has not been touched since. The page itself was last revised that day. American Community Survey table S2801 is the source for nearly every county and state broadband subscription figure in circulation, including the ones this newsletter will need.
More than five weeks on, the bureau has not said when it will decide.
Without table S2801 there is no county-level broadband number for any of these nine states, and the national Pew figure above stays the best available. State and national averages are where the Black Belt goes to disappear.
How we count
Several 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.